Writing

Before moving my blog, I’d been rethinking my writing process. As I noted several months ago, I want to relieve the pressure of pushing out posts on a regular schedule by focusing on improvement and quality. That means recognizing that I earn nothing by writing faster, and that I have to actively engage with my prose. It means following a thorough process of writing and revision while not losing the intuition and nose for what feels right. It means reminding myself that patience and perseverance are always rewarding. ...

I adore niche corners of the internet. Small projects, independent developers, targeted publications, and so much else can only exist because the internet helps them connect to a sufficiently large captive audience. So many companies and industries view the internet as a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos—who can capture the most delicious little spherical bits of yummy data? My kinds of people aren’t trying to win capitalism and aren’t pushed by metrics besides “Am I making something cool?” and “Can I find just enough people who also think it’s cool?” ...

I volunteered to revive the newsletter for the Connecticut “Smoky Joe Wood” chapter of SABR, and successfully sent out its first new edition last week. You can access it here. This was so much fun to create. I had minimal guidance and effectively carte blance from our chapter president. That was a bit intimidating, but I started with editions from the previous editor to guide my design. More directly, I ripped it off as closely as I could in Affinity. I had to relearn the basics of desktop publishing while I figured out how badly I wanted to do this “the right way” with master pages and repeatable formatting. I made mistakes, learned how to fix them, and am pleased with the overall design. Graphics and layout are not my passion nor my strong suit, but I got the job done. ...

I moved my blog from WordPress.com to Bluehost and the open-source version of the WordPress engine back in 2018. I wanted more control, and wasn’t willing to pay the Automattic folks for the right to add more plugins to my blog. Instead, I probably paid even more money to a different corporation because, well, it felt better. Technology has evolved, and I’ve decided to move backwards and save some money. With three or four hours of work, I migrated my entire blog off WordPress and into Hugo, a lightweight static blogging engine that relies directly on Markdown. The files live in GitHub (for free) and are subsequently hosted on Netlify at their free tier, saving me a couple of hundred dollars each year.1 ...

Core to my effort to improve this blog and my writing more generally is a better revision process. I now use tools to catch mechanical errors or to point out when I’ve slipped into passive voice accidentally, but that doesn’t address the flow of prose, the feel of the words washing over the reader. Reading out loud is a superb way to improve, but I’m not always in a position to do that. ...

Stephen Hackett briefly discussed some changes to 512 Pixels on last week’s episode of Connected. Some of those thoughts temporarily live on his Now page. Here’s the main thrust: … my hope is to have fewer — but more meaningful — things in the RSS feed in 2026. He also mentioned putting this on the Now page rather than in a separate post because he can’t bring himself to blog about his own blogging. Few people read my site, so I have no such reluctance. ...

I thoroughly failed this year, but I learned two connected lessons: I will always have distractions from writing. Writing projects require consistency. Distractions in life are a given. Friends and family visit us, we go visit family, people randomly invite us to some local event, and unexpected projects appear. My own hobbies distract me from my other hobbies. So much can demand my time and attention, and I have to prioritize where to place my effort. ...

The secret to writing is never held in a book explicitly about writing. Rather, it’s in the collective hours and thousands of pages spent reading anything one can get their hands on. It’s in the act of noticing how an author’s actions work, of forming opinions about whether a bit of prose succeeded in accomplishing its goal, so one can determine whether it’s a new tool to emulate or an ineffective path to avoid. Then, it’s in the act of writing. Of joyously beginning with a clear approach, then hitting heads against walls, falling into despair, becoming convinced the whole effort is worthless, and coming out the other side with a workable bit of narration. Do that over and over, while also reading, while also exploring the world, and one may just become a writer. ...

It’s always more fun to work on something other than what I should explicitly be doing in the moment, so ideas and small projects naturally arise from procrastination. I was having trouble returning to my NaNoWriMo work after my sisters visited last weekend, and I took fifteen minutes to learn how to locally run an LLM. My ninety percent use-case for LLMs is word refinement. While writing I will get a word stuck in my head, the wrong word for the exact feeling I’d like to describe. So, I tell some LLM (often Claude) to provide several more synonyms with varying connotations. This doesn’t rely on having up-to-date knowledge or internet access, so a nimble, offline, and local LLM would fit the task perfectly. ...

NaNoWriMo, the organization, is on the ropes, or perhaps entirely dead, after a change in focus and an AI-related public relations snafu. None of that affects my plan for participating in the core of the event: writing at least 50,000 words in a month. I initially wrote this post with the intention of delaying NaNoWriMo until February. This November will be hectic: I’m transitioning roles at work, we have visitors for two long weekends, followed immediately by a trip home for Thanksgiving. The likelihood that I will write 50,000 cohesive words in November is slim. ...