First Published: 2022 February 19
Do I feel guilty that I almost exclusively write about the other writing I do? A little bit.
Will that stop me? Not today apparently.
I’ve finally gotten far enough into the novel that I feel comfortable breaking into chapters. This is a bit of a double edged sword, though. I want my chapters to be around 1500-2500 words a piece. I also want to write around 2000 words a day. If your mind is going to the same place as mine, that means I’d be writing about 7 chapters a week.
That doesn’t feel sustainable for me, if only because only one author that I follow publishes at that pace. However, I feel like right now I’m able to keep it up, and it’s1 always better to have more to revise from than less. I think I might try to use one day a week to edit, just so that everything flows well and the story arc works well, but who knows? Maybe I’ll just give up on the idea of a good story soon.
I think and hope↩︎
First Published: 2022 February 18
As I promised, I will be using my novel updates as a way of generating content when I’m mentally exhausted from writing a novel. Today I wrote almost 3000 words, not including the code I wrote so I knew what words to write.
If that sounds a little strange, I guess I should explain. I don’t remember if I have mentioned that the book I’m writing is a LitRPG, which stands for Literary RPG1 More or less, imagine a roleplaying game but instead of playing, you’re reading. That is to say, characters have statistics and can train and specifically watch numbers go up when they do. As a result, readers of this genre tend to be far more accepting of weird contrivances that are due to math.
I decided that I wanted there to be some way that hard spells are more difficult than easy ones. What I decided on is layers of connections between the points which make up the spell. The first level is fairly simple, energy flows from each point to its neighboring point. The second level has energy flowing from each point to the square of it mod the number of points. So, the first point flows to itself, the second to the fourth, etc.
Since the spell I had him learn has2 25 nodes, the sixth piece connects to the 25th slot and the 11th slot, since those add to 36. The eighth connects to the twenty fifth one twice, since 64>25+25. Somehow I wrote almost 3000 words of a character learning this himself, and I really hope that my alpha reader doesn’t find it too boring.
That’s about all the writing I have space for now, since it’s already past my bedtime and I completely lost track of time writing.
First Published: 2022 February 17
As I made my daily commute to work today, a few thoughts went through my head. The first1 was that the ice seemed maybe too crackly for me to have chosen to walk on the lake. The second2 thought was that I could use this platform as a way of keeping myself more accountable for the projects I want to do.
One project I think will fit really nicely here is my goal of learning Scholastic Metaphysics.
“But Jonathan”, you may be saying, “why would you care about Scholastic Metaphysics?” Mostly I’m reading about it because one of the priests at the student center suggested it could be a fruitful discussion to think about the intersection of Scholastic Metaphysics and Chemistry. I agreed, and he lent me a few books to read.
“But Jonathan,” you may be saying, “why now?” The conversation happened in August3, but I kept not really reading the book, because things come up. Yesterday night, though4, he asked me if I’d had a chance to start them yet, so this seems like a good excuse to start again.
I’ll be reading through The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics by W. Norris Clarke, S.J., if anyone wants to follow along. The book has nineteen chapters, so assuming that each chapter is understandable in a week5, I’ll have twenty posts in this series, since today I’m reading the introduction.
Without further ado: my reflection on the Introduction to the book.6
The goal of this book is not to provide an insight into St. Thomas Aquinas’s specific metaphysical system. Instead, the goal is to “provide an advanced textbook of systematic metaphysics”7. One issue with Thomas’s writings, according to the author, is that he uses Aristotle-like dense and technical writing, which is fairly inaccessible.
Apparently Kant and Hume and the like pushed for the idea that a systematic metaphysical understanding to all of creation is not workable, which is interesting. This book will not be comparing Thomistic approaches to other schools of thought, which seems reasonable to me. That’s most of the introduction.
Come back next week to watch me try to piece my way through philosophy for the first time!
irrelevant to this essay but legitimate nonetheless↩︎
relevant↩︎
or the summer, I’m unsure, wait I have my log let me check. Hey nice it was 24 August↩︎
isn’t it weird how yesterday night feels wrong but last morning also does?↩︎
One of those assumptions I have no clue how good it is↩︎
250/55 in↩︎
p1↩︎
First Published: 2022 February 16
Every so often enough ideas start percolating in my head to create a post for me. Today’s came to me from reading “Don’t Teach Coding”1, thinking about the research I’m doing, a conversation with one of the readers of this blog, and being in a Catholic Church. My thoughts, being percolated, are not yet coherent, so I apologize to whoever is reading this.
One issue with communicating high level information in a field to outsiders is that the language is necessarily formalized in a way that requires enough learning that outsiders cannot access the information without first becoming insiders. As an example of this, our group makes “amorphous solid water”, not ice. Why? Because ice as a term encompasses far more than what we do, and the different ways ices behave is relevant to our research. Amorphous ice is different than crystalline ice, and water ices are different than other ices made from other liquids.2
More than novel vocabulary, though, there is also the issue of redefined words. As an example, the term “melting” seems fairly straightforward in day to day conversation. In material science, though, it only refers to crystalline solids turning liquid. In chemistry, though, it refers to any solid to liquid transition. I’m sure in other fields it has other terms as well.
Computer scientists are of course intimately familiar with this issue. Logic gates take common terms, like if, and, and not, and redefine them to mean exactly one thing.
Both of these issues, new words and redefining old words, have incredible benefits though, which is why it’s so hard to be a beginner. There’s no way to talk about chemistry without electrons, but before knowing what electrons are, you have to define it. That brings the second issue, which is that teaching a formal language using informal language requires a leap of understanding, which is never guaranteed. I don’t have any solutions, and I’m still not sure what I’m trying to say here, but I think it’s fun how words work I guess.
First Published: 2022 February 15
This is the first1 post in what I’m expecting to be a fairly repetitive series of posts. More or less, I’ve worked on the novel2 I’m writing for too much time today for me to have the urge to create a whole new writing prompt and write from it. Instead, I get to write about how I’m writing that novel.
Currently, I have been doing a timed3 mostly linear4 word vomit5 to generate content, then going back through on later days and revising that text into something vaguely in the shape I want. An analogy I’m creating right now is that the first pass is throwing clay onto a block, and the second pass shapes it into vaguely what I’m looking for. Of course, since I’m adding more clay every day, I’ll likely need to add more and more refinement so that the new clump of clay doesn’t destroy the shape I’m building. What that means extra-metaphorically6 is that I’ll likely try to add another set of passes before I start publishing it.
Publishing is another point I should discuss here. I’m currently planning to publish it on an online web-serial site, for a variety of reasons, most of which being that I like the site and would like the flexibility of not having to finish the book before I put it out for people to see. Of course, that does limit how much I can work on the revisions, but that’s ok with me, because at some point you have to present a sculpture, regardless of if you want to keep editing it.
I’ve had a couple of people read the approximately 2000 words I’ve done the first pass of the editing through. The word vomit right now consists of about another 3000 words, but I’ve noticed that I add far more words on the first revision of each section, which probably says a lot about the way that I write in general.
As I think about that last sentence, it is 100 percent true. Whenever I write papers I find that I have to use the first few drafts as practically outlines, making paragraphs out of each sentence.7 Today I wrote about 1700 words, which would put me solidly in NaNoWriMo writing pace.8 In the word vomit period of my writing, I find that I’m generally putting between 60 and 70 words on the page per minute, which would imply a time of 25 to 30 minutes of writing to get to my 1700 today.
However, I don’t really time the editing portion, for the reasons of:
I don’t like being timed for things I want to do
My goal isn’t speed but quality
idk I just haven’t been yet9
But I think I probably spent around one and a half hours on the editing today, which may not be the most sustainable for me longterm. Who knows, though, maybe I’ll become more efficient with both, especially since I think a day of word vomiting gets me one or two days of editing, so eventually I’ll just have a story to edit, rather than also generate.
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by definition novel (new)↩︎
book thing, since I get to call it what I want↩︎
I set a timer and write for that amount of time, both to monitor writing speed and so that I have external control on my time↩︎
I try to just continue the plot forward, though occasionally make notes about what I should edit later↩︎
I just spew words onto the page, planning on them being really awful, because I’m going to edit them later↩︎
meaning outside of the metaphor, not making the metaphor moreso↩︎
sometimes literally more than one paragraph per sentence, those are the fun ones↩︎
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writer’s Month, and has a goal of 50000 words in November, which averages out to just under 1700 words a day↩︎
I hate that I have this need to have all lists be in groupings of three↩︎
First Published: 2022 February 14
Today was my first Valentine’s Day in a relationship, and it was really fantastic! I spent the day at work, but then got to come home and make nice homemade meal for my significant other and I to enjoy. For those curious, the meal was:
a Salad1
Homemade herb-laminated fettuccini with red pepper and tomato in a parmesan sauce
Chocolate cake2
But, far more than the food, the company was incredible!
purchased from the store↩︎
First Published: 2022 February 13
Luke 6:21B: “ Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.”
This week is a beatitudes week, which is really nice. Unlike many weeks, I don’t really see the readings totally differently this year. I guess the one that is sticking out to me most right now is the one addressed towards the weeping, saying that they will laugh. As the priest in the sermon tonight pointed out, this is not saying that it is better to be hungry or weeping, but rather a consolation that joy will enter our lives again, even if it isn’t there now. Some days I really should just write that down at the beginning of my day so I’m forced to remember.
First Published: 2022 February 11
Apparently I’ve only had writer’s block once before writing this blog, which is really nice. It’s very sad that I have it right now, though.
Last time I had it, I apparently debated doing some class notes, so maybe that’s not a bad idea. Then again, I’ve already decided on the title and url for today, which means I cannot really do that anymore. So instead of writing anything that could have come up before I had writer’s block1, I will instead be musing on the nature of writer’s block.
Last time I had this issue, I apparently did some of this above complaining and griping about my own self-imposed issues. I then followed a creative writing prompt. This time, however, I lack any creative writing prompts.
Writer’s block is definitely something that I’ve been told all writers need to work past. Since I’m not a writer, I shouldn’t have to worry about this issue, but I will operate under the assumption that having a daily writing goal is enough for the same issue to occur.2 Failing to write has struck me the past few days. I managed to work on the novel3 that I wanted to write only for two days. Coincidentally, those two days were the first two days I was writing the novel. At this point I’m really wondering whether it’s better to keep free-writing or whether I should try editing for a few minutes before I write any day, so that I know where I’m trying to work forward from in a given day’s writing. I have to assume that the amount of time it will take me is going to increase linearly, though one must wonder whether it’ll increase more than linearly because of something that I cannot think of, or slower than linearly because each day’s editing work will go faster due to my knowing and having already made the edits that it needs. Who can say, but I guess I should work on it now, if only because I think I can find the energy to do my creative fiction writing even if my creative nonfiction won’t work.
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very much a chicken and egg problem? in that I don’t really believe someone can have writer’s block before they try writing↩︎
I don’t really know if anyone cares about whether or not I’m a writer, but if you’re curious what about me isn’t a writer, please do let me know↩︎
since I would like to be very generous↩︎
First Published: 2022 February 11
I’ve written a few posts about how I’m trying to reschedule my life so that time flows how I want it. One aspect of this that I’m trying to work more on now is the meta-scheduling aspect of it. That is, the way of scheduling my time so that it self schedules.
The concept stretches a bit further as well. I think the concept of activation energy in chemistry or gravitational potential energy in physics is a fair example as well. In removing bad habits, it’s better to set up your day so that they become harder to do. As an example, if I’m trying to eat less potato chips1, I could try to just say no every time that I see them on my counter while I’m hungry. But, the path of least resistance is to have some chips.
Conversely, if I avoid buying them, I only have to have willpower one time, rather than every time. Building better habits is a little harder, but is moreso about reducing the activation energy, rather than increasing.
For instance, I want to play guitar more, so I leave my guitar set up by my bed so I see it every morning when I wake up.
less because I could never count how many I eat↩︎
First Published: 2022 February 10
Today we got our ion experiment running!1 I had a plan for what I might write about here, talking about delays and future projects, but something came up and so I didn’t write this earlier. It’s now late, so this is as long as I will write today.2