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- 1348-9 (age six) The Great Mortality kills up to half the city’s population.
- 1361-2 (age 18) The Bubonic plague strikes again, killing another one fifth of the population.
- 1369 (age 26) A third outbreak of the plague kills another 10-15%
- 1373 (age 30) Having survived three waves of the bubonic plague, she succumbs to illness and almost dies.
- 1377 (age 33) Increasing peasant unrest leads to the Great Rumour protests in the South of England
- 1381 (age 37) The Peasants Revolt leads to the sacking of Norwich followed by violent reprisals and a pitched battle outside the city.
The Writer’s Journey began as a memo.
Working at Disney during the 1980s, Christopher Vogler saw senior executives using memos effectively. He wrote one to summarise The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as he was sure Joseph Campbell’s book had inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars. He wrote a 7-page memo that became so popular he expanded it into a book. This became the ‘Bible’ for beginning scriptwriters. He called it a ‘practical guide’, since besides summarising Campbell’s ideas on narrative, he showed how they could be used to write film scripts.
Question: what else could start with just a memo?
Personal publishing is still the future
The online writing gurus say it’s pointless starting your own blog, because no one will read it. Best to go where the readers are and write directly on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, Instagram. Anywhere that enables so-called organic discovery.
Social media and new-style forum sites are where it’s at, they say. That’s where you can gain a few readers and gauge the relative popularity of your writing. Then double down on what seems to be working and… lift off! you have an online writing presence with a responsive audience. Next you entice this emerging audience to sign up to your email list, so they become no longer the social media giant’s audience but your audience, to whom you can now go direct.
So really, the advice of those who claim to know is that it’s fine to start your own blog so long as you distribute it by email, advertise it on social media and above all, don’t call it a blog. It’s a newsletter, OK?
Whatever.
I started with the Internet in the late 1980s, several years before the Web even existed. I used FTP, Gopher, and Usenet, and it’s delightful to see that the venerable email still endures, even though it’s an unwieldy beast, forced to perform tasks it was never meant for.
The Web revolution, I can state with some confidence having lived through it, was and still is a revolution in personal publishing. A person of modest means can publish on the web and anyone in the world can read it. Simple but amazing.
Of course findability is an issue. Of course attention is finite. Of course you have to have something you want to say, or show. But the basic tools are there to make anyone a publisher of their own work, if they want it. The corporations do everything in their power to try to put that particular genie back in its lamp, but they can’t.
In the early 1990s UK, the only way to get on the Internet (outside universities) was through Compuserve. Compuserve ran its own forums and pretended the Web didn’t exist. It was a walled garden and they did everything possible not to inform people of what they were missing. It was ridiculous, but effective while it lasted. For eighteen months or more there really was no alternative. Of course this scam didn’t last forever and as soon as people found the real Web, the game was up.
Nowadays Compuserve is a zombified hollow shell of its former self. In the US America Online tried the same scam. And AOL too is a shadow of its former glory. But the walled-garden game plan was closely copied by Facebook. For years in the 2010s it seemed like you could explore the wider Web, but why bother when all your friends were right there on Facebook? In the Third World, meanwhile, Zuckerberg tried to provide ‘internet services’ that only included his own brands - just as Compuserve had done years before.
But the game is up for Facebook too. As Meta slowly trickles down the drain and Twitter eats itself, the wider Internet remains. As someone wise said: the Network is the social network now- and it always has been.
The Web itself is the publishing platform and anyone can still publish there.
For years, I published an obscure Wordpress blog - but it had thousands of views. More recently I’ve been publishing a static blog hosted on Github, simply as a little experiment in whether I can manage the technology. Really, it’s not very difficult. Most recently, I’ve set up a little home here on my new website, which is connected to micro.blog. Gaining readers is entirely another matter. But I’m mainly doing this for my own amusement, so that’s not the main point of the exercise.
Call it a newsletter, (don’t) call it a blog, call it what you like. Personal publishing is still the future.
See also:
You don't build art, you grow it
Finished reading: Dancing with the Gods by Kent Nerburn 📚
This book is advice on the artistic life from an experienced sculptor and writer. I found one section particularly striking. It contrasted two approaches to making art: that of the architect and that of the gardener.
“The architect designs and builds; he [sic] knows the desired outcome before he begins. The gardener plants and cultivates, trusting the sun and weather and the vagaries of change to bring forth a bloom. As artists we must learn to be gardeners, not architects. We must seek to cultivate our art, not construct it, giving up our preconceptions and presuppositions to embrace accident and mystery. Let moments of darkness become the seedbed of growth, not occasions of fear.”
I remembered these words while visiting the new exhibition spaces at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. It’s hard to imagine an artwork that could have more clearly illustrated the cultivation approach to art that Nerburn wrote of.
In a huge, mysterious, and very dark underground space called The Tank, Argentinian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas was exhibiting a series of extraordinary sculptures entitled The End of Imagination. These pieces, apparently four years in the making, seemed really ancient, but of the deep future, organic, not constructed, more biological than artificial, and they appeared to be growing there in the darkness.
Rojas undertook an exhaustive computer simulation of deep-time environmental processes in imagined extraterrestrial contexts, to shape and weather each piece, prior to creating their physical representation. So the outcome was not so much sculpted as weathered and sedimented into existence - yet not by any kind of earthly processes.
Earlier thoughts on Dancing with the Gods.
Can AI give me ham off a knee?
Last night I lay awake thinking about how AI-automated writing is about to change our entire language.
Since AI can easily write everything correctly with perfect spelling and punctuation, one way to show you’re human is to do the opposite. At the time of Shakespeare, spelling was wildly idiosyncratic and people just made it up as they went along. I think this free-for-all might return soon, since it’s a neat way of showing you’re not made of silicon.
But there’s another way we might change our speech and writing to subvert our digital overlords. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: ham off a knee! It’s something chatbots can’t provide, but that we humans can understand quite easily.
I lay awake last night thinking about cryptic crossword clues (I never do crosswords, but still, that’s rumination for you!). Here’s a clue I thought up. Not a very good clue, since I don’t know what I’m doing:
“For Joyce, recovery leads to pain, we hear (15).”
The answer? “Fine again so ache”.
Doesn’t make sense to you? Well, Finnegans Wake was James Joyce’s fourth and last major work of fiction. I was thinking of it because it’s packed full of homophony (ham off a knee - get it?).
So what’s homophony? Glad you asked. Homophony is simply when you use a word that sounds like another word. But Joyce used homophones in a complex way. His sentences read one way on the page, but when spoken out loud they often mean something else, subverting the original meaning. That’s why he was a genius and I’m not.
But it also struck me that we could start doing this and AI wouldn’t be able to keep up. Admittedly it took Joyce years to finish Finnegans Wake. It’s certainly complicated to come up with whole paragraphs of homophonic writing or speech. But I suspect young people, who are always the instigators of new slang, will be quite up to the challenge.
Alternatively, it’s the new AI frontier. Imagine if you could command something like: “ChatGPT: give me a written account of a 16th Century tourist visit to Venice, which warns of impending alien attack when read out loud.”
Now that would impress me.
Despite AI, the Internet is still personal
Blogging is great and it will never die. That’s why I keep coming back to it and you do too.
Dave Winer, the blogfather, once said:
“A blog is the unedited voice of a person.”
That’s a concept worth reconsidering in this age of AI ventriloquism. If I went in for tattoos, I’d have it inked in cursive writing on the back of my neck1.
Because online, in spite of everything, despite all the cynicism and exploitation, advertising and automation, I’m still looking for genuine communication. I’m seeking some kind of connection, some marker that says:
“I was here, and so were you.”
It’s the voice of a person connecting to another person. Not a machine, not an algorithm, but a person. A person with a body, not a corpus, not a pretence but a real presence.
But why keep doing it?
Here I present two good reasons that will cover many use-cases.
Publish to find your people
First, I keep coming back to it because blogging is a long-winded search query to find your tribe. It’s a calling card, many words long. The tldr; version of the message is:
Hardly anyone likes what I like, but that’s OK because now there’s two of us.
Austin Kleon drew my attention to this, so it must be true.
There might be a bit more to this, though. By publishing, you make something that never existed before. It’s not impossible that through it people might find themselves. I’m not saying every post is going to be a revelation. But in my experience the right word at the right time can work wonders. There are a few writers I feel like that about. Perhaps you know of some too.
Publish or be damned
Secondly, it’s a miracle that you can publish your unedited voice so easily. You’re a one person media company - and that’s amazing. When I think of all the functionality crammed into a blogging system like micro.blog, or Wordpress, or Substack, or even Blot or WriteAs, and how previous generations could hardly even dream of such publishing power, I almost feel a duty to make use of it. Imagine a time traveller recently arrived here from the past2 looking at us and saying, incredulously:
“So you can do all this at the press of a button, and what? Right now you can’t be bothered?”
That’s right. Sometimes I can’t be bothered.
And then the feeling passes.
Footnotes
Why I'm writing slowly
There’s an emerging movement in favour of ‘slow productivity’.
And writing is one of the best examples of the many benefits of hurrying slowly.
Successful writing doesn’t result from Herculean efforts to tally up mammoth word-counts, often at the last minute (although, if that’s your chosen path, good luck). The best and most sustainable writing takes place slowly and methodically. This is so despite the many voices telling you how you can ‘write a book in a month’, ‘write a book in a week’, or even ‘write a book in a day’. You can only do this if you write a lot, but without haste.
What works is to write slowly and consistently, so that the writing accumulates over time into larger and ever more meaningful pieces.
The English author of the Victorian age, Anthony Trollope, epitomised a slow but steady approach to writing. He produced a very significant output, including 47 novels, and is best known for a long series of novels centred upon the fictional county of Barsetshire. Yet he claimed never to write for more than three hours a day. In fact, while becoming one of the period’s most popular novelists, he maintained a full-time job with the Post Office. Because he had a workable method, he didn’t need more time.
And without developing a writing method that works, no amount of extra time will ever be enough.
The thing about advice is that people do what they want with it
Currently reading: Dancing with the Gods by Kent Nerburn 📚
I know nothing at all about Kent Nerburn, so it’s interesting to read this book of reflections on creative work.
I did notice, though, that the US version of this book has been re-named to: The Artist’s Journey: On Making Art and Being an Artist. This alternative title reminds me of the format of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, in the sense that both authors offer reflections on their creative experience, having been prompted by a letter from a younger person, wondering about setting out on a career as an artist. The difference is that Rilke was rather young to be dishing out such ‘wisdom’, whereas Nerburn has lived a bit.
To be fair to Rilke, though, he didn’t seek out Franz Xaver Kappus, the nineteen year old military cadet who first wrote for advice when Rilke was only twenty seven. Nor did Rilke publish his letters of advice. They were only collected and published after his death, by Kappus. Nor finally was Rilke’s advice in any way arrogant. He said:
“Nobody can advise you and help you. Nobody. There is only one way—Go into yourself.”
Rilke’s advice didn’t make Kappus a poet. It didn’t make him abandon his military career. He was an officer for 15 years and fought in WW1. But Rilke surely helped make him a writer. Kappus wrote novels and screenplays and was a newspaper editor for many years.
That’s the thing about advice. People receive it and then they do what they want with it. Oscar Wilde said:
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.”
Though given his legal difficulties, perhaps he should have listened, just once.
More:
I finished Dancing with the Gods.
Can Rilke change your life?
I'm now @Richard@mastodon.au - yes I joined Mastodon. There's an original idea. As though there aren't enough half neglected social media accounts in my life. Pretty sure my micro.blog account federates semi-automatically anyway, but haven't worked it out yet. Can someone please point me to a simple how-to article, I wonder?
Not thinking of writing a novel in November
Well, I didn't sign up to NaNoWriMo, where you undertake to write 50,000 words in a month. Partly, it's just not my way of doing things. I have recently completed a novel manuscript, which took longer than a month. But then again I also wrote a lot of other stuff while I was doing it. As previously mentioned, you can get a lot done while writing slowly.
Thinking of writing a novel
Manton mentioned NaNoWriMo and that has got me thinking.
https://www.manton.org/2022/10/07/love-reading-about.html
Living beneath the shadow of the past
In former times people lived their lives beneath the shadow of their past. The golden age was always behind them. The olden days were the good old days.
Since the end of the Victorian era, though, the past has lost its hold on the collective imagination. Since then we have been living instead under the almost unbearable weight of the future.
Once upon a time the past used to determine the present, even though it was over. But these days it’s the future that looms over everything, even though it hasn’t happened yet.
As the conservative writer G.K. Chesterton put it:
“Instead of trembling before the spectres of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn."
He was writing in 1910 on ‘What’s Wrong With the World’, and pointing out that the 20th Century had switched to looking forward as its key register. He claimed this was extraordinary:
“there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.“
These days we are constantly in advance of the age. Everything is about the future, or more precisely about fear of the future, future dread. The short term question is: How will the COVID pandemic find a resolution? In relation to the longer term we ask: How will the climate play out? These anxiety-freighted questions seem completely unavoidable. To ignore them seems impossible at best, and at worst deeply immoral. Our era seems to have no place for a person who doesn’t appear to care about the future. And to care about the future in the proper manner is to be weighted down with concern. If you resist, you’ll hear in the back of your mind a constant chiding voice, the voice of Greta Thunburg, the conscience of a new generation: How Dare You?
Chesterton gets it right, I think. The presence of the future is indeed ghostly. It casts shade. Its dominant mood is abjection and we shudder. The ghost of Christmas Future has a new name: Extinction.
Why? Does it have to be this way? Surely it would be possible for this mood to lose its hold, for the sensibilities of the early Twentieth Century to relax their grip a little on the Twenty-First. Is it too much to ask that we might perhaps contemplate the future without the dread?
I anticipate that after the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has done its worst, there will be a palpable sense of collective relief. The worst, after all, will not have eventuated. For many this will not be true. They will be dead or grieving. The relief will certainly not be universally felt. But for the rest, those not directly affected, and especially for younger people, there will be the slow release of a breath long held. Tensed shoulders will relax slightly. The babe unborn will become, however briefly, a promise, a creature of blessing not curse.
In his book, On Memory, Adam Roberts recalls the 1969 science fiction novel, Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert, in which the protagonist Paul Atreides is to be cast out into the desert because of his unacceptable blindness. He defends himself by demonstrating his visionary powers, which enable him to remember with absolute clarity past visions he has had of the present. In this way, he claims, he can see as well as the next person.
This capacity – to navigate the present by remembering past visions of the future – is what we need now. The present, our Twenty-first Century, wasn’t always doom-laden. In the past it was longed for as a golden age, in which people lived many healthy years, mostly at peace with their neighbours, having experienced fulfilling lives. Such a world was full of technological marvels and discoveries of wonder, that would have been almost unimaginable to previous generations. So marvellously frequent were such innovations that the people took them almost entirely for granted and came to expect life to be like this always. We are living in the golden age of the past’s future.
And so the future is precisely as dreadful as we imagine it to be. It has always been this way. Mark Lynas’s book on climate change, published in 2020, is titled ‘Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency’. Reviewing it in the New York Review of Books, climate activist Bill McKibben writes:
“Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization. The latter is a distinct possibility… “ – 130 Degrees
In the past, great religions agreed more or less on the future. They collectively imagined an imminent end time of existential tribulation in which famine, pestilence and war would ravage the world until a divine judge would finally appear to weigh up the moral worth of the living and the dead once and for all. These days science does what only religion used to be allowed to do. But it is the same vision. Are we morally worthy to avoid the Eschaton?
The same year G.K Chesterton was telling the English what was wrong with the world, a collection of medieval religious texts was purchased for the British Museum from Lord Amherst. It contained a Fifteenth Century transcription of the original ‘short’ manuscript of the Revelations of Divine Love, a work by the English mystic Julian of Norwich - the first book known written in English by a woman, probably composed in 1388.
Julian was born during the ‘calamitous’ Fourteenth Century, in 1343, the same year as Geoffrey Chaucer. Six years later in 1348-9 the Great Mortality reached her hometown of Norwich, killing between a third and half of its 12,000 residents. The bubonic plague continued to break out regularly throughout England. In 1361-2 it killed another fifth of the population, and in 1369 it killed yet another 10-15%.
Apart from widespread death, the plague had colossal social effects. The dissident cleric John Wycliffe wrote in 1356 of how the world wouldn’t last beyond the century. The Great Rumour protest movement of 1377 became the Great Rising of 1381. Norwich was at the centre of one of the more violent episodes of the Peasants’ Revolt. In the summer of 1381, the city was taken over and ransacked by the rebels, who were then routed at the nearby Battle of North Walsham by ‘fighting’ Bishop Henry le Despenser.
In 1373, when Julian was thirty years old, she succumbed to a serious illness and on the verge of death she was given the last rites.
Surprising everyone, she didn’t die. Instead, she survived, having experienced a series of mystical visions, in which Jesus Christ appeared to her. She went on to become an anchoress - a kind of nun, living a secluded life in her cell - a private room attached to a church. She didn’t go out, but people came to her.
Let’s just pause and recall the main events surrounding her life in Norwich up until this time.
All this was local news for Julian. But the national and international news was just as tumultuous. The death of King Edward III in 1377 led to the accession of his ten-year-old son Richard II. It was to be a very unstable reign, dominated by the aspirations of his uncle, John of Gaunt for his own son, Henry Bolingbroke, to take over. All this is to say nothing of the widespread tumult taking place at this time in Europe and spilling over into England. The Western Schism of 1378 saw two rival Popes struggling for supremacy of the Church. The ongoing Hundred Years War saw the French and the Castilian Spanish raiding and burning towns all along the South coast of England.
It was in the midst of all this personal, political, social and religious turmoil that Julian received visions of Christ’s Passion. Her ‘shewings’ took place when she was recovering from her life-threatening illness in 1373. She wrote of her experience fairly soon after, in what is known as her ‘Short Text’. She then reworked this over the following decades into a ‘Long Text’. Although her writing survived through the centuries, the earliest in English by a woman, her life and work were obscured by the Reformation, and it wasn’t until the end of the Nineteenth Century that the Long Text, republished, began to receive attention. The short text, thought to have been lost, was rediscovered in 1910 and published for the first time in 1911. Because of this loss and rediscovery, Julian of Norwich is both very medieval and yet somehow very Twentieth Century. Nor has her star faded. In the present century there have already been at least nine new editions of her work.
Given the turbulence surrounding her life and times, it’s amazing that Julian had such a clear sense that the future was not heavy, Although thoroughly medieval, her visions contradicted the gloomy spirit of the age. She’s been called a visionary and a mystic, but her visions were so out of tune with the spirit of her age that I can’t help thinking of her as a kind of science fiction writer. What was revealed to her was that in spite of all the signs of the times, her God was not winding up the world but sustaining it, like a hazelnut held carefully in the palm of the hand.
“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties; the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God keeps it. “ - Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter V. (Westminster Cathedral Treasury, MS 4.)
People are rightly sceptical of religious certainties these days, and dogma is shunned. Medieval talk of sin and wrath and atonement seems beyond anachronistic. Talk of God is just distasteful. And yet the climate-fuelled certainty that we’re all doomed passes as a rational discussion-starter. It’s increasingly our consensus reality. Now I’m not challenging reality, I’m just questioning the way we choose to look at it. I’m not suggesting we can all relax, since Progress with a capital ‘P’ will fix everything. We can’t and it won’t. There is work to be done which neither the past nor the future will do for us. My suggestion is modest: perhaps our navigation of this difficult present might be aided by remembering our past visions of the future. As I read Julian of Norwich I can’t help asking myself, was her lifetime really less fraught than our own? War, pestilence, political strife, the death of collective meaning. She had it all, in spades. And yet having nearly met with her own ending, she somehow imagined a resolutely hopeful alternative:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.“
We can believe it or not, but we can’t put it down to naivety. The future is what it has always been: it is precisely as dreadful as we imagine it to be.
References
Chesterton, G.K. What’s Wrong With the World (1910), 24-25. Quoted in Adam Roberts, Morphosis blog.
Roberts, Adam (2020) It’s The End Of The World, But What Are We Really Afraid Of? London: Elliot & Thompson. ISBN: 9781783964741
Rolf, Veronica Mary (2013). Julian’s Gospel: Illuminating the Life & Revelations of Julian of Norwich. Orbis Books. ISBN 978-1-62698-036-5.
BBC Four HD The Search for the Lost Manuscript Julian of Norwich (2016) - YouTube
My range is me
The actor and film director Taika Waititi made an interesting comment on his creative process:
"I'm the laziest, laziest actor you'll ever come across."
Taika Waititi
He said he's too lazy to really try to do acting properly so he ends up just being himself. In his movie Jojo Rabbit, for example, he played a version of Hitler, as imagined by a ten-year-old child. But he couldn't be bothered to read any background, so his comic/tragic version of the character is a lot like Waititi himself, rather than the notorious dictator. Did this work? Well the movie was nominated for several Oscars, and I think it won one, so he might have been doing something right.
More recently, he played a pirate in his comedy series, Our Flag Means Death, but having discovered that Blackbeard came from Bristol in the West Country of England, he thought it would be too hard to try that accent and so he just reverted to his own New Zealand voice.
"My range is me. I don't try. And I'm successful, so…"
Taika Waititi
This nonchalance is endearing, but it rather masks the fact that Waititi is extremely prolific, often juggling several large projects at once, including some very big-budget movies. In 2017 he was too busy to pick up his New Zealander of the Year award. I suspect that what he means by 'lazy' is different from that word's common usage! Perhaps his insistence on being himself actually helps him to produce highly creative work and plenty of it.
I'm mentioning all this because I think a lot of people have difficulty just being themselves. Perhaps they feel there is a role they are supposed to perform, or maybe they fear their real, authentic self, whatever that is, wouldn't be good enough. Possibly, their environment doesn't provide the kind of psychological safety they might need to reveal themselves as they are, so they are tempted to hide certain aspects of their character, to mask themselves, or hold themselves in. This can be exhausting, like holding your breath, and this exhaustion doesn't support productive work.
Of course, I'm talking about myself here. I often feel that my best won't be enough, that I'm only acceptable if I can jump some imaginary hurdle. But I recognise that this hesitancy is really mostly in my own mind. Taika Waititi's career shows that at least for one person, relaxing into one's own character is a way of releasing the energy to create high quality work, even if it isn't what people are expecting.
I remember a few years back taking holiday snapshots with my phone. As I did so I was imagining that these photos of my ordinary holiday wouldn't be anywhere near as good as the kind of thing you see on Instagram, where everything seems casual but you know it's been carefully staged to look its best. But my camera app had just updated to a new layout and what I saw, instead of amateur snaps, was a perfect grid of scenes from a beachside paradise. My sense of inadequacy had been entirely made up. Reframed, my holiday and my record of it were far more than merely adequate. My casual shots were more than OK, they were quite good. And the holiday was wonderful. I've remembered that sudden revelation. And now I realise that all this time I've had things the wrong way around. I don't need to be good enough to become creative; instead I want to be creative enough to become good.
A new mantra, then: my range is me.
You can get a lot done by writing slowly
“People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so prolific’…God, it doesn’t feel like it—nothing like it. But, you know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart.”
John McPhee (quoted by Cal Newport)
Journalist John McPhee rarely wrote more than 500 words a day, but his secret was the power of repetition. He did this seemingly small amount of writing nearly every day throughout his long career. By writing a little, a lot, he achieved an enormous amount, including countless articles, 29 books and a Pulitzer Prize.
That's what writing slowly is about. It doesn't mean being lazy. It means cultivating the discipline to keep writing. Five hundred words a day adds up to 182,500 words a year. It's not hard to write a lot. Quantity is not the issue. The only two obstacles are the difficulty of maintaining the habit, and the little voice in your head that tells you your scribbling will never amount to anything.
When I publish a post with no title, where does it go and who gets to see it?
Thanks to Tom Critchlow, I now know a simple JS trick for including the micro.blog feed into a website:
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://micro.blog/sidebar.js?username=tomcritchlow"></script>