Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.
Hey, Mom! The Explanation.
Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3431 - Writing with notebooks, in layers, and Blogging with Cory Doctorow
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3431 - Writing with notebooks, in layers, and Blogging with Cory Doctorow
Wednesday always used to be Writer Wednesday.
This post collects bits from Warren Ellis' newsletters on using notebooks in writing, writing in layers, and blogging with Cory Doctorow (another favorite writer of mine).
This sad Moleskine notebook usually lives in my jacket or my shoulder bag, as my daily working notebook. Which means this sad notebook has not left the house in three months. I just realised today that he’s been forgotten, buttoned into the top pocket of a canvas jacket since the first of March, and hasn’t been written in since Feb 29.
I’m not on social media any more. Apparently I have to mention this from time to time, because, I dunno, people naturally assume cultural workers are there all the damn time? I gave up. But I do have other machinery, which is how I know that writer/producer John Rogers just did an excellent thread on using notebooks as part of your work.
Pretty sure most people will find something of interest there.
Sad notebook has been moved to my desk, since I’m clearly not going anywhere for a while. (Even though I restocked my shoulder bag last week in optimistic preparation for The Great Release.)
Because I need to move fast and because I can’t sit outside at bars with my notebook, I’m back to developing straight into Word. This has been my usual function for many years, using either just Word or Notepad .txt files and then into Word.
The trick is never to let yourself believe it is pouring fully formed from your fingers into a submittable file. It’s all roughs. It’s layering. It’s starting with the six lines you had, that you footlishly believe constitute “an idea,” and editing them and adding to them and sculpting them and building on them and then realising it’s shit and saving that version, renaming the file and starting again, going back to where you went wrong and rewriting, until you feel like you have the shape of something that might actually be useful.
On my way to bed Friday night, I stopped and scribbled six words in a notebook. I typed them into a Word file around 11am Saturday morning. It is, as I write this bit, 10.30pm Saturday night. I’ve got around a thousand words, including the precis of the story and the end of the story and six markers staking out everything in the story that happens before the end.
All this is not to say I’m a genius, and it’s possible none of those 1000 will survive the clear light of day tomorrow. It’s to say you can develop processes and functions that get you through a thing with efficiency and pleasure. Everyone develops different ones. For some people, this isn’t even the hard part. For others, having a development function gets them through the tougher part.
It’s all layers. Always rewriting over and through previous sentences and words. Just building it up, coat by coat, until it holds some weight.
You have permission to be complete shit in all but the last layer, and you get to decide which layer is the last.
Bruce notes that it’s a lot of work. It’s a terrifying amount of work that starts at 5am every damn day. It obviously has returns for Cory, which he discusses in these pieces, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. But it’s a scary level of dedication to surfacing and memorandising information. It includes essentially hand-rolling versions of each entry he makes for three different social media services. Cory wants reach for his ideas, so he has to arrange some kind of syndication, and he’s fighting against reduced use and reducing visibility on all those platforms. He believes that game is still worth the candle and applies fearsome dedication to it.
There’s a lot to think about here. I imagine most people would see his style as over-engineering and time-expensive. But he does it, and makes it work, and that makes it worth examining and considering.
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2407.10 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3295 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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