Patrick Roberts

The Aphoristic Genre

Nietzsche, Rochefoucauld, Aurelius - who writes books of aphorisms now? No one very successfully. With our patience cut by electronic media, I'm betting on a return of the aphoristic genre. Expect my own book of aphorisms, maxims, epigrams, proverbs, parables and koans, culled from this blog and my private notes, once I'm wiser from Cor and other experiments.

How to Feel Superior to a Dead Genius

Search his ideas for one that your society's elite ostensibly judges false. You gain extra status if the media now regularly associates belief in the idea with lower class. Since today's definers of good, evil, true, false, must be right, and since you of course agree with them, then logically you must be wiser than a famous genius. Now you can skip all those other challenging ideas of his, since they're no doubt wrong too. It helps if you can ignore that the use of a genius is to discover new thoughts, especially when exclusive with any now held.

Drafting a Book Online

I'm moving the draft of my book to the Cor blog, posting each chapter as a blog page. Maybe this will flick that hidden unconscious switch, the one that decides whether I'm filled with energy and poetry. The book as web pages, not printed copies, not a PDF, is the form most will read it in, so it's right to make it the primary point of truth. I heard a hundred times to release early, release often but I somehow didn't imagine keeping the book, while writing it, online.

Ignoring TypePad's glacial text editor, using a blog's convenient enough: comments, slick template, and little HTML. Still, does anyone know of a web service, even paid, that will host my book at a sub-domain of mine? It could automatically build a table of contents, add navigation between the chapters, have a search form optimized for a book, keep a revision history like a wiki, and support customizing the look.

Energy Sources

Nietzsche wrote the first part of Zarathustra in 10 days. Largely his usual ideas in new form - still amazing.

How to match that every month?

Novelty - When you lose energy, change how you're working.

Physical - Code that runs, a printed book in hand.

Public - Humans are so social, they even die for each other. Exploit that: put something out in public, even if only technically, so fear of embarrassment, that someone, even a stranger, will see your dull prose or ugly program. There's also then a chance of someone enjoying your work and letting you know what's really wrong with it, if anything, which is the only test, not the bottomless list of flaws you imagine.

Routine - The mind is associative, so bind work with time, place, tool.

Envy - I recall reading that the ancient Greeks judged envy good. They must have expected the jealous to exceed the envied, not pull them down. Not the most pleasant way to push myself.

Once a worthy goal is well defined, energy, not method, becomes top rank. Without energy, methods won't even get tested. Nothing's less efficient than doing nothing.