I've been thinking recently about the way that my interest in writing and publishing blog posts has waned, and while there are a lot of factors that have contributed to this, I think there's a big part of me that questions what the purpose of writing is or should be, and because I mostly write about the things I'm learning or thinking about, my posts end up being off-the-cuff explanations of things I've learned or musings on a theoretical point which aren't particularly well referenced, and while they're fun to write and useful for my own process they're not particularly useful to anyone else. Realizing this puts me at something of a crossroads with my own writing, and has me thinking a lot about the practice of citation. [1]

Mechanically, citation anchors text in relationship to other work, [2] but it also allows discussion to happen in and between texts. Also, the convention for citation in the context of informal writing is a link or an informal reference, so it's difficult to track over time, and hard to be systemtic in the way that one text interacts with its sources.

Blogs bring out confessional writing with ambling [3] structure and the freedom to say just about anything, which I have found liberating and generally instructive, but it's also limiting. For writing that comes out of personal experience, it's difficult to extrapolate and contextualize your argument, or even to form an argument, particularly in the context of a blog where you're writing a larger number of shorter pieces. It's also probably true that by framing discussions in personal experience its hard for people with different experiences to relate to the content, and more importantly the concepts within.

I'm not arguing against journaling: journals are greatgreat, but sometimes, I think journals might be best unpublished. I'm also not arguing against the personal essay as a form: there are many topics that are well served by that genre of writing. I do want to think about what else is possible [4] and how to write things that are stronger, more grounded, and easier to relate to and interact with. I think more citations and references are the key, but I'm left with two problems:

1. Style. There aren't great conventions for referencing things in informal writing. Throwing a link in the right context works, and is clear, but it might not be enough as it's hard to know what's a citation-typed-reference and other kinds of links. Also links don't hold up well over time. The more formal approaches are rooted in out of date technologies and tactics. Citations often reference page numbers, footnotes don't often make sense in informal situations, [5] and bibliography conventions are mostly non-existant.
2. Tooling. I'm pretty sure that well cited texts are well-cited, because their authors have great memories for things they've read, but because researchers often have tooling that supports managing a database of references, notes and bibliographic information. If you have a record of the resources you've read (or otherwise consumed), it becomes easier to pull out citations as you write and edit. [6]

Neither of these are insurmountable, but I think would require a good deal of work both on figuring out better citation formats and patterns, as well as developing better tooling. I don't have answers yet, but I do want to think more about it, and probably play with writing some tools.

[1]

My initial intent was to sort of discuss the personal conflict, and reflect on the corpus of this site and consider my own growth as a writer, which might have been a fine way to tell this story, but it felt much more self indulgent, and I think probably makes my point by example better than I am here.

[2]	Admittedly this should be cited.

[3]	Limited, of course, by size.

[4]	The problem is that I think there aren't a lot of great examples or models to follow. I've been thinking about other kinds of writing (e.g. journalism, academic writing, and fiction,) for potential models. The academic writing and journalism are clearly the starting points for this post.

[5]	My attempts to the contrary aside. Having said that I expect that

[6]

Zotero is probably the most popular one. There are tools that allow you to maintain BibTeX files, with similar effects. The space is probably underdeveloped, and most tooling is targeted at researchers in specific fields. It's unfortunately a difficult space to develop a compelling tool in because the technology is easy (so it's easy to overengineer,) and there are just enough users (and different kinds of users) to make the interface/interaction design problems non trivial.

I've posed about some of these projects before, and I used to regularly post little overviews of the things that I'm working on. But I've not done a lot of this recently. Time to do some back fill.

I think it's probably good to take a step back from time to time and inventory and evaluate the priorities of various projects. Not to mention the fact that I usually say "I'm not really doing much these days," when this isn't really true. Here goes:

I recently took some of my writing time to create a makefile (Novel Makefile) to manage work I hope to be doing on a new novel project. I've started outlining and researching the story in earnest after having spent the past few couple of years talking about it, and I think writing will commence soon. In another post I'd like to write up some thoughts on the tooling and technology of writing non-technical/non-manual long-form.

This post, drawing from the spending some time buried deep in production is about the state of (conceptually) longer form work in digital mediums. Or, at least a brief commentary on same.

---

The tools that I use to write technical materials do all sorts of cool things, like:

• provide instant cross referencing,
• generate great indexes, and
• automatically generate and link glossaries.

This is not particularly unusual, and in fact Sphinx is somewhat under-featured relative to other documentation generation systems like DocBook. [1]

And yet people publish ebooks that virtually identical to paper books. Ebooks seem to say "*this electronic book is the best facsimile of a paper book that we can imagine right now,*" while totally ignoring anything more that a *hyper*text rightfully might be.

I enjoy reading ebooks, just as I have enjoyed reading paperbooks, but mostly because ebooks basically are paperbooks. I've written posts in the past challenging myself,and fiction writers in general, to actually do hypertext rather than recapitulating prior modalities in digital form.

At various points I've thought that wikis might be a good model of how to do hypertext, because the form is structurally novel. Any more, I don't think that this is the case: wikis are unstructured and chaotic, and I've come to believe that the secret to hypertext is structure. There are so many possibilities in hypertext, and I think much experimentation in hypertext has attempted to address the chaos of this experience. This does serve to highlight the extent to which "the future is here," but it obscures the fact that structure makes narratives understandable. Think about how much great, new, innovative (and successful!) fiction in the past decade (or so) is not structurally experimental or chaotic. (Answer: there's a lot of it.)

The not-so-secret of hypertext, is (I suspect,) tooling: without really good tools the mechanics of producing a complex, interactive textual experience [2] is difficult for a single writer, or even a small group of writers. Most tools that manage the publication and writing of text are not suited to helping the production of large-multi-page and mutli-component texts. One potential glimmer of hope is that tools for developing programs (IDEs, build systems, compilers, templating systems, introspection tools, pattern matching, etc.) are well developed and could modified for use in text production.

The second non-so-secret of hypertext is probably that hypertext is an evolution of text production and consumption, not a revolution. Which only seems reasonable. We have the technology now to produce really cool text product. While tooling needs to get better, the literature needs to do some catching up.

Lets start making things!

[1]

It's not that Sphinx is "bad," but it's clearly designed for a specific kind of documentation project, and if you stray too far outside of those bounds, or need formats that aren't quite supported, then you end up without a lot of recourse. Having said that, the "normal," well supported and most projects--documentation or otherwise--will only very rarely hit upon an actual limitation of Sphinx itself.

[2]	To be clear, I'm partial to the argument that today's computer games, particularly role-playing games, are the things that the futurists of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Theodor Holm Nelson) called "hypertext."

Other than shortening sentences, inserting lists, and using document structure, there are a couple of "easy edits" that I make to most documents that other send to me for review:

1. Remove all first person, both singular and plural.

2. Remove all passive sentences, typically by making the sentences more imperative.

In practice these changes are often related.

After doing the first pass of editing on my technical book, "Systems Administration for Cyborgs" on a screen and feeling utterly buried by it, (See: /posts/the-editing-hole,) and I'm considering different approaches for the next book. Specifically, for this novel I have, I'm thinking about getting the novel printed somehow and then editing it "analog style."

I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who has done this, particularly recently. Particularly from people who are very digitally savy. Here's my pro/con list:

I'm working on the final touches of a treatise on Systems Administration that I've mentioned in passing here before. I hope to have this project up on a web-server near you (near me?) in a few months. Because I've had a lot of fun working on this project, I decided that it would be cool to do a similar project on another topic dear to my technical interest: Computing Literacy.

Computing literacy? Isn't that a little *early nineties* for you and or everyone?

Well yes, I suppose, but don't think that the improvements that have aided the adoption of technology in the last 20 years have necessarily raised the amount of computing literacy. In fact, it would not surprise me if all of the abstraction and friendly user interfaces make it more difficult for users to understand how their computers actually work.

Because their computers play such an important role in everyone's life and work, I suspect that there are a lot of folks who don't know how these things work but want to learn. And the truth is that there aren't a lot of resources around for people who aren't already tinkerers and hackers.

This is where I fit in: I can write a book-like object that provides useful information in an easy to understand way that technical people can provide their friends and family say things like "what's a database?" or "what do you mean compiled?" or "what's a server?" or "what is this file system thing?"

Are you so arrogant as to think that you can add something new to this subject?

I'm not going to develop new technology here, or suddenly make things easier to understand, but I think there's a niche for computer users between people like me, who download putty on other people's computers to ssh into their VPS server which hosts a VPN that their laptops are connected to, to ssh into their laptops to kill misbehaving X11 sessions (no really, I just did that,)* and most people who just know how to open MS word and send emails, and browse the web.

And I think that giving folks who are technically creative, intuitive, and curious a way to learn about their computers and technology would be great. Particularly in a way that doesn't assume too much prior knowledge, or an interest in complicated math.

Ok, so you're convinced that it's a good idea, what's going to be special about this?

First, while the material will not be so complicated or so novel, I think the presentation may be. Additionally, I envision this document as a useful reference for describing and defining basic computing concepts, to support more technical blog posts and articles.

Finally , I think it would be fun to do this book-like object in a more iterative style, relative to the Systems Administration book: I'll sketch out the basics, put a disclaimer at the top about links breaking and then publish it, and publish changes and make the whole thing accessible by git..

Sound cool to anyone?

---

So there you have it.

Expect to hear more in the late summer or fall...

I'm stuck in an editing hole, and not only am I not editing the things I need to edit, I'm not getting anything done.

I'm at a point where I have about 25 things on my personal task list, and 16 of them are editing related tasks: edit the article in this file, edit this fiction, edit this documentation, edit these would-be-blog posts, and so forth. It seems like I went on something of a six month writing bender, and while I did a little bit of editing during this period, I have clearly fallen behind.

There are a number of factors:

1. I've been making a point of putting editing tasks on the todo list because I want to make sure that I actually finish projects rather than just abandon them. I've not been particularly good with follow through in the past few years, so that's been a big personal improvement project.

The sad part is that my editing queue is probably 10-20 times larger, but I've got some projects on the less-actionable back burner.

2. I'm not a very good editor.

I'm awful at copy (or otherwise) editing my own work, and while I know that I've become better at this in the past few years. I still know that it's not perfect and so it seems sort of futile, which makes it hard to get inspired to do editing.

3. I find writing to be rewarding, and given the choice I will probably always choose to write new stuff. While this is clearly a learned response to the kind of work, this doesn't make the effect any less real.

4. I find editing to be really difficult work.

This is probably related to #2, but editing wears me out. I find it difficult to spend long periods of time editing, which makes it difficult to make any really substantial progress on the pile of editing tasks.

As a result, I take a long time to edit things, I'm most effective at editing in short bursts. I often want to break up longer editing tasks with other kinds of work just to keep a clean mind set. After a week or so of this, I have almost everything else done on the list, leaving me with a big pile of editing that looks even bigger for the lack of other things on the list.

So now, I'm trying the following:

1. I'm working on making editing tasks smaller, which will turn into more editing tasks, but it'll be possible to face editing tasks in units less than 10 or 20 pages.

2. Make more tasks for other projects.

There are two ways to get stuff done: 1) You can be really focused and work on one project at a time until it's finished, or 2) you can be working on a lot of projects in parallel and when you start to loose focus, you switch to another kind of project. The idea is that you end up getting more done because you're being productive more of the time. I subscribe to the second theory.

Here's hoping it works!

Onward and Upward!

There's this saying, I traced it down once but have forgotten the source again, that before you can write anything good, you have to write a million words of crap.

Well I've done it. I'm guessing that most writers hit this number without much difficulty fairly early on in their lives/careers, but it's hard keep records and do proper accounting of this data. And let's be frank, it's kind of a stupid thing to track. While I'm definitely a better writer these days than I was even 2 years ago, I know that I have a lot more to learn.

In any case, I have a firm account of a million words of crap that I've written in the last 10 years or so:

• tychoish.com this wiki, mostly rhizome accounts for a bit more than 800,000 words.
• I wrote a novel in 2002 and 2003 that now exists primarily as a paper volume in a zippered binder that I use as a foot rest. That was 100,000 words.
• Since September 26, 2011 I've written a bit under 101,500 words for my work. The number is slightly inflated on account of code samples, some repetitive sections, and a few articles that colleagues wrote that I did some significant editing/rewriting.
• Between June 2009 and May 2011, I wrote somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 words for a previous job (again some measure of redundant content, other people's work, and code samples makes this figure hard to track.)
• The Knowing Mars novella that I wrote between July 2007 and ~March 2008 is about 35,000 words.
• The novel that I finished the first draft of few weeks ago is about 85,000 words.
• I'm 35,000 words into the first draft of a technical book-like object.
• I have 10,000 words in a couple of other projects.

Which puts me way way way, over (what? 1,300,000.) I wonder when I broke the million word mark?

Some observations on writing.

• I still make all kinds of writing mistakes that I find embarrassing and difficult. Particularly with fiction (which probably only accounts for 200,000-250,000 words,) I feel incredibly clumsy.

• At the same time, as long as I have a clear idea of what a piece of text needs to say, I'm reasonably comfortable pulling together a draft without much fuss. Sometimes figuring out what I need to say involves a bunch of reading and long walk, but it's possible.

• I'm getting better at writing less. Writing concisely is hard work and it's easy to get into the habit of generating "word stew" that don't say anything useful and are impenetrable to read.

• Writing is hard. I've always been an awful speller and I have some dyslexic moments, but--as longtime readers of the blog have surely noticed--I'm getting way better and writing cleaner copy.

  Editing other peoples writing on a regular basis has also been enlightening because it allows me to put things in perspective, and be able to see value in what I can do with words. Also it's cool to be able to help other people write.

• This is totally a correlation, but I pretty much never write anything longhand, and I think I'm a better writer for it. The downside is that I'm incredibly dependent on my own computer and its setup to do anything.

Onward and Upward!