I just read pg’s latest essay “What to do”. It’s great, as always. He gives the generally good base advice of: “One should help people, and take care of the world.” He then goes on to suggest: “Make good new things.” Clumsy phrasing, but great advice. The rest of the essay mops up. I can’t argue. But I was thinking about this myself, personally. For me, I follow the maxim: ...
I’m revising my next novella. And it’s coming out dark. Each revision is even darker. I’m reminded of Steven Pressfield in “Do the Work”: My friend Paul is writing a cop novel. He’s never written anything so ambitious—and he’s terrified. “The story is coming out dark,” he says. “I mean twisted, weird-dark. So dark it’s scaring me.” Paul wants to know if he should throttle back. He’s worried that the book will come out so evil, not even Darth Vader will want to touch it. ...
I’m re-reading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Like her Wild Mind, it’s less on tactics and more on the mindset of a writer and the writer life. The books make you feel okay with the disgust you have for your own writing and self-loathing you feel almost continuously. Or maybe that’s just me. I have internalized an early chapter in the book: “Writing as a Practice”. You write every day. It’s what you do. And the more you do it, the more it be comes a habit and hopefully the better you get. ...
I just reread Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook yesterday. It’s great fun, lots of useful advice. It’s also a beautiful book. The section on revision was particularly helpful to me right now. I try to jam everything I can think of in my first draft/s so and trim it back later. Jeff agrees: “Exactly because revision combines analysis and redeploying your creativity, most things you get wrong in your first draft can be fixed in revision, especially as you gain experience. Usually, however, it is easier if you have too much in your first draft rather than too little; mangled can be altered more readily than the invisible.” ...
I recommend reading (or listening) to AI 2027. Then consume (watch/listen) the most recent episode of the Dwarkesh podcast. It’s a huge amount of work. The site is beautiful. The implications, if accurate, terrible. The authors are very impressive and Daniel Kokotajlo’s What 2026 looks like written in 2021 is very impressive (it’s probably more than survivorship bias). Yes, it feels like science fiction in places, but it’s all very plausible to (naive) me. ...
I’ve been fighting an epic struggle with my LLM friends on some writing, and failing mostly. My mistake was trying to one-shot or two-shot the piece. I loaded in all of the context in structured sections (3k or 5k words), ask for a plan for a piece of writing, then ask it to follow the plan and all the context and write the piece. And every variation I tried failed. The writing was TERRIBLE! So bad. ...
I just finished Richard Dawkins’ 2024 book “The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie”. Another great book. Dawkins rarely misses, although the older I get the more I want a tl;dr. This was a shorter book of his, but it felt a little repetitive and a little long. Anyway, the premise is that you can look at the genes of something alive as a snapshot of what the pressures of its evolutionary past look like. From the genes, we could reconstruct the environment that shaped the current instance of the creature or plant or whatever you. ...
My eldest practices sabre fencing and the competitions can be quite brutal. A “bout” is basically a dual. Hard physically and emotionally. Many of the kids are roughly equally skilled and it often comes down to mindset on the day. Like most competitions, I would expect. Here’s a cool pic from wikipedia: In one competition, last year, I made a comment, something like: “There exists a series of steps or moves you can make in the next bout that will allow you to win. You just need to think about what those steps are. Find them. In fact, there exists many paths of varying lengths, many series of steps to victory.” ...
I’m writing constructing another novella. This one on the history of Port Phillip as told by research into a sea monster. It’s fun. It’s not literature. It’s not even great story telling. But I’m having fun. It’s also so easy to think and rethink every little thing without making forward progress. Progress in the form of pages and chapters. Work product. Not meta work product. I must remind myself to get down the first draft as fast as possible. ...
The older I get, the more annoyed I am with my fellow humans. My first thought is that I need to meditate more. I need to slip in a thought before doing something stupid. Alternately, I can use the annoyance. The annoyance is the way, the path. This reminds me of Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way. Great book, and a great title based on a quote from Marcus Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” ...