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To re-start work on
To re-start work on Meaningness, I need three days of re-reading and digestion to get the structure back in my head; so it takes an uninterrupted working week to make significant progress. I rarely get that.
Are you sure that’s strictly necessary? I’ve written a few books, and as I recall, large parts of them were written as relatively stand-alone pieces at first, when an idea happened to strike me, and then edited later on so that they’d fit the overall structure.
Yes, writing this way does mean that you need to spend more time editing things afterwards, and maybe throwing away some stuff that you decide you can’t fit anywhere sensibly. But it does allow you to write in shorter blocks. Then when you get that uninterrupted working week where you can remind yourself of the structure, you can spend all of that time editing the stand-alone pieces to fit into the overall structure (where “editing” here also includes writing whatever additional bridging paragraphs you need).
Re-starting
Thanks for the (implicit) advice!
Parts of the book are more divisible than others. In fact, I wrote the eternalism chapter one page at a time, pretty much, and that worked out OK. For some of those pages, it did take a couple days to swap the context in, though. And it took a couple years overall! And the result is not quite as smooth as I would like. Another pass of editing over the whole thing could fix that, but I don’t want to take the time.
So far, over the past year, I’ve tried to write the section on counter-cultures vs sub-cultures four times , and on each occasion ran out of time before producing any text. The discussion is really complicated.
Of course, this might mean that I don’t know what I want to say, and it needs re-thinking, but my subjective impression is that I just need ten days clear to get the whole thing in my head and then dump it back out as text. It hasn’t seemed feasible to split off pieces to work on, because I am not sure how best to do the top-level factoring of the material.
It’s hard to sort out inherent difficulties from my own limitations!
Hey, no reason to warn us
Hey, no reason to warn us that you might pull a GRRM (may he live a thousand years!) one day.
After all, the core texts of the big eternalist movements (Torah, NT, Kapital, etc) are these sprawling messes that are obviously unfinished and full of intense contradiction. They support generations of interpreters trying to extract Beautiful Diamonds.
So of course a full-on critique of eternalism should be properly organized, polished and without any gaps. We don’t wanna end up with “instructions unclear, attached eternal meaning to ceiling fan” after all.
Based on the iron law of movements to be founded in the most ironic way possible, I wouldn’t be too worried. The section on eternalism is gonna be perfect and the one on nihilism will be barren and useless anyway. It’s meant for everyone, so of course it won’t be accessible to anyone but Degrees Georg.
Heck, the actual solution will probably have to be interpreted by channeling dragons or something, fuck if I know, it’s all I ever understood of nebulous people.
(anyway, keep doing the things!)
keep it up!
Please, keep it coming. This is great stuff. I love it.