Goood Morning [The Trenchant Edges]

In which I realize I bit off more than I can chew.

Alright, we’re here again.

Today’s topic was supposed to be about organizing my previous emails into more easily accessible medium posts, but I’ve now realized that reading thousands of words in 25 emails is going to be more than I can do in a morning so, lol.

While we’re talking egg on my face, I also just noticed that when I said I’d gotten a rare first edition of Terence’s second book, I wrote True Hallucinations and not The Invisible Landscape.

Whoops!

There is no 1975 edition of True Hallucinations. >_<

And we’ll get into the actual first edition of The Invisible Landscape tomorrow.

Why did you want to do long-form writing anyway?

A reader asked why I wanted to focus on writing longer pieces than I normally do on my page.

It’s a really good question.

There are a few big answers. The main one is that I’m really comfortable writing 200-1000 word posts on FB. I’ve got a nice audience, and I’ve got a good flow for it.

But the writing I really want to do is extreme long form research, like Robert Caro’s multi-volume biographies of Robert Moses or LBJ that took 5 or 15 years of research to put together.

That’s… extreme. And Caro sure as hell didn’t start out writing that kind of monster. In fact, he started out writing fluff pieces in a local newspaper. Only starting to tackle the bigger pieces after years of experience and seeing some strange gaps in his understanding of the world.

This project started in part as my way to try and bridge up to bigger things requiring more research.

Seems pretty clear I’ve been psyching myself out about that rather than focusing on doing the best I can.

Which isn’t working ;-)

So let’s try chilling out a bit and see where things go.