Somewhere on the planet there is a publisher who will immediately recognize what I’m trying to accomplish with this book. I hope to one day shake her hand, because she will very certainly be fantastically strange.
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I hope to one day shake her hand, because she will very certainly be fantastically strange
Steve Spalding
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Steve Spalding
We are not robots.
Size doesn’t matter. At least when you are discussing the volume of content you generate.
Falling into this lie is one of the principle reasons there is so much junk in the world.
Human beings, consumers, users want tiny moments of extraordinary beauty not great piles of commoditized crap.
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Steve Spalding
I feel like I should be thinking more about how long these entries should be.
When I really think about why this fear keeps bubbling up, I realize I’m actually suffering from College Research Paper Syndrome, which is the belief that regardless of whether you have anything interesting to say, you better have 5000 words by the end of it.
You should write whatever you need to in order to get your point across, no more and no less.
I wonder why it’s so hard to accept what seems like such an obvious truth.
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Steve Spalding
I sometimes wonder how much writers block is just us realizing how incredibly boring we can be.
If you haven’t noticed up until this point, this is a distinctly imperfect book and assuming that you are reading this I figure that is a large part of its appeal.
In our rush to be cast into the socks of Professionals with a capital P, we who call the Internet home have become exceptionally boring. We don’t take chances with our forms, and we don’t have fun with what we do anymore.
This is fun to write.
It’s messy, it’s scattered and what it lacks in narrative flow it makes up for with incoherence. But, it’s fun, light and up to this point more interesting to this humble author than almost everything he has put together in the last few months.
That has to be worth something.
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Steve Spalding
I want you to see the first draft of this, it was spectacular — spectacularly awful! See what I did there?
Funny story,
I keep sitting here trying to come up with clever things to write. This whole “one draft” business is murder for someone use to being able to hit backspace on his life. The truth though is one that I think has wider applications for anyone who produces content – if I am working to try to remember something, it probably wasn’t half as clever as I thought it was after all.
Information is like that, we retain those things that are important to us and forget the ones that are junk.
Instead of trying to pull quips from the ashes of our imaginations, maybe we should spend a little more time considering those things that stuck out.
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Steve Spalding
Some people are very, very good at managing their schedules. Some people — aren’t. I fall into the latter category and if its taught me anything at all it’s that I need to refine goals down into actions.
If I am not staring at a list of things, concrete things, that need to be done my mind will wander off and start working on just about anything. It’s one of the reasons that I write, it helps me take all the mental detritus and give it form and substances. It helps me transform goals into actions. It’s as much therapy as it is sage advice.
Thank about it. How much of your writing is therapy?
