TrickJarrett.com

The Desk, my new writing tool

So, I have been working on something. This week, with the inspiration to dive back into my writing, I also whipped up this new project thanks to the help of Claude.ai. The idea is to have a central hub for tracking the progress of my writing, as I find the charts and data about my progress very motivating. But, as you'll see, it has some more features built in, including the ability for me to do my writing inside the tool if I want to.

It's not perfect, the AI generated code base always means there are bugs and pain points to be hunted down. But, it works for the base needs. I can refine and fix the remaining issues in the coming days.

Alright, let's take a look at things.

Here is the main dashboard. The red blobs are titles for my projects. I went back and forth on hiding them. Aside from suggesting the writing genre, I don't think they give anything major away, but also - I figured I may as well keep some mystery.

Right now I'm only actively working on the first project. The other four in the system are either ideas I have, or ones I have worked on previously and just haven't brought into the system yet.

The next view is the project specific one.

So, here is the project view for the current book. It gives the full overview of the data it has collected, shows how each writing session has gone, and even lets me look at previous versions of the story (so long as I am uploading them.)

I don't have to upload the manuscript, I can also manually enter the data for each writing session. But the advantage of uploading is that it acts as a backup in case something happens, and also allows the system to measure both words written as well as words removed from the most recent previous version. This is relevant as one of my pain points with a system like this is that sessions which were predominately editing, weren't easy to track as we were just tracking the total word counts, and so revisions, and cuts, and additions which come during editing were largely missed.

I'll also note, the first session here is misleading as I had done a few bits of writing on this project before importing it into the system and thus the first session is heavily inflated. But I didn't feel it was really worth diving into. It'll even out the more I write.

And the last feature, the one I am most happy with, is the in-browser writing tool.

Normally, I write using an app called FocusWriter, which blocks out all other apps and notifications and just lets you focus on writing. But, with the integration of my own selfhosted tool, I decided to recreate the base parts of it in browser.

Yep, retro CRT green on black. I don't know why, but I really like that scheme for writing. Additionally, I'm using the fantastic Monaspace Neon font, which is also my preferred font for programming. So far, it's been quite comfortable to write in.

That's really it. There are a few other small features (milestones are in the code, but not something I've fully implemented.) There are the rough corners I mentioned which still need addressing, but overall - I'm happy with the core functionality.

Previously I had my code integrated into Glowbug (this blog's admin tools), but it is very rough and barebones. Nowhere near as fleshed out as the above system. The main benefit was I could easily integrate it into the automated end of day posts where it would record the amount of writing I had done during a day.

I still can do that with this system, they're on the same system, but it will just take some reworking of the system. But I'm deciding what I want it to be and if I want to keep the same format, or maybe make the Sunday post a special edition with more information for writing from the past week, etc.

We'll see. I'm still deciding on the implementation. But now, back to writing for a bit.

Last night I finally sat down to resume work on the rewrite of a novel I've been working on. That interview with Sanderson left me feeling inspired and motivated. I was able to write almost 3,000 words. In addition, thanks to some help from Claude.ai, I was able to throw together a new tracker which I can use for recording progress on my writing.

I had a version of it that I had previously written and integrated with this blog, but the UI was very rough and I had some core feature updates I wanted. The biggest of which is now it more elegantly will record progress for both new writing and when I go back and edit to change things. The way it does this is I can now upload a copy of the document I'm working on, and it parses the file and compares it to the most recent version, counting new words and words removed.

I'll share more about it after I've been using it a bit longer, and I make sure it's all working how I want. This is the sort of project where I do think AI coding support is useful. It wasn't perfect and I've had to chase a few random bugs, but it is a promising new tool for me.

The lesson of J.R.R. Tolkien’s abandoned Lord of the Rings sequel

'The New Shadow,' which Tolkien left unfinished at his death, has a chilling warning about the dangers of historical amnesia and peacetime rot.

Angels are born of need. Demons are born of opportunity. Devils are born of suffering.

I came up with this a few months ago and jotted it down. I have no idea when or where I'll use it. But I just loved it. Sharing it here as I found it again while looking through my Google Keep scribblings.

Fixing my book: Thorn

Fittingly, just in time for November, last week while traveling for work I had an idea of how to rework my first novel. I wrote it a few years ago and I've just been sitting on it. The number of people who I've let read it can be counted on one hand. Because, simply, it's bad. I know it is. It's meant to be. It's my first novel.

But, last week, I had an idea which will require a great deal of work, but which has me excited for it. It might be the key to leveling up the story. Basically, I'm going to swap two characters in the book in the plot. Not just in name, but swap them in the plot an rewrite it around this swap.

It's going to make me basically rewrite significant portions of the book. But I truly think it will be better.

I'm going to try an finish this rewrite by the end of the year. I originally wrote the book as part of NaNoWriMo, but I won't lock myself in the 30 day cage for this.

Being sick has completely thrown off my sleeping schedule and my energy is limited. I'm about to go lay down and try to sleep again, but I just put in a solid bit of writing on a project that, aside from a little work a few days ago (which included cutting a large segment) I hadn't touched in over half a year.

But, it feels good to be writing again. Even if I am coughing and sniffling through the entire writing session.

Migrated post: Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018)

I was reminded I never migrated this post from my Wordpress blog. Here it is, if you're curious for my writing in response to Bourdain's passing.

It's wrong to call myself a fan of Anthony Bourdain. That overstates it. I read Kitchen Confidential and enjoyed it. When I watched one of his shows, I enjoyed it. But I didn't seek his content out, I didn't wait for news of new seasons or projects. But above all, I held jealousy of the career and life he had. It is a romantic way of life.

The vision of traveling the world to eat food and experience life around the world. I've been able to see many places around our world, and yet there remains a whole world that I haven't seen yet. What I've done is a step more than most people, and those places I have seen have confirmed this famous quote by Bourdain.

"In Search of Writers' Haunts"

The British travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin held that there are two categories of writers: "the ones who 'dig in' and the ones who move." "There are writers who can only function 'at home,' with the right chair, the shelves of dictionaries and encyclopedias, and now perhaps the word processor," he observed. "And there are those, like myself, who are paralyzed by 'home,' for whom home is synonymous with the proverbial writer's block, and who believe naïvely that all would be well if only they were somewhere else."

Adding the Writing Log to End of Day Automated Entries

As you'll see in today's end of day post, the auto inclusion for tracking my writing log is done. At least for a first draft.

The output is very rudimentary, if I have a writing log entry for the day, then it will insert a header for "Writing Log" and then a sentence giving context to what I did.

Example:

Trick wrote 996 words over 40 min. with an average writing speed of 24.9 words per minute.

It has some additional functionality. I can theoretically track work on multiple projects at once, so if I do that it'll add a note for how many projects I worked on. Additionally, it will track my daily streak total if I've written for at least 2 days in a row.

I was thinking about doing a weekly summary every Sunday, but I haven't written that yet. I'll add it to the backlog.

Tonight's writing was just under 1,000 words. But it involved a bit more work as I finished developing a behind-the-scenes timeline which required a bit of work to sort out and develop.

I feel good about it. I wish it had resulted in more words, but not everyday can be a flowing river of words.

The key to writing the book is keeping momentum, even a miniscule forward movement (not that today's was) is momentum and it keeps the progress moving. I can see the story unfolding in front of me. We'll see how it goes from here.

Writing Project Overview

This morning I spent some time writing. I've got four projects I rotate between working on depending on motivation and inspiration. I'm trying to focus and wrangle my efforts be on one piece and, when I need a change, to have another one I can switch to for a bit. This morning's work is on my most complete project, "Thorn."

Here's a quick overview of them. I am loathe to give away many spoilers or plot details, because A) I'm jealous of these stories, and B) who knows how correct they'll end up being when they are eventually finished.

Here's a quick overview of the projects and their current state. All titles are just placeholders.

"Thorn" (Modern Fantasy)

• Current word count: 81k
• Status: Editing and rewrites

The working title for my first book, I wrote it during COVID and have continued to work on it over the past few years. I am firmly convinced it is mediocre at best. But it has potential and it represents a "complete" book. I just need to make it better. Right now I'm giving it a bit of a rewrite as I change the position of one of the characters and need to adjust the book around it.

"Canopy" (Science Fiction & Fantasy)

• Current word count: 10k
• Status: Early writing

A science fiction novel with elements of fantasy interwoven. I have much of the plot laid out and now it's just about writing it. Notable because it's the only one on this list which ventures outside of Fantasy, and also the others are all such that they could be a larger series and I think this one is self-contained. We'll see.

"Lukas" (High Fantasy)

• Current word count: 7k
• Status: Early writing

A high fantasy epic. I have broad strokes of it figured out, and it's currently about a core cast of characters and a larger plot, but I still have a lot of work to do to figure out what the story is.

"Runes" (High Fantasy)

• Current word count: 2k
• Status: Very early work

This is the newest on the list. The main concept and plot came to me before a flight last week. I've started work on world building and figuring out the plot to flesh it out. I have a lot of excitement over this right now, but there is a lot of work to do to figure out what this story is about.

Ghost writer talks life, writing, and working with Prince Harry

I will admit, I don't plan to read Prince Harry's book. But I enjoyed this article by the ghost writer who wrote it with Harry. First, because ghost writing is indeed something I had an unconscious bias against and this article made me realize that about myself. And second, because this was really humanizing for all involved.

"The Paris Review - Document: The Symbolism Survey"

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

Medium.com's current CEO shares some thoughts on why the company has floundered / failed

This is a comment on a discussion titled, "Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail"?"

I'm Medium's current CEO as of last July. I actually pay a lot of attention to this sentiment on Hacker News. For example, I've bookmarked and often share this recent HN poll where 88% of people here think there's a negative stigma to a medium article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223222

It's sad and entirely our fault. We didn't fail but we did lose our way. Here's how I see it:

1. Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true and it gets even more pronounced if you pay people to game your recommendation system. I think we were boosting articles that made people think we were a site for clickbait. The canonical example for HN is "Why NodeJS is dead" by a new programmer with zero experience or context. Readers noticed this, but worse, so did authors. And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. As of December, about 30% of our recommendations are generated by a new system that is picking much higher quality articles that have been vetted for substance over clickbait. This is getting a lot better, rapidly.

2. Got lost thinking about the creator economy, when we should have kept thinking about doers. Distribution was our winning value proposition (on top of simple free tools). We were built to find and boost individual articles and that meant that anyone with something great to say had a chance to get their story boosted, often by a lot. This is my original background in publishing: working at O'Reilly helping them publish programming books that were written by programmers. For a lot of topics, personal experience trumps everything. Not to knock creators, but by definition full time content creation gets in the way of having personal experiences that are worth writing about. We are partly through fixing this and #1.

Those are the two most obvious ones. But then there's a longer list. We competed with our platform publishers by starting our own in house publications. Those are shut down now. We started but didn't finish a number of redesigns and so the tools didn't get better for a couple of years. We're past that now and are putting out table stakes features again and some innovations too.

What I told our investors was that there was a huge pile of shit to dig out of, but that it would be worthwhile eventually. And I still believe both that there is a lot more to do and also that it'll be worthwhile.

I think point two is an interesting one. As a publishing site / tool, the better content is better for you, for the author, for the reader. Losing sight on that is the downfall of a publishing site who relies on content which draws readers back, and more importantly, for them to pay.

This does not lessen full time content creators. They have an audience and even have a use for businesses of various kinds. Specifically the ones who make things and need people to market and talk about them.

Regarding medium.com, other comments on the discussion and in direct reply to the CEO's post call out the business model and methods of medium.com as problematic for various reasons. But I wanted to highlight this specific response by the CEO for that second talking point.

Writing Update

I had taken a few days off writing, letting the story percolate in my mind. I had reached a point in the story and couldn't figure out how to proceed forward. I was stuck and needed to figure out what to do. And sometimes, the right answer is not to plow forward. I eventually decided the right course of action was to get delete some stuff I had written and I'm glad I did.

Once I removed the obstacle, I jammed out roughly 3,000 words this evening. The log sheet will only show 2,700ish, but that is because I had deleted the problematic section two nights ago but didn't log it. A session with a negative word count would wreak havoc on the formulas for my tracking sheet. So, instead, I have a slight undertruth in the number for tonight. A fair trade off for avoiding the headache of making it so the sheet can handle the rare negative wordcount session.

Additionally, I'm not killing myself writing this. This isn't NaNoWriMo. I've set myself a very achievable goal of 2,000 words a week on this book. This gives me license to only write a few times a week. Sure, I can do more if I find the time or motivation, but I'm not going to be wracked with guilt if I don't.