on writing

134k words published from January-April. If I turn this up slightly, I could hit 500k words published in one year. For context, I did 500k words in the the 3.5 years before this one.

• On expression (craft) — 27 patterns behind great essays

• On language (logos) — selective dictionary, new thesaurus architecture

• On ideas (history) — lineage of 100 root ideas through civilization

For pleonasm, (“black darkness”) a modern editor would say to cut “black” because it’s already covered in darkness. There’s a bias to reduce redundancies, but it’s not an absolute rule. There can be power in duplicity.

How do you render your consciousness honestly? How can you transcend mere fact without getting lost in fanciful prose? Is all mundanity worth logging? Stop by stop, a robot announcer drone-talks the time, and my pointer finger feels foreign as I scratch its side. Who will be at the meetup tonight?

BOOK REVIEWS: this is a whole genre. During my last time at the Strand bookstore, as I looked through the essay section, I found a few that were compilations of book reviews by the same author. I have a Le Guin book of mostly reviews. What would I review? Ideas: Food of the Gods, Road to Eleusis, Sovereign Individual, Be Here Now, Sapiens, The Orig

The journey doesn’t really begin until you get to the swamp.

An essayist, a novelist, a memoirist, a historian, a poet, a comedian, a narrative philosopher, a songwriter, a screenwriter — in the search to find the edges of language, the writer finds temptations to learn all the sub-mediums.

“I feel like a detective reading between the lines to figure out what I was really thinking, what I was really feeling.” From a friend re-reading their old blog … Whenever you read back on writing from your past-self, you notice the gap between what’s being said, the underlying tension, and how things actually play out. With foresight, it’s easy to