I’m working through what the next evolution of this daily blog might (could? should?) be. If you’re following along, here’s the last post. I have no idea how many of these posts it’ll take, but hey, a post is a post.
There’s a tension when you’re publishing something like a daily blog (which… welcome) between speed and quality. Between a piece that you can start and finish in a single writing session (which sometimes isn’t very long), and a piece that needs to bake for a little longer.
While I was driving down the coast to Montara today, I started to wonder what it might look like to lean into the latter, whilst still publishing daily. Almost every post on this blog (with the exception of the handful I’m writing right now) are totally distinct stories. What if, instead, my daily blog was just a continuation of a single story.
There’s something interesting/charming/terrifying about the idea of just treating this blog like an append-only draft of something. I’m not sure what that something would be yet, and I’m sure that I’d get bored of the concept pretty quickly, but what if? That’s the question I’m trying to explore, after all. What would executing that idea even look like?
Importantly, I’m talking about something other than diary here. I’m not looking to trade ad-hoc diary for actual diary. There could be something in that idea too, but I’ll save that for another post. Here I’m talking about picking some story and sharing the daily progress until it stops making sense to share it. Would that be fun? Weird? Boring?
The thing I like about the idea is that it could be a good forcing function for landing on some idea that could really be something. I also sort of like the idea that any given day could just be totally weird. A shitty first draft of something. The next day could keep building, or could rewrite a previous day. Something like “changelog as blog.”
Maybe an open Google Doc is the better version of that, or maybe intentionally sharing a changelog as the primary artifact (rather than a hidden tertiary one) could be interesting? Not sure. Unconvinced either way. Fun to explore though. I’ll sleep on it (as I will on the others).