2021 is turning out to be a slow year getting off the ground here on ribbonfarm. A quick-and-dirty theory I made up and began testing last year about a kind of play-to-production pipeline for my writing isn’t quite working out:
- Twitter for play-level shitposting and transient lightning-rod stuff
- Ribbonfarm for experimental and R&D writing with no QA (open)
- Breaking Smart and Art of Gig for production-grade stuff with a bit of QA (paywalled)
Ribbonfarm is in a way getting starved of low-hanging fruit to work with as raw material.
On the one hand, if it’s early enough, I shitpost on Twitter about it, often making what I now refer to as threadthulhus — messy intertwingled threads that QT and reference each other in weird ways like a bad Cthulhu dream, exploring a big topic with an utter lack of discipline.
These are not easy to clean up and serialize into essays, so I only do it when the idea feels extra strong, like the Internet of Beefs post which started life as a threadthulhu. But often, the very act of letting something sprawl into a threadthulhu precludes it ever become a cleaned-up essay. You have to switch gears early enough to do that, or it becomes impossible.
On the other hand, if it’s old-style enough (as in, a style I developed here 5+ years ago), it ends up in the newsletters. The subscription mode of the two newsletters keeps me on my toes on the production end, and even when it’s not fun, I’ve disciplined myself to keep writing. And because it is usually very familiar topics, and styles I’ve been honing for a decade, I can produce that kind of content even when I’m not feeling at the top of my game. It’s also stuff that I feel kinda doesn’t deserve a place on ribbonfarm anymore (which is a weird kind of self-snobbery, since I expect people to pay for it) because it is not bold enough in its intentions. It’s safe stuff for me personally. The risk of writing a truly bad newsletter are low because I don’t take many risks with newsletters.
Ribbonfarm is where I’ve always done stuff where I don’t want to be held to others’ expectations (which comes with taking money), but do have my own expectations. The expectations I have of myself here are the opposite of the QA type expectations I have of myself with newsletters and books. I don’t care about consistent quality or thematic coherence. But I do expect stuff I write here to be fun to write, break new ground thematically, and be at least a little technically challenging in writing terms, forcing me to develop new tricks or skills to execute on an idea (I’m almost never methodologically experimental in the newsletters).
This experimental quality means only a small fraction of readers will have the patience to ignore the failed experiments and wait for the experiments that work. It also means it would be kinda unfair to charge for it, since there are no implied promises.
Hey, there’s a 2×2!
The thing that’s making it hard this year is that the two kinds of writing I want to experiment with this year — fiction and maker projects — both involve a lot of upfront design and planning.
For the former, stories have to have more structural work and plotting up front (even if you are a pantser like me, and approach fiction as an improv activity, it still involves way more planning than nonfiction).
For the latter, well, you have to actually design and/or build stuff offstage and take photos to talk about, as in my clockmaking project posts. Otherwise you’re vaping rather than making.
In both cases, you need more time, and longer-range planning. You can’t just make shit up in a day, which creates a problem.
Historically, 90% of the posts on ribbonfarm were conceived and written in a single day — those that took longer did so simply because they were long (~4-5k finished words per day is my physical limit), not because I was planning them. I’ve almost never done preparation, outlining, note-taking etc. I wake up with an idea, and if I have the energy, I write for 4-14 hours, and I have a post. Done.
Lately of course, my energy has been closer to the 4-hour end than the 14-hour end, which is one of the reasons I shifted to the blogchain model. I simply don’t have the physical energy to do the 14-hour–day heavy lifts anymore that fueled this blog in the early years. Worsening middle-aged eyesight and stiffening joints aren’t helping either. I have to pace myself now, and break up writing sessions with physical activity to stay sane and avoid physical pain. Working on stuff that takes more planning and preparation fits better with my current energy patterns in theory, but clearly I’m having some startup troubles.
Anyhow, this is obviously an excuse-post for why more exciting things haven’t been happening here this year, given we’re already into February. The good news is, I’m working it out, and figuring out workflows and tooling and mechanisms to actually write the fiction and maker posts I am itching to write. It’s just taking longer than I expected to retool the factory.
About Venkatesh Rao
