As I was putting together my year in reading, it occurred to me just how long I’ve had this thing going, how much I’ve more or less written at it. It’s not necessary a valuable amount of work, but it is certainly non-zero. It’s certainly has volume and something like a history. There are certainly even a few things I’m even probably proud of. And I think I would like to do more things that I am maybe proud of.

My "intention" for this year is, I think, pretty much the same as last year: something to the effect of "process over performance," by which I mean practice over outcome, by which I mean focus on the doing of the thing instead of what it may or may not get me, or produce, or become. I think my written intentions were a bit different, but functionally that’s what I was focusing on doing last year, which, as mentioned, was a weird year for a lot of different reasons and in a lot of different ways. What good things came out of last year, however, came by virtue of a practice, of focusing on the process, because to be honest, many of the outcomes — the "performances" — I had last year were not what I was hoping for (with the obvious exception of Two Page, of course).

A big piece of process is, of course, practice, and as another means of practice I’d like to publish here more consistently, at least for a little while, at least while it’s still fun and productive. I mean to practice the writing itself, of course, but also practice finishing things, practice the performance of work itself, like a comic or a musician doing open mics; this blog is not entirely unlike a personal open mic, although — to belabor the metaphor — I do not currently have any means of knowing whether anyone is listening or not, as I’ve not had analytics on this site for years now. And so I may indeed re-introduce some analytics — though only ethical ones, I assure you. (Mostly I need to figure out if it’s cheaper to host my own or pay one of the "ethical" Google alternatives.) There is an "ROI" element to this, sure, but I also think it would just be good to know. Heartening, in a way. Even if, as I very much suspect, it will only serve to confirm that I am indeed shouting into a void. Which: no matter. It is, after all, a practice.

But because I want to do that I may eventually add some "features" to help the blog pay for itself a little better. There will not be ads, almost certainly ever. Or paid posts. Or any of that kind of annoying shit. (A benefit of having no reader data means that I would not be able to sell any ads anyway, were I ever tempted.) I will probably turn on the Bookshop.org affiliate stuff again if I ever figure out a way to do that somewhat more cleverly (i.e., programmatically). I like Bookshop.org and feel good about that kind of thing. I may also try some other things, but we’ll just have to see. I’m committed to keeping this a static site, though, and that does come with certain (I think positive) constraints. I may abandon Jekyll, though I did finally get a Docker container set up because I somehow broke the Ruby management in asdf, and I’m hesitantly excited about the rv project. Regardless, I am pretty sure that I have no interest in writing a newsletter, and I have a lot of strong opinions (that I should write up as blog posts…) about things like Medium and Substack anyway (though Ghost does look kind of good and ethical and whatever; I think https://escapecollective.com/[Escape Collective uses it, and I love Escape Collective).

In any case — 

What will this new "practice" consist of, aside from more regular posts? Mostly it will consist in work toward other goals, which for now I am going to keep to myself, thank-you-very-much. But it will at least consist of more books, more bullshit, and probably more bikes, too, once the weather improves (or I discover that I have something interesting to say about riding indoors, which: maybe). I know too that I want to try and work out some ideas I have about writing, and specifically about writing "on a computer" (though in a very weird turn of events, most of this post was actually drafted long-hand, which: a topic!). I’d also like to document more of the work I’m doing on my side projects, e.g., asciidocr and one or two other things I’m not quite ready to make public yet.

All of this means, too, that I will probably redesign the site again. If nothing else, I need to add a code highlighter, because the code examples in various programming posts are, at the time of writing, not nearly as legible as you’d want them to be.

This is all to say that changes — hopefully positive ones, if positive only fro myself — are forthcoming, and I hope to make this a place worth checking in on (or at least subscribing via RSS, may it live forever and always).

Cheers.

I’ve got a story out called "The Wheelbarrow" in Rock Salt Journal. You can read it here if you would like.

While I am secretly^[1] focused on a new writing project, I’m still trying to get some of my finished writing projects, you know, published. It’s pulling teeth, jousting at windmills, and/or maybe I just suck at writing.^[2] Either way, I prefer to submit to places that are (a) free (because cheap) and (b) on Submittable. I don’t really like Submittable. I liked it better a decade and a half ago when it was called "Submishmash" and, importantly, was free. But it’s convenient to submit to places on Submittable because — for lesser known titles — it signals a certain seriousness (i.e., they’re paying something for it), and because it keeps track of all the submissions for me. It’s not that I’m necessarily averse to keeping track of them myself, but if I don’t have to —

In general I don’t really bother with the cover letter for my submission, not in any real way, because I don’t think that it really does anything. I’ve read at a variety of literary journals and never, not once, had the cover letter any effect on publication. They do usually want a bio though, and so I’ll send that along. But if you use the same bio everywhere…​

For the longest time I’ve just had an alias setup:

This works fine. Very well, in fact. But the thing is that, for various reasons I won’t go into, it might be nice to have a reasonably well-structured and tested Python project pinned to my GitHub Profile,^[3] and we are looking at updating some of our old Python tooling at work, and so I thought I’d take a half a day or so to get back up to speed on uv packaging, typer, and poke at pydantic, although I can’t really say I used hardly any of the useful features of the latter save the very simple validation.

Anyway, I made a tool I’m calling tmplcl ("Template to Clipboard"), and while I eventually want to support string-formatted templates, it’s in good-enough shape that I thought I’d get it up on pypi, so you can now:

Though I’d recommend using uv tool install tmplcl instead.

It’s a very simple app, whose source code you can read here if you would like.

It was a nice thing to chew on a little bit while I slowly get back into the swing of working on this Rust app^[4] I’ve had half-built and have been thinking about for a long time. So I suppose now back to that, back to the aforementioned writing project, and onward into September.^[5]