The tortoise and the hare both win

So. I refactored my website again. Y'all are the first to know! In short, I separated out "fast" and "slow" content. Fast content is something I write once and publish. I can still go back and edit it, but it's largely "finished" once it's public. Slow content, in contrast is published and then added to slowly over time. To get more into it you can read the (fast) post I wrote about it.

The main thing all this accomplished (because I don't do it just for fun), was enabling me to write more freely on my blog. So I could write things as loose as some musings on magic and spells inspired by leaving the city for the first time in a while and hearing some birds. The downside here is that this is the kinda stuff I'd normally write about here. So, I've gotta shift gears a bit.

Reasons to write a newsletter

The original plan for this newsletter (as you may have read in it's blurb) was to be a path through my website. The aspiration was that I'd have a messy garden of a website, with posts in various states of finished, and I use this newsletter to make order out of the chaos, talking about the specific writing I added to during a week.

Well. I didn't really end up writing much. This newsletter really was my primary writing habit. Now that's it's been 10(!) weeks since I started writing this it seems like a good point to reflect on what I've gotten out of it.

A reason to write

I haven't written this much (6795 words) in ages. I very much buy into the power of writing, for both thinking and communicating, but I hadn't been really practicing it. This newsletter more than anything else has gotten me into the habit of writing, which is making me a better writer.

A reason to collect

Throughout the week I have so many little ideas, little thoughts, whether it's things I might want to do, plans for my projects, or just idle musings. I might read 20+ random things on the internet, flip through three or four different books. This newsletter helps me to pull all of these things (at least the ones I find valuable) together.

A reason to reflect

Sitting down to write this down makes you really look at what you've been doing the last week. It's a subtle pressure to do things I think are worth talking about. An important part here is in the tuning of the pressure. I think this is a version of the same thing that drives social media addiction, wanting to look good in front of your peers. But attenuated correctly, and handled in a healthy way, it can drive me to do the things I actually want to do!

looking forward

A couple of weeks ago I tried out writing this section, pointing out the work I was doing with hyperlink.academy. Since then, I've made some headway on that, but things are still not quite there.

In addition to all of the above, I want to better use this newsletter as a system of accountability. Even just publicly stating a well defined goal is incredibly good for my odds of actually getting it done. Of course, all the trickery there is in the words "well defined".

Together with the refactor of my site I restarted using gitlab issues to keep track of things I want to do. Perhaps I could use those each week to say what I'll be working on for the next. I may wait two weeks to implement this as I'm currently on vacation in the Finger Lakes (which is why I'm hearing birds)!

Thank you all for reading these past 10 weeks! See you next!