Kimberly Hirsh

Here are a pair of blog posts that ended up in conversation with each other in my brain because I read them both this morning in quick succession.

CJ Chilvers asks, “What’s with the hostility towards personal publishing?

And it’s almost as if Seth Godin answers, “The Coney Island problem.”

Chilvers says:

our innate trust in individuals over brands will determine the winners of both attention and revenue. Everyone in media should be racing to become a trusted individual right now.

and Godin points out:

We’d like to believe that we prefer to walk down the picturesque street, visiting one merchant after another, buying directly from the creator or her gallery. We’d like to think that the centralized antiseptic option isn’t for us… And yet, when the supermarche opens in rural France, it does very well. It turns out that we respond well to large entities that pretend that they’re simply a conglomeration of independent voices and visions, but when masses of people are given a choice, they’re drawn to the big guy, not the real thing.

Where does this leave personal publishing and blogging? I’m not sure. But I think it’s an interesting question and an interesting thing to think about. I suppose a lot of it comes back to that old question, why blog? Are we doing it for ourselves or for our readers? I find that even when I don’t mean to, I tend to blog for my future self. And future me would rather hear what past me has to say from me, rather than an LLM trained to sound like me and everyone else. That said, I am intrigued by the idea of training an LLM on my own diary and journal entries and blog posts and then having a conversation with my younger self, like Michelle Huang did. In fact, I think I’ll try it now.

edited to add: I tried it, but because I don’t have a payment method in OpenAI it didn’t let me do it. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to extrapolate from old blog posts and LiveJournal entries what a younger me would have said.

In November, when I realized there was no way I was going to be able to get 50,000 words of writing done, I decided to try writing 750 words a day using the website 750words.com. I enjoyed doing morning pages this way. The traditional writing-in-a-notebook way tends to give me hand or wrist pain. But I was using the new site, and after a streak hiccup, I realized that it wasn’t quite the write tool for me. I actually do better without streak tracking, because if I mess up (and I didn’t, their system didn’t save my 750 words even though I’d written them), my perfectionism has me go NEVER MIND!

So I decided to use a combo of my Google Calendar to send me an email reminder like 750 words does and Scrivener to set up a journal where each entry had a 750 word target. That went well, for a while, until I hit a day when I just didn’t feel like it. And I gave myself permission not to. And that was fine, too.

I got back into it but overtime it just felt like… not quite what I was looking for. I would write things in there, and then I would think I had said those things to someone, but I hadn’t. And I realized that private journaling is great and valuable, but if I’m looking to be motivated to keep up a regular practice, I want an audience. (Can you tell I’m an obliger?)

I’m not a journaler. I’m not a diarist. I am an escribitionist. I have been for over 20 years. So if I want to keep up a writing process, blogging is the best way to do it.

I also really appreciate blogging as a mode of thinking, as a way of finding out what I think. When I write for no audience, words come out, but they don’t have sticking power in my mind. I do best when my ideas are things I can talk out with another person, even if that other person is a silent reader. I love having my blog as a tool I can refer to when I need help, a place where advice from my past self bubbles up for me.

So hi. I’m trying out daily blogging, again. I’m not setting a word target. I’m not going to stress if I miss a day. But this is my plan, to get something a little more deliberate than a quick note written every day.