In last week’s Sunday journal, I wrote a little bit each day about that day’s writing. This week, I didn’t write every day and forgot to start the journal for the week at all.
I made a few CSS changes, but I’m holding off on any major design changes until around post #75. I’d like to build a categorized index.
Saturday — July 16: I finished some posts and uploaded them. I back-posted to fill in some missing days. That might be cheating in some way, but nobody’s keeping track and I never really laid out solid rules for myself.
Here: My goal is to finish 100 posts in 100 days. Most post dates are accurate, some are approximate, and some are completely off but I want to fill those days in because it helps me keep track of things.
These sandwiches were very good.
I listened to Simon Rich on James Altucher’s podcast. James summarizes the appearance in one of his posts:
Simon Rich, one of the funniest writers I have ever read, the youngest writer of SNL ever, and now working on two movies and a sitcom, said to me, “if you don’t wake up and want to write first thing, you probably shouldn’t be writing.”
In the course of our discussion he must’ve referred to 50 different books and comedians and movies, etc.
In the podcast episode, Simon says his favorite writer is Roald Dahl, for both his children’s books and his short stories. I didn’t know Roald Dahl wrote short stories. I bought one of the Dahl collections—The Umbrella Man and Other Stories. I also picked up Simon Rich’s The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories.
Sunday — July 17: This morning I read one story from each of the books. In the podcast, James says he rarely laughs out loud when reading but it happened often when reading Simon’s stories. He’s right, I laughed a lot while reading Unprotected.
This is story of my life inside wallet.
Go read the entire thing on The New Yorker. I’d love to write something that made people laugh as much as I laughed reading it. Which I understand is years and thousands and thousands of words away. First, I’ll continue writing anything at all.
From the Dahl collection, I read The Great Automatic Grammatizator. It’s about a machine that writes stories.
“There are many other little refinements too, Mr. Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”
I’ll use this trick illusion whenever I want to seem sagacious and exterous.
These days, you can learn more about machines that write stories on, you know, websites for companies that make machines that write stories.
Planning next week
It’s still early in the day, so I’m going to go on with my day. Tonight, I’ll try to finish a couple of posts from the Japan trip.
I’ll also plan the coming week’s writing out and I’ll try outlining what I can. And preparing posts in Google Docs so I can go in and write. I’m still struggling with starting and finishing a single post without jumping around to other posts, looking things up, or whatever else. It’s not making me a better writer, but it’s probably making me better at posting consistently.