Publish Everything (Pretty Much)

Do we need to spell out why something is interesting or useful? Show don't tell?

Or are we all looking for an aesthetic that we love and want to see more of but we know it when we see it?

I've been journalling about computers since 2013. I am looking for something higher and beautiful.

I too write a Substack and I have also experienced this. There have been articles that I’ve written that have out performed my expectations, articles that I was sure would do well and flopped, articles that didn’t do well when I initially posted, then suddenly receive a lot of traffic a few months later due to a share, etc.

Very rarely do I write an article, know it will go viral, and then have it do well. It’s still hard when I have a string of bad weeks where nothing does well, because I still want to grow my audience and viewership. I have to remind myself that I started writing because I just desperately wanted to see a certain type of content put out into this world. This means that there are lots of times I write about things I know won’t do well ( a history about BSD, a tutorial about using xml with C#). As my readership grows it can be hard to write those types of articles, but I’m trying to stay true to myself.

Most of the time writing is fun, but there are definitely weeks were it’s hard to feel inspired. But for some reason for me writing just feels like breathing. It’s something I have to do, even if I don’t always enjoy it.

I won't be publishing any of my writing publicly until there's a way to insure it isn't being used by some tech bro to pump the valuation of a company designed to replace me.

Took me a while to parse that headline. I was trying to figure out what "land-publishing" was.

I realise that most typographic style guides recommend not putting spaces around em-dashes which separate clauses in a sentence, but I always have trouble distinguishing between em-dashes and hyphens in most fonts. As a result, I often mistake non-spaced em-dashed clauses with hyphenated words, leading to confusion.

I note that the original article does not use the word "land" anywhere at all; not in the title, nor the body. The un-editorialised headline "Publish Everything (Pretty Much)" is (IMO) much clearer.