My 2002 Musings
In the spirit of my reading, writing, and meditations, this year, I want to pass on some thoughts and ideas that streamed passed me during the year. They are mostly musings, insights, and quotes splashed with some outright plagiarisms (mostly not intentional--I just forgot to record their sources--and I apologize to all you authors in advance). I wrote the seed of them on scraps of paper and notebooks as I moved through 2002. These words are the nuclei of some future books. But I decided to share them in this unrefined form now, in case I fail to get them out later. I have always suffered with waiting until I can do something perfectly so no one can find fault. But perfection is not an option--we are human and creatures and thus can never be or produce anything perfect. So why do we use it as an excuse for not acting or for beating on someone else for not being perfect? We do, that's all.
Write the content and the framework often takes care of itself. Often I worry to much about the framework and never get around to the content for that trivial worry. Frameworks do tend to default to highly workable solutions. But if you do not have content, what is the use of the framework. [This concerns life and life tasks as well as writing.]
Writers are told to show not tell. When you write a story, a novel or a mystery, you show the reader what you want them to see and learn. And if you write well, they will likely see and learn what you want to see and learn. The writer gets the reader to observe. I am doing somewhat different writing here. I am recounting rather directly observations I have made--not to do your thinking for you by any means--rather simply to say here is what I have observed. In fact it is my hope that you take these things and run with them, tearing them apart and/or building them into more precise or elegant observations and then communicating them to the world (or just to me--or yourself) in your words. Just think about them.
The writings are many and varied. I tried to sort them out a bit but I mostly failed at that effort in the interest of getting this onto my web site by Christmas. Though they are roughly in these several categories, there are many overlaps and likely several mis-assigned observations. Maybe I'll try to organize them better later, maybe not. Click on one to read about it.