Writing

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    Dooce, RIP

    Sad news.

    “The pioneering mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and on social media, has died at 47. Armstrong died by suicide.”

    I did not really read her, but I knew her story. My heart goes out to her family and friends, especially her two children, who are feeling her loss right now.

    Here’s a lovely tribute.

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    Substack reportedly in financial trouble

    I had a Substack email for a bit. It was easy to use but lacked a lot of the functionality I wanted. It also looked so restrictive—everybody’s Substack looked exactly like everyone else’s. So, I dropped it but held onto an account just in case things changed or I decided to go all in. It seems that my wait-and-see approach was the right one.

    Verge reports the company seems to be running out of money after failing to raise more capital. Substack, from what I can tell, is not doing well financially.

    It tried to raise last year, seeking $75 million to $100 million from investors. But it had revenue of only $9 million in 2021, and a sky-high valuation on relatively little revenue was not the vibe in 2022. The company gave up. On its Wefunder page, the company says that the pre-money valuation on Substack is now $585 million, a 10 percent decrease from 2021. And now Substack has turned to Wefunder and retail investors. Friends, I do not like it, not least because the VCs last year got a pitch with Substack's annual revenue, and I do not see that shit line-itemed anywhere on the Wefunder page. Where's the money, Lebowski? Substack makes its money by taking a 10 percent cut of the subscription fees its newsletter writers charge. (Its payment processor takes another 4 percent, according to Wefunder.) The company says it paid out more than $300 million to writers, cumulatively.
    They paid $300m to writers and only earned $9m in revenue. At least they earned revenue and are not operating in a deficit, but they are going to have to change something to remain viable. Lovely that they paid so much out, but investors want their money's worth. Not sure it can remain viable long-term.

    I guess I’ll just keep my account parked.

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    Welcome to Brandon Sanderson's Fantasy Empire

    I have never read a Sanderson book, but I admire what he’s accomplished. The piece also casually mentions that he wrote twelve novels before one sold, which I think is something worth pointing out: Most “first novels” aren’t, and persistence is important to getting to that first book.

    Also, underground lair. Want.

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    Giving Up the Ghostwriter

    Not much of a ghost if she sucked this bad at stealing passages for books. Also, I can’t believe the publishers of these books did not find this plagiarism earlier.

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    A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job

    Ryan Bradley, writing for The Atlantic, outlines how he’s using AI to generate copy for work.

    I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week.

    Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week.

    The process itself takes place within OpenAI’s “Playground” feature, which offers similar functionality as the company’s ChatGPT product. The Playground presents as a blank page, not a chat, and is therefore better at shaping existing words into something new. I write my prompt at the top, which always begins with something like “Write a newspaper-style paragraph out of the following.” Then, I paste below my prompt the three or four paragraphs I selected from the list and—this is crucial, I have learned—edit those a touch, to ensure that the machine “reads” them properly. Sometimes that means placing a proper noun closer to a quote, or doing away with an existing headline. Perhaps you’re thinking, This sounds like work too, and it is—but it’s quite a lot of fun to refine my process and see what the machine spits out at the other end. I like to think that I’ve turned myself from the meat grinder into the meat grinder’s minder—or manager.

    I keep waiting to be found out, and I keep thinking that somehow the copy will reveal itself for what it is. But I haven’t, and it hasn’t, and at this point I don’t think I or it ever will (at least, not until this essay is published). Which has led me to a more interesting question: Does it matter that I, a professional writer and editor, now secretly have a robot doing part of my job?

    I’ve surprised myself by deciding that, no, I don’t think it matters at all. This in turn has helped clarify precisely what it was about the writing of this paragraph that I hated so much in the first place. I realized that what I was doing wasn’t writing at all, really—it was just generating copy.

    This article made me wonder how I could use AI in my job.
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    Good Stories

    Seth Godin on stories and how they relate to facts.

    The thing is that facts almost never get in the way of a good story.

    Because a good story feels true.

    A good story resonates.

    A good story is based on our feelings, long-held and hard-earned.

    A good story sticks with us, regardless of the facts.

    If I bring facts to rebut your story, they will fail… unless the facts I bring are the foundation for a new story, a story about doing something smart, based on evidence or simply more effective.

    But facts alone have little chance in a battle with a good story.

    Part of the job of making change is working to make sure a bad story doesn’t get in the way of good facts.

    Good stories are so powerful.

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    Start Small

    Shawn Blanc on creating habits.

    When you begin a new habit and you’ve started taking action, only commit to it for 30 days or so. And then commit for another 30 days. Then commit for 90 days. Then commit for 6 months.

    At first it’ll be fun. But then it will be hard and mundane.

    If you start out by committing to do something for the rest of your life you’ll never make it. And how many people can say they woke up at 5:00 am every day for their entire life? Seasons change, needs change, things change, you change. So your daily habits will change, too, and that’s okay.

    Start with something you know you can do. And then do it again. And again. Not only is this more realistic, it also is a way to build up trust with yourself. You will feel confident deciding to get up early every day for the next six months because you already did it for 30-days in a row.

    Some good advice for me specifically in the new year as I’m embarking on a few major changes.

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    Santa visits Horizon Hobby Headquarters

    I wrote this for Horizon Hobby, and I can be seen in a couple of shots.

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    The Lovable Douche

    Anne Victoria Clark, writing for Vulture, has a great profile of AEW wrestler, Maxwell Jacob Friedman (a.k.a. MJF).

    In the world of professional wrestling, shoot is a term for a performer going off script — usually in a very bad way. When CM Punk, star of three-year-old wrestling promotion AEW, decided to start hurling insults at AEW management during a press conference in September and followed it up with a very real locker-room altercation, it was a shoot — one that would get Punk indefinitely suspended and his AEW World Championship title vacated. This kicked off a tournament to crown a new face of the promotion, during which one of the company’s biggest villains, Maxwell Jacob Friedman (a.k.a. MJF) has emerged as its biggest hero.

    Friedman’s persona in the ring is, to put it bluntly, that of an asshole. He wears a Burberry scarf all the time. His tag line is “I’m better than you, and you know it.” He calls people “poors.” He constantly refers to himself as a “generational talent” and “the devil” (his fans are “devil worshippers”). And perhaps worst of all, he’s proudly from Long Island. Parents bring their children to gleefully be insulted by him, fans wait in line for him to scowl in photos and call them names, and people deliberately troll him and bring him homemade gifts to ruin. (In one video, after he drops a fan’s autograph sheet and storms off, the fan yells out, “That’s better than an autograph, bro. You’re the man!”)

    I was lucky enough to have met MJF when he was out of character and I found him to be a delightful, smart, and charismatic individual. He was very high on AEW and what the company could create.

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    Action Brings Clarity

    Shawn Blanc on action:

    Clarity comes through action and experience. Thus, you should focus on getting started and taking action more than you focus on the perfect end result. Optimize for the starting line instead of the finish line.

    Instead of committing to a giant, year-long undertaking. Commit to something small and simple so you can get started and get some experience. Then, when you have more clarity about what you are doing and working on, you can continue to mature and build upon that idea, or you can pivot.

    This is some excellent advice heading into the new year.

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    Quantity and Quality

    Nicholas Bate has a thought about writing that I love:

    Write, write, write.

    Then edit, edit, edit.

    Out of quantity you can produce quality.

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    Jony Ive on Life After Apple

    I have always found Jony Ive among the more exciting creatives working today. It is his vision that catapulted Apple to the level it enjoys. This Wall Street Journal profile by Elisa Lipsky-Karasz is wonderful, but I was struck by this bit about his most current company, LoveFrom.

    One of the first employees hired by Ive was a full-time writer. (There are now more than 30 employees, many of whom worked with him at Apple.) Ive says LoveFrom is the only creative practice he knows of to have an on-staff scribe whose job is, in part, to help conjure into words the ideas that his team of graphic designers, architects, sound engineers and industrial designers come up with for its collaborations with Airbnb, Ferrari and others.

    I’ve never heard of this practice. More companies should do this.

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    It Happened on Medium: The First 10 Years

    The Medium staff looks back at the first ten years of the platform.

    Medium turned 10 this month. A decade ago, we built a place on the internet for stories that aren’t too long or too short, but… that in-between length. Our simple, beautiful publishing tools gave you the freedom to focus on your words, and our platform connected you with other readers, writers, and thinkers. Our goal, from the beginning, was to help you share ideas that matter.
    I’m hoping the new CEO, Tony Stubblebine, has a plan to make Medium work even better.
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    Writing Essays

    Here’s a good quote I found that I wanted to keep:

    The best way to write an essay is to sit with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. Then set a timer for 30 minutes and start writing. Don’t stop until the timer goes off.

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    Ted Chiang

    Last year during the pandemic, I read the two collections by Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation: Stories. He’s easily one of the best authors in contemporary science fiction. What’s surprising is Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas — intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God — and thrusts them into a new light.

    Here are my favorites (found via web.archive.org):

    “Tower of Babylon” — A Bronze Age laborer joins the construction of an impossibly high structure on a mission to breach the vaults of Heaven. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

    “Story of Your Life” — A talented linguist reflects on the life of her daughter as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novella and was adapted into the film

    “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” — An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. It won the Hugo and Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

    “Exhalation”— A non-human scholar relates the dissection of his own brain and the implications his discoveries hold for his curious clockwork universe. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

    “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” — The relationship between people and their creations are explored in the near-future world of sentient AI. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.

    “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” [scroll down]- A new technology that lets people see and communicate with alternate timelines throws society into an existential crisis.

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    I’m Only 9, And I’m Already In College. Here’s What Life Is Like For Me.

    Kairan Quazi is nine-years old and wrote an essay in the Huffington Post about what’s it’s like to profoundly gifted.

    I was a 3-year-old preschooler when I corrected my teacher’s knowledge of the constitutional requirements to be U.S. president. In kindergarten, I learned that telling my friends that Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons against his own people would cause kids to cry on the playground. My parents received a call from an unhappy principal that day. And telling my third-grade science teacher that her knowledge of gravity lacked depth earned me a spot on her naughty list for the rest of the year.
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    Signal v Noise Exits Medium

    Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson on the reasons Signal V Noise has left Medium and created a new Wordpress site.

    These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise. […]

    Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization. […]

    That doesn’t mean we regret our time at Medium. Being on Medium helped propel some of our best writing to a whole new audience. But these days there’s less of a “what Medium is doing for us”, and a whole lot more of “what we’re doing for Medium”. It was a good time while it lasted, but good times are gone.

    This fascinates me because for a short while I thought I might actually be able to use Medium as a platform for my own brand of writing. As much as I love the look and feel and audience of Medium, I wasn’t making any money with the partnership program and I decided the way Medium changed from a social networking blogging platform into a subscription based magazine wasn’t for me. It’s turned into something akin to the Huffington Post. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what I want.

    So, I’m in the slow process of removing various posts from Medium as well as writing and posting to my own site. I think I prefer it that way.

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    Ulysses and Markdown

    I want to use the word processing app Ulysses more. It’s just not quite working out.

    Distraction-free writing is all the rage with sheets and groups and ebook outputs and “you can write a novel using Ulysses.” These are all fine and spiffy, but I just want a better word processor than MS Word (and I kinda like Word just fine…)

    I want to like Ulysses, but I can’t seem to get the hang of writing in it, and I know the reason why: Markdown.

    I don’t want to write in Markdown. Yes, yes, I know. It’s the greatest thing in the world for writers. You can just write and use these odd symbols to indicate all the things you want the text to do, and it just does it in the output. It’s supposed to help keep the natural flow of the writing and leave the format stuff to later. This is anathema to me, and I can’t tell if it’s because I’m loathe to try something new or my mind just doesn’t work that way after decades of writing in Word or Pages.

    At the beginning of the year, Shawn Blanc at The Sweet Setup archived the site’s best articles, tips, tricks, etc. for Ulysses. I’ve read them all, and it just isn’t clicking for me, and I’m frustrated because this should be the ideal software for me.

    Maybe I just need to dive in headfirst.

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    Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s Wishes

    I don’t follow Neil Gaiman online, but I am a huge fan of his New Year’s wishes for everyone. This year’s is especially wonderful.

    Be kind to yourself in the year ahead.

    Remember to forgive yourself, and to forgive others. It’s too easy to be outraged these days, so much harder to change things, to reach out, to understand.

    Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.

    Meet new people and talk to them. Make new things and show them to people who might enjoy them.

    Hug too much. Smile too much. And, when you can, love.

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