Tags

I try not to bloviate, but I am innately verbose in writing.

I have now had multiple people tell me that they enjoy my writing but that they feel unable to read it through to completion for their attention drifts. They cite short-form video platforms and social media for this attention-span harm.

Multiple people have independently told me this personally, so I can’t speak to how many more people have silently stopped reading long-form work, or who have never built the attention-span to discover it.

What shape does information take if it must all be attention-optimised and conveyed within a few short minutes?

Generally, short content means less nuance, more reactionary (due to less time to produce), and less in-depth research per output. I worry for the long-term impacts.

My head is on a swivel, left and right. I’m trying to find something to look at as I sit in my chair, hands on keyboard, expected by my own mind to write. I can feel the breath of an editor down my neck, though he isn’t in the room, and I’m just trying to place my gaze anywhere other than that rotten blinking cursor in front of me.

I scrunch up my face and tears well in my eyes before I open them and return them to the page. I blink for a moment before allowing my eyes to grow out of focus, where I look through my screen into my own reflection looking back at me with an expression of weary sickness. My head is splitting down the middle, or perhaps it is from the side.

There is this radiating throb regardless, and I don’t think the sounds of destruction emanating up the stairwell are helping. There is a man doing repair work on the bathroom. Or at least I hope there is. I didn’t see him come in, and I haven’t heard any words from him, but I can hear the vicious smashing of tiles and dull thuds of something hitting something. Perhaps a burglar. I can’t be bothered to check.

‘Oh woe, be ye’, I think, turning my attention back to the infernal blinking caret. It feels as if the air around me is molasses. I’ve got no trouble breathing, but movements are as if through a thick horrible.

They’re smashing about the hammer again, my page is near blank, and my eyelids have taken on the same heavy weight of my pouting lips. Another hour spent. Nothing done.

Squeezing code and prose out of myself like a toothpaste tube on its last legs.

Let’s say it takes 30 minutes to read 8000 words, and lets assume that people only read a third of that (10 minutes). Based on my (under-representing) GoatCounter stats, 6000 people viewed my post about browsers on game consoles.

That calculates to people having spent a collective time of over 40 days reading that post.

Lots of vague figures and assumptions here, but still crazy to think about that amount of human life being spent reading my screed.

I’d love to be able to use a writer deck. Some sort of little distraction-free device built just for writing without the luring distractions posed by the rest of a computer. Something with a nice keyboard and pleasant screen – maybe e-ink?

Unfortunately, writer decks just don’t fit my needs. I can identify genuine value for creative writers, or people writing stories for the facts of which they already know, but that is very rarely me. Almost everything I write requires research, so I’m usually split between my writing buffer and a browser, and by the time a browser is introduced, the benefit of a writer deck is nullified.

In addition to traversing the World Wide Web for research, much of my writing is technical, so I find myself needing a way to write code and test it. That means I need to configure – and maintain – a development environment, and that whatever device I might use as a writer deck needs to be capable of performing these development tasks, ideally at such a speed that it doesn’t break my writing flow.

I’d love a writer deck, and it’d be fit for writing a novel or the likes, but for my needs I’m afraid it is impractical.

I need write some words coherently proper please. Grant me strength to word put together into sentence so can read well and goodly. Brain all frazzled can’t word readable way thank you. Oh dear. Too many language.

It was year 4 of primary school, and my class had just returned from either recess or lunch. As we formed a line outside the class, waiting to be let inside, Edvard Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King began blaring at an extreme volume through the wall. Speculating amongst ourselves as to what was going on, our teacher opened the classroom door, stepped through it, and beckoned us inside with a complete poker face.

Stepping inside, we were all shocked. The song blared from the interactive whiteboard’s speakers, and the room was in shambles. Tables were toppled, chairs were strewn around, and bits of paper waste littered every surface.

Our teacher remained vague and unspecific as our nine-and-ten-year-old minds attempted to figure out what had gone on. Had someone broken in? Had the teacher gone insane? Looking around, surveying the carnage (which seemed much more destructive than it really was), we found envelopes strewn around.

This was the setup for a creative writing exercise. I don’t recall what I wrote – it was almost certainly atrocious given my age – but this exercise has really stuck with me. It was one of the first times I was truly exposed to the joys of writing.

I very much enjoy that you can identify if a writer has read the works of Hunter S Thompson simply by reading their prose.

I wield the English language with the accuracy and precision of a sawn-off shotgun at 30 paces.

Taking a break from my writing to go to a content aggregation site to enjoy somebody else’s writing, only to find my own writing staring back at me there.

There are worse problems to have, but I’m not cut out for ‘success’.

Bit miffed that half my vocabulary is given the ‘archaic’ or ‘obsolete’ usage labels in dictionaries.

True horror is having to start a writing session with this incantation:

:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us

I was once emailing someone, and I hit them with a decent screed, to which they responded, ‘By the way, that whole email looked like you had written it for one of your blog posts.’

Thinking about that evaluation, it’ll work well if I die famous and someone publishes a collection of my letters.

Inflammable means combustible. It doesn’t mean non-flammable.

Infamous means famous for something bad, not famous.

Invisible means not visible. It does not mean visible, nor visible for something bad.

I swear, English is a linguistic mutt raised by wolves.

I get rather hateful emails quite often. Usually due to my writing.

One of these emails referred to me as an ‘AI-loving, hypergraphia-addled, graphomaniacal, logorrheic schizophrenic’.

Hateful intent aside, that is genuinely the best insult I’ve ever received. I can picture someone sprawled over a thesaurus cackling to themselves while pursuing the perfect selection of words – refining their diction with obsessive glee and hitting send with a maniacal laugh.

Spot the typo in this line I wrote today:

‘…or these media queries we’ll be breasted to graceful degradation.’

For those of you that read my writing, any feedback?

Anything from tone, to structure, to clarity, to length, etc – whatever stands out (good or bad).

Thanks!

Someone featured my writing in their newsletter, then signed me up for that newsletter using the email on my site.

At no point did I ask for or consent to this. Huurrrrrrr

(To the tune of ABBA’s Money, Money, Money)

I write all night, I write all day, to craft the guides they toss away.
Ain’t it sad?
But praise is cheap and tickets close, for all this thankless, perfect prose.
That’s too bad.

A new feature ships, all sleek and grand,
But no one seems to understand.
I wouldn’t be writing docs at all;
I’d fool around and have a ball.

A few days ago I wrote a message and forgot to close a parenthesis. I’ve been talking as an aside ever since, and I can’t take it anymore.

)

I’m free!

Sometimes I read something I’ve written and think, ‘Who the hell writes like that?’

Then I have the horrifying revelation that it is me. I write like that. Oh dear.

Words, laid bare. Branded with the mark of shame: ‘[sic]’. The textual equivalent of a public flogging. Execution in bracketed form.

A good plot doesn’t thicken – it coagulates.

I’ve been thinking about loanwords in language. How long have we got these words on loan for? Will they be taken back? What is the fee to buy them outright? Who should I talk to about this?

The misquote ‘write drunk, edit sober’ is often incorrectly attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

He actually believed the opposite, and, if you’re wondering, that advice is crap – especially for anything formal, structured, or academic.

Which one of you sneaks into my computer and adds typos to my posts between final proofing and publication?

Further proof that I am not an LLM is found in the fact that I use en dashes, not em dashes.

This also acts to prove I am not American and that I am the sort of nerd that cares about typography and gets hung up on punctuation.

Write late; edit early.