I'm pretty tired today. I managed to have lunch with my extended family on Thanksgiving and still make it to work at 4:00. Yesterday and today were also spent with my brothers. I really like spending time with them but it's left me in a bit of a bind for catching up and finishing Iron Noder. I've pretty much got tomorrow to try and close a huge gap and while I think I can do it I expect that it's pretty much all I'm going to do. As per usual my writers block has almost entirely disappeared now that it's going to take a desperate effort to finish. My standards have dropped but I feel like the quality is staying in the tolerable range. The main effect of all of this is that I'm noding about topics that I have passing familiarity with and little real interest in personally merely because I can and they aren't noded yet. There are a lot of minor changes in the usage of words that sort of creep into the language without anybody noticing which is convenient in a noding for numbers context. As much as I admire doctorate thesis level write ups most topics need little more than five hundred words to describe what they are, what they do, and why it matters and I think a minor thing I'm learning this November is that as much as I like the idea of being verbose and hyper detailed I'd probably write more and provide more value if I were more willing to just jot down ten quick descriptions that all linked to each other than a full article like I'm trying to get published in a magazine.
I've read a lot of stuff off of the internet and I have a certain unhealthy fixation on word count. My favorite web serial is more than a million words long and it's not the longest piece of fiction I've ever read. On the other hand I try to keep my writing pretty tight without any superfluous verbiage. That's not to say that I want to write sparsely so much as I want to use the fewest words that still clearly express the images and ideas in my head. It's a perilous balancing act and one that I suspect I fail at more often than I succeed but it's my honest opinion that clear communication is the single most important skill a person can develop. Here at the end of the month, I find myself restating notions, deleting the redundant sentence, and then typing it again in a slightly different form only to repeat the process. Usually I can break the pattern by rereading the whole paragraph but I find myself wondering how much this is a normal part of writing and how much this is me.
IRON NODER XV: LAST SECOND BARE BONES IRON NODER FREAKOUT!