Serial Bones
2026-01-14
A milestone: today is the first day I set my sprint timer to thirty minutes.
I am excited to see how this goes. The longer these sprints get, the longer these entries should get in theory. However, I don't know if I want the entries to be longer than about 1200 words. These entries are vignettes—read quickly, but slowly enough to demand a certain rigor of thought. Historically, my sweet spot has been around 700—1000 words. That allows enough expansion toward a single well-developed thought. At least for me, anyway.
I've been a bit downtrodden with my writing lately. I put some earlier pieces through the newest Claude Sonnet model. As I stated yesterday, I ran my Nowmina essay through it and got absolutely eviscerated. ChatGPT was way more sycophantic, which made the evisceration a tougher pill to swallow. It can be easy for me to fall into the trapping of thinking "I'm not good enough" and "I'm better than most people" at the same time, so seeing Claude's long and sharp critiques was a real shot to my ego.
Like many, I crave validation and attention. As I've said before, our deepest desires and fears revolve around being seen. It's one thing to have someone reach out and express their appreciation for my work. When that happens, I feel good about myself. I feel the dopamine rush for a little bit, but then it's right back to the grindstone. Negative criticism, though, is harder to deal with. I've received a few negative comments on my guestbook. Usually when I get an email about a new note, I get excited. "Oh boy, someone decided to pay attention to my work," I tell myself as I click the link to read the comment. When I receive a negative comment though, it's tough to get through it. Thankfully, I've gotten better at getting past it. Still, it probably wasn't the best idea to put ads on 4chan in the first place. Whatever.
I still feel confident in this project, though. The bones are here, and the future of all writing is here in this kind of format: serial, daily, and iterative. If I were an executive at a big publishing house, I would stop printing most physical media and prioritize serial digital media. Sites like Royal Road and even AO3 have the superior publishing model: hosted platform, serial works, and a community built around the platform. Their weakness? Ninety-eight percent of the writing on there sucks.
Since big houses have access to the best talent, I would go all-in on a platform for their writers to publish serially. Pay writers directly to publish on a premium platform, and copy the Patreon model with reader tiers. This will pull readers in because instead of having to pay for the works of just one author, they can access an entire library of best-in-class work.
Of course, the biggest stick in the mud here is Amazon. They have distribution locked in, so any move to escape Amazon's clutches would be met with a swift and decisive punishment. That punishment would, of course, be to just copy the idea. More than likely, they would turn Goodreads into a Royal Road. Maybe that's their long-term play and they're just keeping their cards close, I wouldn't know. Goodreads is already the de facto Book Social Media site, so there's already immense integration there.
I usually don't like to think too much about business strategy. It makes my stomach churn. I wouldn't want to be in any kind of position to make those calls. I'm a smart guy, but I'd rather be an artisan than a businessman. That's just me, though. I used to have plenty of anti-capitalist sentiments, but these days I try not to think about it that much.
Capital and profit are just the drapes. Power is what lives behind the curtain.
Today's writing has felt like a lot of meandering. I don't feel particularly charged about it like I usually do. I think that's just part of the harsh reality of daily publishing like this. Some days are just part of the slog. It's tough to keep up a charade of useful or entertaining content for long.
Thankfully for me, I don't have to deal with that problem.