anticontent

I posted this on Mastodon earlier today:

Wrote the terrible first draft I needed to get out of the way. A kind team member, with great tact I thought, said it was “surprising – in a good way!” I had a couple of good thoughts, but they need to be throw-away observations, whereas I've stretched them much too thin as the main substance of the thing. You're not supposed to dwell on thoughts when you sit zazen, but sometimes you do and sometimes it's useful. After this morning's sit, I know where to go with the next draft.

This as a reply to a previous post (I will not say toot) setting the context that I'm writing a speech (I won't say which). I don't do enough short blog posts, so I thought I'd put it here too.

On a related note, I haven't done much blogging since I got back from holiday. I think that's because I've been very conscious of how much work there is to do. Especially when there's a big/scary thing to write. (That could be big in size, or importance. When it's the latter, shorter can be harder. There's really nowhere to hide.)

But I think not blogging is a mistake. I like a bit of writing to get the wheels turning. Work then becomes something you can easily slide into rather than kick-start. It's a good time investment, plus you get a blog post out of it. Maybe even a good one from time to time.

I've always liked that Richard Herring's blog is called Warming Up – presumably for precisely this reason. Though I forget to read it, so please to see it has an RSS feed.