Congrats on 3 years! My subscription (er... patronage) is among the best money I spent all year. Your work this year broke containment and made its way into real world projects like a mens' group and a book of family history (which included family myth and explicitly referenced the re-enchantment of the world). Looking forward to reading in the year to come.
Working on a startup. Have made a little time to write, but this year it mostly went to the family project. That is wrapping up and I hope to get some other stuff posted soon.
Thanks for the list and all you do John. The one about “What Happens when the left steals 2024” is the one that really jerked a knot in my tail. It was the moment that I realized Civil War and/or Societal Collapse were not options to be content with. Both need to be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately there are LARPERS out there who think it’s the solution. It’s not and should really scare the hell out of anyone capable of reasonable thought.
That being said I still have some preps just in case. However we must get involved politically in hopes that we can dislodge our enemies in that fashion. Trump shows us that it can be done.
First of all congratulations on three years and so much well earned and deserved success John! You were one of the first writers I followed on this platform and to this day you haven’t ever put out an essay which I didn’t found useful and informative! I wish you much more success and I look forwards to future posts by you!
Second: Thank you for your writing advice and this compilation of essays John, it is useful for me to catch up in your less recent essays which I would otherwise not have found, I always enjoy your essays and they always add something useful to my view on various subjects, if I may provide a piece of amateurish suggestion and advice that would be that you should consider compiling your essays and political/social commentary on a single book, the material is already there and it would be useful for references in the future, I think it would sell fairly well considering the high quality of your works, specially if you add let us say, 5 or 6 new essays exclusive to the book, it would be an extra stream of income and would I assume, increase your reach further, although I assume you’d wish to focus on your science fiction books and stories first rather than becoming known for writing about politics…but then again the choice is completely yours and this is just the advice of a random internet frog!
Have you tried writing by hand instead of on a keyboard, when possible or for a challenge?
I'm too old to have had computer-classes in school, and only had one semester of typing (on real typewriters), so handwriting is still what I think of as "writing"; what I'm doing now is "typing" to me. Nitpickery-persnikkery perhaps, but still - there's a real difference. Example:
Writing assignment, end of semester-style, to be done at home and e-mailed, you have two weeks to do it so you can plan your work-load according to your personal schedule
vs
End of semester exam in a huge room with hundreds of other students, desks all two meters apart, old shrews meandering around watching over everyone like Scrooge McDuck looking for a lost penny. Four hours, and you are to write one rough outline of the essay's structure, one draft copy and one final copy, the draft in lead pencil and the final one using a BIC or fountain pen, as long as it's permanent.
There's a real difference between those two, even if the actual test is the same. And it is a real difference writing by hand, using ink in some form or other*. My personal experience is, when done by hand, you do fewer re-writes and less editing since you've done most of it before putting pen to paper anyway. Typing, you edit on the fly giving the backspace and C+P and ctrl-z a good workout, but you also do a lot more re-writing and editing once the text is on the page (or screen/hard-drive, I should say perhaps).
It makes for a nice conundrum I think, the following:
Most all cultures developed writing in some form, and of those that did many further developed systems for writing a lot, quickly. Egyptian fill-in-the-blanks rolls of papyros, Sumerian stamps with pre-engraved common words, and the like, all to save time for the scribes - contrasted to (f.e. because it is close to home for me, metaphorical and literally) runic script; sparse, terse, and with layer upon layer of kennings in very short texts, because they chiseled the runes on stones.
Not making a value-judgment, but the pace of producing/recording/consuming information vs the content matter and whether or not the contents matter, makes for good meditations and musings.
This is what you get for making me think.
*Swedish is so much easier than English; we just say "bläckpenna", meaning anything from cheap-o ballpoint ones to super-duper expensive executive-lounge limited edition fountain pens.
Well, my handwriting is atrocious. I've journaled a bit by hand. But for serious writing, no, because then I need to transcribe to the screen, which is a horrible chore. That said I've occasionally considered if it might be worth using a tablet to write by hand, so that the transcription can be done automatically.
/Everyone/ thinks their handwriting is atrocious. I guess it's the same phenomenon as when you hear yourself recorded.
There's not a single student I haven't heard that from. Certainly, the argument about time is valid and relevant - time being a finite resource. For some pieces, or under some circumstances, the slower pace of the hand allows the time needed for the thought to percolate and condense onto the paper.
That it is called a "tablet" is a nice touch. We have come full circle, from disposable clay tablets to plastic ones. And if the medium is the message?
Edit: Grrr. I hate using my wife's laptop - the keys are not in the same places, and it's a lot smaller. This was supposed to form the coda:
Perhaps for modern conservatives, itself a nice almost-a-paradox, picking up the habit of writing a diary, a physical one, woud be a worthwhile pursuit? It was originally a thing men of the world with spare time did, not tweenyboppers.
And from personal experience, a grown man sitting at a café and randomly with his pencil attacking a page in a small book as if he was fencing with bumblebees draws to kinds of looks:
From normal people, admiring curiosity (or at least the latter one); from people with signs of the woke-scold or the puritan-harridan (the conserative counterpart to woke) it draws looks of scorn, anger and fear.
And should that be my imagination, so much the better. In the words of Herr Baron Doktor Fronkonsteen:
I'm sure everyone thinks their handwriting is awful but mine genuinely is. I should probably write longhand just for the remedial cursive practice. It's the only subject I consistently got a D in, which I thought hilarious at the time, as an elementary school student. What will I ever need cursive writing, I thought as a child - everything will be done with computers when I grow up (this was back in the 80s). I was correct of course, but didn't understand that there are cognitive advantages to cursive.
That said, I've been writing with word processors since I was 12. At this point it's like an extension of my brain...
Jumping in here... I'm not sure people even consider that novels pre-typewriter were written longhand on paper. I mean, War and Peace? What a feat! Hemingway's (autobiographical) protagonist David in In the Garden of Eden writes longhand in lined exercise books. It's wonderful to read his writing process, in the context of a fateful menage à trois.
I'm trying to alternate between laptop and longhand, but laptop tends to dominate purely due to ease and speed. But as you say, longhand takes consideration and results in less editing.
I have so infrequently handwritten anything over last 20 years that I once wrote a list for shopping and couldn't read some of it myself 3 hrs later at the store.
Also, I recall being pissed because every programming assignment given out in my university CS classes (my BS Major) I was unable to escape the building without figuring all that ways the code would go and the best algorithms, etc. I once hit the exit bar on the door as I finished the form of the code, it was as close as I got to outside.
.. had only the shitty part left, the putting all that was in my head into code, the typing it all from my memory, always thinking if I could only project it down into machine without all this slow meat-machinery in the way.
Well done on another productive year. And thank you again for publishing one of mine. I am grateful.
And your advice on writing is solid. Write plenty, write often, and find some way to not become emotionally attached to it, even if that means leaving it aside for a while. Edit like a ruthless shit. The shorter the better. As Elmore Leonard suggested, try to delete the bits people will skip.
I wish you well and hope your next year is as productive.
Don't change the way you write. Mark Steyn (another Canadian, as chance would have it) is probably the only writer I'd put in your class, and I prefer your takes to his. Whatever you've been doing, keep doing.
Well done, sir! Your essays (and the commentariat) have been enlightening, infurating, thoughtful, and best of all for penurious citizens of a long-gone universe (the past): free. I am most grateful for the opportunity to rant occasionally at various dissident sites on this miracle of the technmagical age, the interwebz. And on that note, I shall allow myself one comment in re the essay about the 'theft of the election'.
It is the height of folly, in my most humble and perhaps mistaken opinion, that the 'regime' in no sense whatsoever has been changed in any meaningful sense. To place yet another worshipper of our most important ally in front of the crowd? Please. The orange carny barker is merely the placeholder for the formerly displeased and disappearing magaboomatards to root for their own place in line to the "egress" ( an exit P.T. Barnum used for rubes so they had to pay to get back in the circus). All Western nations, like lemmings, are rampaging towards the financal cliff of sovereign default. After the hapless reality talmudvision star is driven off the stage, yet another actor will appear to "save" the madding mob from what is coming.
Rant off; back to Spring (what there is of it) and in hope of creating some homegrown veggies. Again, best wishes and best hopes for our English and other European friends in the Great White North, eh?
The strangest thing that no one seem to notice that President 'too mentally incompetent to face a court on his and his living son's clear treasonous corruption with China and Ukraine' (as clearly recorded on that laptop that 51 Intelligence Agents claimed was falsely planted by Russia or some lie, and censored by similar minions of Satan running corp mass media and social media,) no one seem to notice that the Presidency was being run by a secrete group for at least Biden's last 2 years but likely all 4 years, ..
.. Or notice that our two candidates did not even seem to be voted on, both geocoding nation destroying, population hating - want us all dead or at least endlessly suffering - while the goal of the both 'sides' contrived Ukrainian-Russian war were many but one least talked about is another White Christian virtues-based valued raised men genocide, estimated 1 million Ukrainian men, fathers, protectors of families, women, children, land, culture, .. mass murdered to clear away any form of resistance to tax-payers reconstruction by BlackRock and other Zionists directed and owned corp to create a israeli2 play, torture, trafficked, organ-harvest-murder, .. Epstein Island playground where the tortured to death's screams of women, children, crippled-by-war men are never heard and bodies are dumped in mass graves as easy as wrapped-up with weights and dropped off-shore.
Ops, you got me ranting a bit.
I'll only add this, the only 'hope' we have to return to sanity is if God sent a real pandemic that kills all women at menopause and those already past for 4-5 generations to cleanse that insane murderous Witches and their Toxic Poisons they spread through their extended families, friends' children especially young women, other women in social and political and employments connected and often the most sick are in positions of power they abuse men from, or advance the resentment based forced policies of poverty 'hire not white men, remove existing white men, fill with meritless minorities and vicious manhating virtueless women' ..
.. unwritten business policies that for generations have effective killed (aborted before formed) families when white men cannot afford wife and family, barely can live alone or homeless when educated and-or skilled with good histories as employees. Effectively throughout white indigenous nations sterilizing no-child situations so population percentage of whites in world dropped from was 29% in 1950, to today's studies report from white world-wide population at from 15% down to 9%. Good Job white man-hating inhuman babymurdering walking bags of poisonous vomit; our mothers, aunts, grandmothers, women co-workers, managers, Judges, law-makers, educator, administrator, and every non-sweaty non-stinking non-deadly well-paid vag-card-required 'professional' shitting in every common soup-pot, crushing the testicles of every display of the slightest healthy manhood and every boy to castrate his mind-body-soul.
St. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians of that period defines how sin harms us, our intellect is darkened, our judgements distorted, imprudence expands, memory damaged, .., the more a person defines Sin is good, the more mental faculties are damage.
It is not hard to expand this rational understanding of crippled mental faculties in the damage that raising children from crib to accept and even celebrate insanities as 'normal', generation after generation the more the West has become functionally insane. Raise a child to accept that mom or any mother can hire Witches to torture our brothers & Sisters, our sons and daughters, or possible wives and husbands, .. to death, ripping them apart while they silently scream .. is insane, yet children are forced to accept it because psychotic mom 'loves' us and hurts us if we don't accept it. Then sexually mutilating minds-bodies-souls of children and damaged adults, then killing old people and depressed people and .., and .. what? Accepting open public televised genocide?
Courts, law-makers, 'professionals' that would have been hanged as Witches 300 years ago, they are Witches or the Witch-directed coven members .. we were lied to about those 'Witch trials', Witches exists - clearly - as they are mutilating our children, our young adults, our legal system, our Joys-Loves-Hopes.
Sadly, if you support legal abortion at any stage after conception then you are not much less mind-raped delusional and functionally insane as those Witch's minion 'professionals' that start mind-crippling our children from crib, day-care, child-media, early schooling, and later. Child Abuse in Sexual Confusing, stealing innocence and self-exploration of world and self "You are 5 yo., Jimmy, you might be a girl in a boy's body, try on your mom's cloths, and what girls name do you want, Dawn?, Jane?" (Some porn-star's name) Grooming female-pedos that mind-rape the helpless and Get-Off on their victims future suffering and suicides.
Fatherlessness in home, no men teachers and school admin. for young children - Men and Fathers do truely Love those in need of Provisions and Protection, protecting children from baby-murdering delusional psychotic mothers, women teachers - and before women voted - law-makers, courts, etc.
Unlike mothers and women that will lie directly or in silence under the excuse of not hurting a child's VagFeelies or to not warn them that the modern Western women around them are now more craven, lying, dishonorable, virtueless, and vicious and deadly then men and fathers ever were. Fathers and men display by example fairness, virtues, sacrifice, support, protect, .., will explain that males and females should not lie, should be fair, should not assume badness or goodness based on sex, race, wealth, etc. Not to believe the 'men bad, women good' because modern women are generally untrustworthy (Parental Fraud of 1/3, False Rape Accusations filed with police over 40%) Women & Mothers will lie life-crippling lies because they cannot face what Sickness much of womanhood as become.
That Satanic-Modernists took over Vatican in 1958 was a marker that the communist-Satanic-genocidal destruction of all institutions had started.
SCOTUS defined 'right of privacy' for legal Birth-Control to then use later in baby-torturing to death sacrifices to Satan. Before Birth-Control we saw each other as potential glorious souls made in God's image, then turned self and us all into soulless meat-machines to use and abuse and dispose of. Insanities to poison our children with.
but don't get me started or I'll rant and hurt VagFeelies of someone!
I second Nelson Elliot's comment about the best money spent.
I think your introduction in this post on your writing techniques and regimen was some of the most valuable stuff I've seen on Substack. So much of what you said tracks well with my own approach, which has yielded 11 books, with a 12th in process.
I have discovered in my own writing/ editing process that leaving a "dormant" time between completing a first draft (or part of one) and each successive editing pass makes me think, "Who wrote this trash? Oh, shit! It was me!" This of course is the first step to a nicely edited final version.
I have also noticed that, even with the aforementioned dormant period, my first editing pass is usually the most effective (i.e., most errors caught). The second pass finds fewer errors than the first. And by the third, I'm seeing what I expect to see---not what's actually on the page. That's when it's time for an outside set of eyes...
Finally, over the multi- decades of reading other people's stuff and writing my own, I've concluded that for every 1,000 people who say they're going to write a book, there are maybe only 100 who have something worthwhile to say. And for every 100 who have something worthwhile to say, there are maybe 10 who can actually "write their way out of a paper bag." And of that 10, there's probably only ONE with the self-discipline to keep everlastingly at it until the job is finally done. And done well.
You, my friend, are definitely ONE in a thousand...😉😊
Yeah I find the same thing with editing. After enough passes you're seeing what's in your head, not what's on the page. Something always slips through...
Congratulations! Please keep passing these milestones, a lot of us will still be here to cheer you on! Great work, great mind! Thank you for sharing your gift with the world.
Congratulations, John. You deserve it - not by the sheer length of your essays (some I wished had been longer) but by engaging our whole brains and making us think, contemplate, consider and re-consider. My personal all-time favorites were/are your Nietzsche essay and the two-parter Age of Psychic Warfare and Re-Enchantment. They made a profound impact and opened my mind in ways unexpected. So thank you for sharing your work, however easy or hard it was for you. I just hope the coffee was good in those cafes you frequent in places old and new.
Wow three years how time flys. Every time I see you pop into my inbox I get a little excited. Thank you for broadening my perspectives and encouraging deeper thought. Side bonus my vocabulary has expanded!!
A handy compendium as always, makes for easy reference, and really puts into perspective the quality of your output when its an (almost, god bless) unbroken string of hits, most very hard hitters at that. hats off to your guests for their high caliber posts, and/or to yourself for curating them well.
Very much appreciated the writing advice you proffered here as well. I've been tinkering for some time with the idea of putting pen to digital paper, writing something between an analysis and retrospective about this glittering jewel that's both my pfp and namesake here on Substack. Half as advertisement/evangelizing for any would-be readers/watchers, half to get my thoughts out of my head on the subject; as is I'm liable to gush at length to anyone I can trap into listening. However, sans any warm up material to work out kinks in writing, an oscillating scope, and an unhealthy dose of procrastination, poor thing has been stalled out in committee for a while.
That being said, the advice here, in conjunction with parts of those book reviews (mainly how they've been structured), has been helpful in wrapping my head around the how of what I want to get up to.
I found your substack last year and have enjoyed it greatly since then.
In my academic English classes, whilst teaching how to write an essay, I came to the same science and art conclusion! I told them the first steps of the process are about coherence, the brainstorming, outline and first draft. Also the first go through at proofreading and editing should be focused on coherence...the science of writing an essay. Then focus on the cohesion, the art of writing an essay in the next draft and then final draft. I knew that was right!
Many articles from before I started reading here to catch up on for understanding and ammo in the culture wars.
When I discovered you SubStack I read maybe 3 articles and by the 3rd I knew I not only would subscribe but wait with held-breath for next article, and after 3rd I regretted my poverty and unable to pay-you for this most value SubStack I've yet discovered.
Thank you for pointing out your article about stealing 2024 election written before election, I read it and with so many comments that I wanted to read but can't spend 38hr that way. Instead I feed the comments to AI NotebookLM overview audio overview. It pulled out a number of main themes in comment: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/52edf766-532f-41fd-bab0-69336b049e8d/audio
I'm sure it missed some of the better comments about civil-war is worseistist, but unless this simulation reality can be God_Fork(this comment URL) double raised-to 5th power times and the 500+ comments divided into 32 sections with each version checking if this is Root otherwise use PID to know what section that version of me to read, then return with Brain_Image and Root reintegrates all. Many Many_Worlds makes short work.
Let me suggest if the civil war had a huge race component - DeepState bribing non-whites with bounty on severed heads of white men, married women, children to accelerate the generations of White Christian Virtues-Based value-raised genocide, and turn cities and dense urban centers instant 'safe zones' for select MKUltra programmed troops to station and raid 'blue country' from.
It seems that white men when must-do can kill like no-one-else and after my 60+ years of constant Hate-Speach FemNazi and commie directed genocidal suffering, every reasonable expectation of positive goals and life dreams that I literally shaped my education, studies, ethics, skill, .., from 5th grade (love of Science) and 7th Grade (love of computer science) and perhaps always my desire to Serve and Benefit Man, Nation, and my Creator with basic medical science research, with an measure IQ past 2nd SDV and impressive work-ethic, and excellent social skills when not Poisoned by vile vicious fatherless [white, Christian values raised] man-hating women and their Demonic-Possessed Witch coven-leaders .. as I learned research and clinical department at my University in my State that I was hired in a dream job only 2 year into my degree because of a summer of Work-Study produced published data for that lab, anyway ..
.. If I were in bulk muscle-mass and health that I was at 35-40 and the Witches and Satanists decided it was time to stop slow White genocide and go full Omama-Bidden Race-War with Illegals also being given Head-bounties don't bother worrying about it, I must not be the only one that saw the death count of the Las Angelous DeepState programmed shooter and thought I could think of a number of ways he could have killed 3 or more time that many - thought-experiment only so please VagFeelie retards call 911 to SWAT me right now or report your Feelies were hurting and you hadn't murdered our son's or grandson's fetus in months and your a modern day delusional mind-raping gonad crusting male-punishing psychotic FemNazi (or want to be, once your baby-murdering count is high enough.)
Anyway a duffle-bag containing a liquid Gas tank, a timer synchronized with 2 others to fire with blank shotgun shell a large steel X-headed stub to open tank up and fill each of bottom floors (2, 3, 4th floor hotel main hallway) at same moment in each bad left at one end 5 minutes after left hotel, and a time period calculated to turn entire hall way on each floor into Air-Gas bomb and timed ignition same across all three. Entire Hotel collapse and at night in busy season, what body count? ..
.. And those huge CruiseShips - like I indicated, if it would go a long way to end Satan's Grip and Poison on Nation, West, or entire world - small plane filled with Deisel-Nitrate barrels each with high-order detonator on kill switch and fly to hit mid-center below water line. Pilot dead before plane finishes bashing into center middle below waterline of hull, bombs go boom! Some might escape on life-rafts but entire ship should go down fast enough to suck even those few under.
I spent 30 minutes while washing my dishes to conceive of those two and one other. Humans die so easily it is only the hand-of-God that guides us from risk-insane puberty to 30ish and Holy Ghost that stays the fist in throat, the pen rammed up nose, and the .. well you likely get-it.
And I spent a fraction of my early evening, and I have been in a room with a few other men that made me feel slow, and others that those electronic and other physical devices could be designed and built in an afternoon. I'm only a unJustly tormented victim of putrid vile vicious horror but I with argue that kill 5 of them and no innocent others like some policeman that support a family - take his bullet if needed, but the world without even 5 of those horrors and so many boys, young men, and men and their families and those that depend on them would be so much safer, and if the civil war started hanging unrepentant baby-killers (abortionists and mother of dead children) or active supporter of father-children or parent-children separators and the like kinds of Witches and their minions, hanged over corpses of all their adult family bloodline, in public, how many of those examples would dry-up vile torture-living wet vags and convert with repentance, or not and face the only real Justice that you above that law have left, Death Death Death is Justice, and a safer world for the rest of us.
Back to Earth, Ashes, Dust Witch!
But don't get me going or I might commutate how I really know and feel.
I'm surprised you hunch over a laptop in a cafe. My back is aching for you. Have you tried standing while working? It's a bit hard on the knees, but way easier on the rest of your body.
Congrats on 3 years! My subscription (er... patronage) is among the best money I spent all year. Your work this year broke containment and made its way into real world projects like a mens' group and a book of family history (which included family myth and explicitly referenced the re-enchantment of the world). Looking forward to reading in the year to come.
Wow. That's really cool.
As for you ... You've been rather quiet of late... Working on something big? Or just no time to write?
Working on a startup. Have made a little time to write, but this year it mostly went to the family project. That is wrapping up and I hope to get some other stuff posted soon.
That's awesome. Sounds like you're keeping busy in the best way.
Writing for family is incredibly important. Market doesn't care of course but your great great grandchildren will.
Absolutely legendary. Well done man.
And thankyou so much for what you helped turn Bushido into.
I'll never forget that,
🤝
Thanks for the list and all you do John. The one about “What Happens when the left steals 2024” is the one that really jerked a knot in my tail. It was the moment that I realized Civil War and/or Societal Collapse were not options to be content with. Both need to be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately there are LARPERS out there who think it’s the solution. It’s not and should really scare the hell out of anyone capable of reasonable thought.
That being said I still have some preps just in case. However we must get involved politically in hopes that we can dislodge our enemies in that fashion. Trump shows us that it can be done.
Love your work brother!
Civil war is not to be wished for by anyone
First of all congratulations on three years and so much well earned and deserved success John! You were one of the first writers I followed on this platform and to this day you haven’t ever put out an essay which I didn’t found useful and informative! I wish you much more success and I look forwards to future posts by you!
Second: Thank you for your writing advice and this compilation of essays John, it is useful for me to catch up in your less recent essays which I would otherwise not have found, I always enjoy your essays and they always add something useful to my view on various subjects, if I may provide a piece of amateurish suggestion and advice that would be that you should consider compiling your essays and political/social commentary on a single book, the material is already there and it would be useful for references in the future, I think it would sell fairly well considering the high quality of your works, specially if you add let us say, 5 or 6 new essays exclusive to the book, it would be an extra stream of income and would I assume, increase your reach further, although I assume you’d wish to focus on your science fiction books and stories first rather than becoming known for writing about politics…but then again the choice is completely yours and this is just the advice of a random internet frog!
You're not the first to suggest I compile some of the essays into a book. It's certainly something I may do in the future.
I second this recommendation. Curating essays into books grouped according to subject matter could become a significant secondary income stream.
Yes, that's something I've definitely considered.
Here's a question, with thoughts attached:
Have you tried writing by hand instead of on a keyboard, when possible or for a challenge?
I'm too old to have had computer-classes in school, and only had one semester of typing (on real typewriters), so handwriting is still what I think of as "writing"; what I'm doing now is "typing" to me. Nitpickery-persnikkery perhaps, but still - there's a real difference. Example:
Writing assignment, end of semester-style, to be done at home and e-mailed, you have two weeks to do it so you can plan your work-load according to your personal schedule
vs
End of semester exam in a huge room with hundreds of other students, desks all two meters apart, old shrews meandering around watching over everyone like Scrooge McDuck looking for a lost penny. Four hours, and you are to write one rough outline of the essay's structure, one draft copy and one final copy, the draft in lead pencil and the final one using a BIC or fountain pen, as long as it's permanent.
There's a real difference between those two, even if the actual test is the same. And it is a real difference writing by hand, using ink in some form or other*. My personal experience is, when done by hand, you do fewer re-writes and less editing since you've done most of it before putting pen to paper anyway. Typing, you edit on the fly giving the backspace and C+P and ctrl-z a good workout, but you also do a lot more re-writing and editing once the text is on the page (or screen/hard-drive, I should say perhaps).
It makes for a nice conundrum I think, the following:
Most all cultures developed writing in some form, and of those that did many further developed systems for writing a lot, quickly. Egyptian fill-in-the-blanks rolls of papyros, Sumerian stamps with pre-engraved common words, and the like, all to save time for the scribes - contrasted to (f.e. because it is close to home for me, metaphorical and literally) runic script; sparse, terse, and with layer upon layer of kennings in very short texts, because they chiseled the runes on stones.
Not making a value-judgment, but the pace of producing/recording/consuming information vs the content matter and whether or not the contents matter, makes for good meditations and musings.
This is what you get for making me think.
*Swedish is so much easier than English; we just say "bläckpenna", meaning anything from cheap-o ballpoint ones to super-duper expensive executive-lounge limited edition fountain pens.
Well, my handwriting is atrocious. I've journaled a bit by hand. But for serious writing, no, because then I need to transcribe to the screen, which is a horrible chore. That said I've occasionally considered if it might be worth using a tablet to write by hand, so that the transcription can be done automatically.
I'm going to laugh, and I'll share why:
/Everyone/ thinks their handwriting is atrocious. I guess it's the same phenomenon as when you hear yourself recorded.
There's not a single student I haven't heard that from. Certainly, the argument about time is valid and relevant - time being a finite resource. For some pieces, or under some circumstances, the slower pace of the hand allows the time needed for the thought to percolate and condense onto the paper.
That it is called a "tablet" is a nice touch. We have come full circle, from disposable clay tablets to plastic ones. And if the medium is the message?
Edit: Grrr. I hate using my wife's laptop - the keys are not in the same places, and it's a lot smaller. This was supposed to form the coda:
Perhaps for modern conservatives, itself a nice almost-a-paradox, picking up the habit of writing a diary, a physical one, woud be a worthwhile pursuit? It was originally a thing men of the world with spare time did, not tweenyboppers.
And from personal experience, a grown man sitting at a café and randomly with his pencil attacking a page in a small book as if he was fencing with bumblebees draws to kinds of looks:
From normal people, admiring curiosity (or at least the latter one); from people with signs of the woke-scold or the puritan-harridan (the conserative counterpart to woke) it draws looks of scorn, anger and fear.
And should that be my imagination, so much the better. In the words of Herr Baron Doktor Fronkonsteen:
"It's alive!"
I'm sure everyone thinks their handwriting is awful but mine genuinely is. I should probably write longhand just for the remedial cursive practice. It's the only subject I consistently got a D in, which I thought hilarious at the time, as an elementary school student. What will I ever need cursive writing, I thought as a child - everything will be done with computers when I grow up (this was back in the 80s). I was correct of course, but didn't understand that there are cognitive advantages to cursive.
That said, I've been writing with word processors since I was 12. At this point it's like an extension of my brain...
Print!
Heh. Yeah but then what's the point? The entire cognitive advantage of writing by hand is in the flow of cursive.
I’ve printed since I was twelve. It’s vastly more clear and effective than cursive and with practice, just about as fast.
Jumping in here... I'm not sure people even consider that novels pre-typewriter were written longhand on paper. I mean, War and Peace? What a feat! Hemingway's (autobiographical) protagonist David in In the Garden of Eden writes longhand in lined exercise books. It's wonderful to read his writing process, in the context of a fateful menage à trois.
I'm trying to alternate between laptop and longhand, but laptop tends to dominate purely due to ease and speed. But as you say, longhand takes consideration and results in less editing.
Neal Stephenson wrote the entire Baroque Cycle - 1.1 million words - longhand, in order to put himself in the correct frame of mind.
Thanks for making my point better and clearer than I could!
I have so infrequently handwritten anything over last 20 years that I once wrote a list for shopping and couldn't read some of it myself 3 hrs later at the store.
Also, I recall being pissed because every programming assignment given out in my university CS classes (my BS Major) I was unable to escape the building without figuring all that ways the code would go and the best algorithms, etc. I once hit the exit bar on the door as I finished the form of the code, it was as close as I got to outside.
.. had only the shitty part left, the putting all that was in my head into code, the typing it all from my memory, always thinking if I could only project it down into machine without all this slow meat-machinery in the way.
Well done on another productive year. And thank you again for publishing one of mine. I am grateful.
And your advice on writing is solid. Write plenty, write often, and find some way to not become emotionally attached to it, even if that means leaving it aside for a while. Edit like a ruthless shit. The shorter the better. As Elmore Leonard suggested, try to delete the bits people will skip.
I wish you well and hope your next year is as productive.
Man. If only I could learn to write short. This is my biggest weakness I think.
Don't change the way you write. Mark Steyn (another Canadian, as chance would have it) is probably the only writer I'd put in your class, and I prefer your takes to his. Whatever you've been doing, keep doing.
I love Mark Steyn. Top stylist.
Noooo.... !! It's your strength! Please don't write short trite shite.
You know the old saying, I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn't have time.
I too write too much. Although I have been forcing myself to write less. But it isn't easy.
Well done, sir! Your essays (and the commentariat) have been enlightening, infurating, thoughtful, and best of all for penurious citizens of a long-gone universe (the past): free. I am most grateful for the opportunity to rant occasionally at various dissident sites on this miracle of the technmagical age, the interwebz. And on that note, I shall allow myself one comment in re the essay about the 'theft of the election'.
It is the height of folly, in my most humble and perhaps mistaken opinion, that the 'regime' in no sense whatsoever has been changed in any meaningful sense. To place yet another worshipper of our most important ally in front of the crowd? Please. The orange carny barker is merely the placeholder for the formerly displeased and disappearing magaboomatards to root for their own place in line to the "egress" ( an exit P.T. Barnum used for rubes so they had to pay to get back in the circus). All Western nations, like lemmings, are rampaging towards the financal cliff of sovereign default. After the hapless reality talmudvision star is driven off the stage, yet another actor will appear to "save" the madding mob from what is coming.
Rant off; back to Spring (what there is of it) and in hope of creating some homegrown veggies. Again, best wishes and best hopes for our English and other European friends in the Great White North, eh?
Of course, Mr. Old, you are correct.
The strangest thing that no one seem to notice that President 'too mentally incompetent to face a court on his and his living son's clear treasonous corruption with China and Ukraine' (as clearly recorded on that laptop that 51 Intelligence Agents claimed was falsely planted by Russia or some lie, and censored by similar minions of Satan running corp mass media and social media,) no one seem to notice that the Presidency was being run by a secrete group for at least Biden's last 2 years but likely all 4 years, ..
.. Or notice that our two candidates did not even seem to be voted on, both geocoding nation destroying, population hating - want us all dead or at least endlessly suffering - while the goal of the both 'sides' contrived Ukrainian-Russian war were many but one least talked about is another White Christian virtues-based valued raised men genocide, estimated 1 million Ukrainian men, fathers, protectors of families, women, children, land, culture, .. mass murdered to clear away any form of resistance to tax-payers reconstruction by BlackRock and other Zionists directed and owned corp to create a israeli2 play, torture, trafficked, organ-harvest-murder, .. Epstein Island playground where the tortured to death's screams of women, children, crippled-by-war men are never heard and bodies are dumped in mass graves as easy as wrapped-up with weights and dropped off-shore.
Ops, you got me ranting a bit.
I'll only add this, the only 'hope' we have to return to sanity is if God sent a real pandemic that kills all women at menopause and those already past for 4-5 generations to cleanse that insane murderous Witches and their Toxic Poisons they spread through their extended families, friends' children especially young women, other women in social and political and employments connected and often the most sick are in positions of power they abuse men from, or advance the resentment based forced policies of poverty 'hire not white men, remove existing white men, fill with meritless minorities and vicious manhating virtueless women' ..
.. unwritten business policies that for generations have effective killed (aborted before formed) families when white men cannot afford wife and family, barely can live alone or homeless when educated and-or skilled with good histories as employees. Effectively throughout white indigenous nations sterilizing no-child situations so population percentage of whites in world dropped from was 29% in 1950, to today's studies report from white world-wide population at from 15% down to 9%. Good Job white man-hating inhuman babymurdering walking bags of poisonous vomit; our mothers, aunts, grandmothers, women co-workers, managers, Judges, law-makers, educator, administrator, and every non-sweaty non-stinking non-deadly well-paid vag-card-required 'professional' shitting in every common soup-pot, crushing the testicles of every display of the slightest healthy manhood and every boy to castrate his mind-body-soul.
St. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians of that period defines how sin harms us, our intellect is darkened, our judgements distorted, imprudence expands, memory damaged, .., the more a person defines Sin is good, the more mental faculties are damage.
It is not hard to expand this rational understanding of crippled mental faculties in the damage that raising children from crib to accept and even celebrate insanities as 'normal', generation after generation the more the West has become functionally insane. Raise a child to accept that mom or any mother can hire Witches to torture our brothers & Sisters, our sons and daughters, or possible wives and husbands, .. to death, ripping them apart while they silently scream .. is insane, yet children are forced to accept it because psychotic mom 'loves' us and hurts us if we don't accept it. Then sexually mutilating minds-bodies-souls of children and damaged adults, then killing old people and depressed people and .., and .. what? Accepting open public televised genocide?
Courts, law-makers, 'professionals' that would have been hanged as Witches 300 years ago, they are Witches or the Witch-directed coven members .. we were lied to about those 'Witch trials', Witches exists - clearly - as they are mutilating our children, our young adults, our legal system, our Joys-Loves-Hopes.
Sadly, if you support legal abortion at any stage after conception then you are not much less mind-raped delusional and functionally insane as those Witch's minion 'professionals' that start mind-crippling our children from crib, day-care, child-media, early schooling, and later. Child Abuse in Sexual Confusing, stealing innocence and self-exploration of world and self "You are 5 yo., Jimmy, you might be a girl in a boy's body, try on your mom's cloths, and what girls name do you want, Dawn?, Jane?" (Some porn-star's name) Grooming female-pedos that mind-rape the helpless and Get-Off on their victims future suffering and suicides.
Fatherlessness in home, no men teachers and school admin. for young children - Men and Fathers do truely Love those in need of Provisions and Protection, protecting children from baby-murdering delusional psychotic mothers, women teachers - and before women voted - law-makers, courts, etc.
Unlike mothers and women that will lie directly or in silence under the excuse of not hurting a child's VagFeelies or to not warn them that the modern Western women around them are now more craven, lying, dishonorable, virtueless, and vicious and deadly then men and fathers ever were. Fathers and men display by example fairness, virtues, sacrifice, support, protect, .., will explain that males and females should not lie, should be fair, should not assume badness or goodness based on sex, race, wealth, etc. Not to believe the 'men bad, women good' because modern women are generally untrustworthy (Parental Fraud of 1/3, False Rape Accusations filed with police over 40%) Women & Mothers will lie life-crippling lies because they cannot face what Sickness much of womanhood as become.
That Satanic-Modernists took over Vatican in 1958 was a marker that the communist-Satanic-genocidal destruction of all institutions had started.
SCOTUS defined 'right of privacy' for legal Birth-Control to then use later in baby-torturing to death sacrifices to Satan. Before Birth-Control we saw each other as potential glorious souls made in God's image, then turned self and us all into soulless meat-machines to use and abuse and dispose of. Insanities to poison our children with.
but don't get me started or I'll rant and hurt VagFeelies of someone!
I second Nelson Elliot's comment about the best money spent.
I think your introduction in this post on your writing techniques and regimen was some of the most valuable stuff I've seen on Substack. So much of what you said tracks well with my own approach, which has yielded 11 books, with a 12th in process.
I have discovered in my own writing/ editing process that leaving a "dormant" time between completing a first draft (or part of one) and each successive editing pass makes me think, "Who wrote this trash? Oh, shit! It was me!" This of course is the first step to a nicely edited final version.
I have also noticed that, even with the aforementioned dormant period, my first editing pass is usually the most effective (i.e., most errors caught). The second pass finds fewer errors than the first. And by the third, I'm seeing what I expect to see---not what's actually on the page. That's when it's time for an outside set of eyes...
Finally, over the multi- decades of reading other people's stuff and writing my own, I've concluded that for every 1,000 people who say they're going to write a book, there are maybe only 100 who have something worthwhile to say. And for every 100 who have something worthwhile to say, there are maybe 10 who can actually "write their way out of a paper bag." And of that 10, there's probably only ONE with the self-discipline to keep everlastingly at it until the job is finally done. And done well.
You, my friend, are definitely ONE in a thousand...😉😊
Yeah I find the same thing with editing. After enough passes you're seeing what's in your head, not what's on the page. Something always slips through...
I have not had ONE book that made it completely “clean” to publication, even when screened by professional copy editors. 🤨😬
Yes, but typos became way more common after the introduction of word processors.
Congratulations! Please keep passing these milestones, a lot of us will still be here to cheer you on! Great work, great mind! Thank you for sharing your gift with the world.
Thank you!
Congratulations, John. You deserve it - not by the sheer length of your essays (some I wished had been longer) but by engaging our whole brains and making us think, contemplate, consider and re-consider. My personal all-time favorites were/are your Nietzsche essay and the two-parter Age of Psychic Warfare and Re-Enchantment. They made a profound impact and opened my mind in ways unexpected. So thank you for sharing your work, however easy or hard it was for you. I just hope the coffee was good in those cafes you frequent in places old and new.
The coffee in Belgrade was so good it gave me heart palpitations.
Wow three years how time flys. Every time I see you pop into my inbox I get a little excited. Thank you for broadening my perspectives and encouraging deeper thought. Side bonus my vocabulary has expanded!!
Yeah I can't believe I've been at it this long. Time really does fly by.
Glad I've been able to keep you entertained for so long!
I couldn't find anything older the the BudLight post which isn't 3years old. Please advise as to where the older stuff is.
The older stuff isn't published here (and will not be).
A handy compendium as always, makes for easy reference, and really puts into perspective the quality of your output when its an (almost, god bless) unbroken string of hits, most very hard hitters at that. hats off to your guests for their high caliber posts, and/or to yourself for curating them well.
Very much appreciated the writing advice you proffered here as well. I've been tinkering for some time with the idea of putting pen to digital paper, writing something between an analysis and retrospective about this glittering jewel that's both my pfp and namesake here on Substack. Half as advertisement/evangelizing for any would-be readers/watchers, half to get my thoughts out of my head on the subject; as is I'm liable to gush at length to anyone I can trap into listening. However, sans any warm up material to work out kinks in writing, an oscillating scope, and an unhealthy dose of procrastination, poor thing has been stalled out in committee for a while.
That being said, the advice here, in conjunction with parts of those book reviews (mainly how they've been structured), has been helpful in wrapping my head around the how of what I want to get up to.
I found your substack last year and have enjoyed it greatly since then.
In my academic English classes, whilst teaching how to write an essay, I came to the same science and art conclusion! I told them the first steps of the process are about coherence, the brainstorming, outline and first draft. Also the first go through at proofreading and editing should be focused on coherence...the science of writing an essay. Then focus on the cohesion, the art of writing an essay in the next draft and then final draft. I knew that was right!
Many articles from before I started reading here to catch up on for understanding and ammo in the culture wars.
Great minds think alike!
When I discovered you SubStack I read maybe 3 articles and by the 3rd I knew I not only would subscribe but wait with held-breath for next article, and after 3rd I regretted my poverty and unable to pay-you for this most value SubStack I've yet discovered.
Thank you for pointing out your article about stealing 2024 election written before election, I read it and with so many comments that I wanted to read but can't spend 38hr that way. Instead I feed the comments to AI NotebookLM overview audio overview. It pulled out a number of main themes in comment: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/52edf766-532f-41fd-bab0-69336b049e8d/audio
I'm sure it missed some of the better comments about civil-war is worseistist, but unless this simulation reality can be God_Fork(this comment URL) double raised-to 5th power times and the 500+ comments divided into 32 sections with each version checking if this is Root otherwise use PID to know what section that version of me to read, then return with Brain_Image and Root reintegrates all. Many Many_Worlds makes short work.
Let me suggest if the civil war had a huge race component - DeepState bribing non-whites with bounty on severed heads of white men, married women, children to accelerate the generations of White Christian Virtues-Based value-raised genocide, and turn cities and dense urban centers instant 'safe zones' for select MKUltra programmed troops to station and raid 'blue country' from.
It seems that white men when must-do can kill like no-one-else and after my 60+ years of constant Hate-Speach FemNazi and commie directed genocidal suffering, every reasonable expectation of positive goals and life dreams that I literally shaped my education, studies, ethics, skill, .., from 5th grade (love of Science) and 7th Grade (love of computer science) and perhaps always my desire to Serve and Benefit Man, Nation, and my Creator with basic medical science research, with an measure IQ past 2nd SDV and impressive work-ethic, and excellent social skills when not Poisoned by vile vicious fatherless [white, Christian values raised] man-hating women and their Demonic-Possessed Witch coven-leaders .. as I learned research and clinical department at my University in my State that I was hired in a dream job only 2 year into my degree because of a summer of Work-Study produced published data for that lab, anyway ..
.. If I were in bulk muscle-mass and health that I was at 35-40 and the Witches and Satanists decided it was time to stop slow White genocide and go full Omama-Bidden Race-War with Illegals also being given Head-bounties don't bother worrying about it, I must not be the only one that saw the death count of the Las Angelous DeepState programmed shooter and thought I could think of a number of ways he could have killed 3 or more time that many - thought-experiment only so please VagFeelie retards call 911 to SWAT me right now or report your Feelies were hurting and you hadn't murdered our son's or grandson's fetus in months and your a modern day delusional mind-raping gonad crusting male-punishing psychotic FemNazi (or want to be, once your baby-murdering count is high enough.)
Anyway a duffle-bag containing a liquid Gas tank, a timer synchronized with 2 others to fire with blank shotgun shell a large steel X-headed stub to open tank up and fill each of bottom floors (2, 3, 4th floor hotel main hallway) at same moment in each bad left at one end 5 minutes after left hotel, and a time period calculated to turn entire hall way on each floor into Air-Gas bomb and timed ignition same across all three. Entire Hotel collapse and at night in busy season, what body count? ..
.. And those huge CruiseShips - like I indicated, if it would go a long way to end Satan's Grip and Poison on Nation, West, or entire world - small plane filled with Deisel-Nitrate barrels each with high-order detonator on kill switch and fly to hit mid-center below water line. Pilot dead before plane finishes bashing into center middle below waterline of hull, bombs go boom! Some might escape on life-rafts but entire ship should go down fast enough to suck even those few under.
I spent 30 minutes while washing my dishes to conceive of those two and one other. Humans die so easily it is only the hand-of-God that guides us from risk-insane puberty to 30ish and Holy Ghost that stays the fist in throat, the pen rammed up nose, and the .. well you likely get-it.
And I spent a fraction of my early evening, and I have been in a room with a few other men that made me feel slow, and others that those electronic and other physical devices could be designed and built in an afternoon. I'm only a unJustly tormented victim of putrid vile vicious horror but I with argue that kill 5 of them and no innocent others like some policeman that support a family - take his bullet if needed, but the world without even 5 of those horrors and so many boys, young men, and men and their families and those that depend on them would be so much safer, and if the civil war started hanging unrepentant baby-killers (abortionists and mother of dead children) or active supporter of father-children or parent-children separators and the like kinds of Witches and their minions, hanged over corpses of all their adult family bloodline, in public, how many of those examples would dry-up vile torture-living wet vags and convert with repentance, or not and face the only real Justice that you above that law have left, Death Death Death is Justice, and a safer world for the rest of us.
Back to Earth, Ashes, Dust Witch!
But don't get me going or I might commutate how I really know and feel.
I'm surprised you hunch over a laptop in a cafe. My back is aching for you. Have you tried standing while working? It's a bit hard on the knees, but way easier on the rest of your body.
Standing desks are not particularly common, and I move around a lot.