Writing

Page initially created: 2025-05-28.

Memoir

My main project moving forward will be to write up my personal story, aiming ultimately to come up with some kind of book-length autobiograpy or memoir. I worked on a memoir in 2021-22, creating two LibreWriter (.odt) files:

The approach there was to start with my birth, provide a little historical context and family background, then move forward through my childhood. This followed by habit for writing essays, which I've mostly been able to kick off and write straight through, with only minor revisions later. But I started running into multiple obstacles: things I didn't remember, or think of in sequence, as well as things it would be hard to judge how much weight to put on, or even whether to include. So I stopped writing, and thought some more.

I later wrote some occasional files about various topics, like lists of cars we/I owned, houses/appartments lived in, games we played. I've also written up various memories in the notebook, a more obscure journal, and various blog posts. Lately, I find myself thinking of most things as framed by my personal experience, so it's fair to say I've been thinking a lot about resuming this. Time to do so.

I originally thought the .odt files would give me a book-like framework, as well as a system for handling TOC, index, etc. That's probably true once I have sufficient material, but I need to step back to what we might call the "primitive accumulation" stage. What I need is a system for keeping track of a big heap of notes. I've considered doing this with a wiki, but for raw material, the easiest approach would be to set up a directory with a bunch of flat PHP files, like I started with my "worknotes" directory. I might set this up with some security, so the files can be shared among friends but won't be visible to the general public (or their search engines and AI tools). I could see this as raw workspace for prototyping other writing projects.

The "Weird" Book

I've been thinking about a politics book for a long time. Over the last 10-20 years, this has evolved toward something that would start with a severel critique of the Republican Party, and end with practical advice for aspiring Democrats. For all practical purposes, this has drawn me away from my radical/new left roots to a moderate reformism (which, alas, is still on the Democratic Party fringe). However, the second Trump election has really demolished my interest in ordinary politics. It's time to return to fundamentals and ideals, to think about approaches that might solve problems, as opposed to rhetoric that pleases voters. Sure, losing hurts, but at least if you lose while campaigning for principles that could have made a difference, you can hope for better. What really sucks is losing with a campaign of half-measures and half-truths, especially when your undoing is because people don't trust you.

[quick outline of the book here, and where "weird" comes from]

The easiest way to do this would be to write a quick outline, then flesh it out with a strawman draft, written almost totally off the top of my head (with occasional nods to the blog). I'd aim for about 100 pages, with a somewhat lesser amount of side notes (incidents and ideas that could be developed or discarded). The key things are not to get bogged down in research, and not to worry much about fact-checking or polishing the prose. It should be good enough to circulate among friends, get some feedback, with an up or down vote on turning it into something publishable. I might at that point look for a co-author to finish and promote it.

The Music Database

Old Work

Circa 2020, I went through the notebook and a few other sources, and collected my writing in a set of LibreWriter (.odt) files: