Finished reading: Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au 📚 This was a quite mezmerising read. It reminded me of the writing of Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. He wrote a novel called Snow Country. Both these snowy books are set in an unnamed Japanese onsen resort in the winter, a train journey away from Tokyo. The Wikipedia entry for Kawabata’s work says:

Through many of Kawabata’s works the sense of distance in his life is represented. He often gives the impression that his characters have built up a wall around them that moves them into isolation… Kawabata left many of his stories apparently unfinished, sometimes to the annoyance of readers and reviewers, but this goes hand to hand with his aesthetics of art for art’s sake, leaving outside any sentimentalism, or morality, that an ending would give to any book. This was done intentionally, as Kawabata felt that vignettes of incidents along the way were far more important than conclusions.

All this qualities strongly apply to Jennifer Au’s book, too. But she writes about quite different themes, such as the relationship between mother and daughter, and the distance that accrues between second generation migrants and their parental place of origin.

I found the prose to be so understated as to be almost tedious, but then I found the narrator’s ‘vignettes of incidents along the way’ strangely engaging.

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, and is best known for a long series of novels all centred upon the fictional English town of Barchester. Yet he claimed never two write for more than three hours a day. In fact, despite becoming one of the period’s most popular novelists, he maintained a full-time job because he never believed he needed more time to accomplish his significant writing goals. 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.

New year, new website (backend)

It’s a new year, so it must be time for new web connections! Well, I finally decided to shift from a hosted Wordpress site to go all in on micro.blog.

It was fairly easy to migrate, just following the instructions. Things already feel easier and less complicated.

Why did I decide to make this change?

1. I need a simpler system for online writing. It’s been clear for some time that Wordpress was holding me back. I know: “poor workers blame their tools”, and obviously there’s something wrong with me if I can’t just log in to Wordpress and write a line or two from time to time. But really, it felt as though the user interface was presenting a psychological barrier. Every time I logged in it seemed the WordPress UX had got more complex. Anyway, that’s my excuse. I’m hoping that a switch entirely to micro.blog hosting will help the writing to flow a bit better.
2. I like the IndieWeb. Although I had some Indieweb plug-ins set up on my Wordpress site, it didn’t feel as though they were getting much use. The Musky shenanigans at Twitter have made it even clearer that independence on the web is essential and that the true social network is the web itself. Switching to micro.blog will hopefully connect me better, and if I ever change my mind, there’s no lock-in.
3. Updating the app feels like a chore. When I checked my hosting dashboard it was clear that there were several insecurities caused by a lack of updating. I just hadn’t gotten around to it for ages. But really, I don’t have much interest in which version of PHP I’m supposed to be using, or what version the plug-ins are - so I’d rather not think about this side of things. If micro.blog can do this for me, I’m not complaining.
4. I also quite like Mastodon. Micro.blog has a certain amount of compatability with Mastodon, through the activitypub protocol. So I plan to try that out.
5. Writing in Markdown syntax has become more and more intuitive to me, despite its limitations, and I like the relative simplicity of static sites. Micro.blog uses Hugo as its site generator, so now I’m now using Markdown to create static pages.

Look, I’m not really complaining about WordPress. I like it, and Automattic isn’t Apple/Facebook/Google/Twitter/Amazon, so there’s that. If I had to choose a dictator to rule the world, Matt Mullenweg would be on my shortlist. It’s not Wordpress, it’s me. I’m ready for a change.

Writing about reading

Also, I’m making a commitment to writing about my reading in 2023.

I love reading. Each year I read about 30-40 books and this year I’ll be writing about it here. There’ll soon be a ‘reading’ category at the top of the webpage. Why am I doing this?

• for motivation, and
• to leave a record, sharing what I know and
• to encourage you, dear reader, to stop scrolling and go read a good book.

Micro.blog has a series of companion apps, one of which is Epilogue. You can set an annual reading goal and every time you blog about a title you’ve finished, your goal moves one step closer to completion.

Micro.blog also has some other great book-related features, including a handly bookshelf, and this is one of the things that made me want to switch.

I keep a private TiddlyWiki Zettelkasten in which I already reflect on my reading, so the only real change is in making it public.

Don’t panic

So that’s what’s new. But don’t worry, whatever happens I’ll still be writing slowly.

Finished reading: The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard 📚

This incendiary novella - only 66 pages long - burns so fiercely it felt like a bomb was about to go off in my hand. With amazing economy the author, Eric Vuillard, brings to life the brief, violent career of Thomas Müntzer. He makes the past as vivid as an execution, and renders the urgency of the past fully present. The Peasants' War, so distant in time, is now.

“Müntzer is thirsty, hungry and thirsty, terribly hungry and thirsty, and nothing can sate him, nothing can slake his thirst. He’ll devour old bones, branches, stones, mud, milk, blood, fire. Everything.”

Gripping.

Currently reading: The Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita 📚

I love the metaphor of the piano as a living forest, and I’m enjoying the journey of the diffident main character, Tomura, in his apprenticeship as a piano tuner. It’s certainly making me see my own piano in a new light.

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?

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.

Manton mentioned NaNoWriMo and that has got me thinking.

https://www.manton.org/2022/10/07/love-reading-about.html

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>

I had forgotten that posts to my wordpress site only show up on micro.blog if there’s no title.

Let’s see whether this post, written on my new iPad, makes an appearance…

Having finally got hold of an iPad, I’m expecting more posts here soon - and by extension on micro.blog

I'm imagining writing a handful of  'zines and setting up stall at one of those 'zine fairs. I would like that. I just looked it up and found a pop-up 'zine fair just down the road this Sunday. I will go to seek inspiration.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/zines-had-it-right-all-along/

https://austinkleon.com/2018/03/01/fancy-zines/

Great bike ride down the river and along the bay this morning. Cold to start but warmed up nicely. Flat rear tyre though - twice... argh! I'm getting new tyres, finally. Should be good by Wednesday.

It starts innocently enough, then they take over the world. You have been warned.

Vrypan says ‘social networks don’t scale socially’. It’s true. We need a distributed alternative to the monolithic megacorporations. The indieweb is a way of including in the web itself a set of social network protocols.  The big social network silos are then redundant, because social network functionality can exist everywhere by design. An example Vrypan uses is the webmention.  I’m loving micro.pub and am also intrigued by the DAT protocol and beaker browser. Such ideas are the building blocks of the next web, I hope. The next web will be fit for humans. The issue for semi-commercial operations like micro.pub and hashbase is whether they should develop a business model that recognises an optimum size. What even is the optimum size for a social network? One metric might be: ‘can be maintained by one admin person’. That would be a small network – hence the value of distribution and federation.

[vrypan]: https://blog.vrypan.net/2018/08/15/social-networks-dont-scale-socially/

[indieweb]: https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started

[webmentions]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

[[microblog]: https://micro.blog/

[beakerbrowser]: https://beakerbrowser.com/

[hashbase]: https://hashbase.io

[DAT protocol]: https://datproject.org/

A big win for civilization in England?
A judge has ruled that a local council in England needs to consider its statutory duties before closing down libraries due to funding cuts.
[The Guardian] (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/14/family-claims-win-in-high-court-challenge-to-northants-library-cuts)

Just by posting on my site, the post is automatically mirrored to micro.blog

I’m thinking of adding a connection between this site and Manton Reece’s micro.blog It’s a bit like Twitter but there’s more control of your site’s own contents. And it’s possible to syndicate everything to Twitter anyway.

Hello,Thanks for reading my first post here. As you can see the site certainly lives up to its name. I am writing slowly¹.

If you’d like to write back, you can just leave a comment, or email me:

info at writingslowly.com