(via) Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay about publishing today is that it’s all about self-publishing. These points jumped out at me:
Being a book author has a lot more cachet attached to it than being a blogger. I’ve been both, and for me, blogging and engaging with an audience online is way more fun and fulfilling than having a book with my name on it sitting on a shelf.
Writer Ann Patchett describes the idea she has for her next project as a beautiful, wild butterfly fluttering about her mind, a three dimensional miracle of color and movement she enjoys for as long as she can.
When it’s time to put pen to paper, she plucks the butterfly from her mind, smashes it onto her desk, and pins it down. What’s left is her book: a flat, one-dimensional, “dismantled, and poorly reassembled” version of her butterfly.
No one wants to smash the butterfly, but it’s the only way to turn an idea into something tangible.
One way back to yourself is reconnecting with the things you loved as a child.
When I was 11 years old, Harriet the Spy was my bible. In retrospect it’s so obvious: A tomboy writer in NYC carries around her marbled composition book, taking notes on the world, and learning more about herself–and her relationships with friends when they read her words.
When you experience something in life–and as much as I’ve experienced in the game of basketball–the beautiful part of it for me is to give back. You don’t experience things to keep. You experience it to give it back.
– Basketball great Teresa Weatherspoon on what she brought from her start as a player in the inaugural season of the WNBA to coaching today.
Lately I’ve noticed a clear and consistent pulse of an old feeling I haven’t had for a long time: I want to share more of how I think, what I learn, and what I like online. That is, I want to give it back. But not on cookie-cutter content platforms where we’ve all signed up to work a data entry job feeding an LLM. On my own webpages, on my own domain names, with my own code. Let’s do this.
