I went home last night with every intention of doing a great deal of writing. After all, there I was on a Wednesday, the girlfriend at work until late, and I hadn’t put anything up on my site that day.
It's even bigger in real life
It’s not as if I didn’t have a great long list of material to write. Hell, the list alone is getting so long and descriptive that it could be published. I’ve learned not to trust my memory. I scribbled notes aggressively – I’m an idea packrat. But I didn’t want to do that.
I wanted to write a big one. A post that ties together two of my posts (here and here), and a conversation that I’d engaged in earlier in the day at ND&P’s blog and on Twitter.
So, I sat down at my computer. Popped up Open Office, grabbed a notepad, pen, and headphones and started going to town.
And I went. And went. Started over. Went some more. Scrapped everything I’d done. Grabbed a beer. Kept going. Grabbed another beer and a smoke. Sat back down. Started over. Scraped that attempt too, retrieved my first attempted, started going from there. Stopped. Went for another cigarette and a third beer, and then realized what I wanted to do.
It was big. I mean really big. The blog post was threatening to pull a James A. Michener. I had attacked the situation three different ways, starting small, starting personal, and starting obtuse. The result was always the same – what I was staring at wasn’t something that could be summed up into a couple thousand words. It wasn’t a quick witty retort, something in my mind had flipped on the social-philosophical mode.
I had been writing things like “Identity online differs from identity offline, because by transferring our personalities into disparate pieces of information we strip the sense of context from our life. The Internet loses or blurs the senses we frame our understanding and society with. Geography, time, and social standing are largely removed. Our lives online are reduced to slices of seconds captured without periphery, trapped in tunnel vision…”
It was all coming out like that. I had run not into a block, ’cause I was writing, but a wall. A wall that formed just one very large side of one incredibly large object. We’re talking book sized.
So, I leaned back from the keyboard. Said “Oh no, not tonight. Not that way,” and took my steno pad to the couch.
This one is going to need a whole separate well to draw from. And man, it pissed me off last night.
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.
Sounds like you’ve hit my everyday. Even my technical posts tend to be massive lectures or tiny little blurbs — which would be why I don’t post as much as I should: It’s always an ordeal.
Here’s hoping you get it out. I was enjoying the arguments presented, and I don’t think any of us were coming from the same point of view, which was nice.
Yeah, the problem is I was working in such large sweeps and attempting to be so thorough that the point was getting lost. I was pulling in a lot of background, which wasn’t necessary but would have supported the later points (I’m guessing…) nicely.
The way I’m choosing to attack this is actually very different, novel even. I’ll throw some light on that at a later time. It’s still gestating.
If you end up writing a book, I want an autographed copy… :)
I am eager to read what you come up with, should it start completely gelling and solidify for you.
I think there’s so much to explore as online and offline lives start to reach parity in importance.
-Dean (from ND&P Blog)
In incidental news, one of my classmates from my second attempt at college, Stacy Snyder, had appeal rejected today. She lost her teaching cert and had her BS in Education turned into a BA in English largely due to her MySpace page.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081205-court-rejects-appeal-over-student-teacher-drunk-myspace-pics.html