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| The navel-gazing entry |
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navigational aids: News ticker:
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02 December 04. OK, so the content management system keeps track, and this is the hundredth entry. What I'd had here: I had written up an appropriately self-absorbed analysis of the situation to date: me, the audience, our interaction. I'd posted the winners among this month's oddest search terms: I'd talked about the effect that writing on a regular basis has had on my thought process and my writing ability. The big winner among ways my writing has improved by writing sort-of-essays on a sort-of-regular basis is that I cut more. I used to think that every frigging thing I'd written was golden. I mean, I'd put effort into constructing the sentence just right, and now it's so delightfully clever---the reader would be so much worse off if such beauty weren't brought to light. So yeah, I cut more. There are paragraphs and sections in the dustbin, and even entire half-entries which just never went anywhere, or never said anything that others haven't already said better, or that just didn't feel good---like the entry that used to be here before I deleted it all. Small scale: The medium one writes with needs a method of turing an undesirable paragraph into an invisible comment. It is much easier to say `oh, I'll just set aside this paragraph for now' than `I'll just irrevocably delete what I'd jut written'. That is, if my writing tool allows commenting, my output will be of higher quality. [The tech details: Word and OpenOffice users: don't send out DOC or SXW files. If you save as a PDF, then your bitchy asides and bad writing are safe. [How to save a DOC as a PDF: download OpenOffice.org, open your Word document with it, click file|export.] HTML is half-OK, since people never read the comments unless they're really bored. If that describes you, then let me confess that I myself have some nontrivial comments in many entries. TeX users, put \long\def\comment#1{} somewhere, and then \comment{stuff} will work (but be careful about spacing).] Large scale: I've been posting less frequently lately, partly because I have so many things I've already said, but partly because my quality control is higher. It gets back to the root question of what a blog is supposed to be, exactly. Unlike (daily or weekly) TV or (weekly or monthly) magazines or any other medium that I can think of, the blog does not need to be updated regularly. I'm reasonably confident that in the near future, I will be able to produce interesting content; however, I have absolutely no faith that in any given seven-day period I will produce anything of interest at all. And this is where RSS saves me: I don't have to make sure that I have something every day or week to keep you interested, `cause when I have something, the RSS feed will tell you. And so, RSS makes me a better writer. [Tech: So if you don't have an RSS reader, get thee to Bloglines and set yourself up. There are probably at least a half dozen other irregularly-updated sites which you read, so a centralized site-checker will pay off quickly.] The moral is that although our modern technological world has given us the ability to cheaply produce reams of cheap content, in a few ways it's also given us the ability to filter and throw away content. On balance, I think I'm a better writer for it. My faves Since this is the navel-gazing entry, I wanted to give those of you who weren't here from day one a brief list of favorites from the archive, since I've written well over a novel's worth of text and you're probably not going to read it all. So here are the entries that score high in importance, utility, or reader popularity. Rereading, I think a few sentences could be cut from all of them. Next time I'll get back to the usual alienating overtechnical detail.
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