Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 39

Cutting Twitter

I can’t remember the last time reading Twitter made me happy. It’s been even longer since I’d wanted to post anything. I wasn’t using it as a communication device. It didn’t seem to serve any purpose beyond letting me see people yell at one another over things I used to like.

I had a Twitter account from early 2008. I had killed that account during the US election in 2016. I opened up another one earlier this year, in hopes that I could at least contain political rhetoric and just follow people I liked. But it didn’t work. Trump ruined twitter, and the people who run Twitter seem fine with this.

Here’s a nice run-down of “Twitter is bad” articles, largely here for my own needs, just in case I’m tempted to go back:

Being extremely online can only bring you pain
“Did We Create This Monster?” How Twitter Turned Toxic
I Quit Twitter and It Feels Great
How Twitter Fuels Anxiety
What If We Stopped Going On Twitter?
The Internet Is Killing You And You’re Begging For More

Finally, perhaps the best paragraph about quitting Twitter I’ve ever read, from Fluxblog:

Is any of this still fun? And what are we getting out of this, besides new ways to feel anxious, insecure, or unsafe? I personally ran into this wall with Twitter, and have stopped reading and participating in that platform altogether. At first it was because I was tired of constantly checking a timeline that was increasingly packed with paranoia, dread, anguish, and in the worst moments, outright hysteria. But once I stopped reading the stuff, I stopped writing tweets as well. I didn’t anticipate how freeing that would be. Twitter is a platform that rewards anger and negativity, so even my fairly benign presence took on a snippy, aggrieved tone. The platform subtly encouraged my worst impulses, but I’ve found that once I stopped having an outlet and audience for bitchy little thoughts, I stopped having so many bitchy little thoughts. I’m better for it, and so is anyone else. No one needs this from me. No one needs this from the vast majority of people.

Hopefully it sticks this time.

Fran’s Not Here 26 - Subway Sleep Jealousy

Cura, June 15, 2018

Cura is my Spotify mixtape. You can listen to it and subscribe here. I keep it as one playlist so it’s easy to subscribe to. I update it fairly frequently, but I also keep an archive playlist so you don’t have to miss a thing.

I hope you like it. I made it for you.

Here’s the track listing for this week:

Humility (feat. George Benson) - Gorillaz


Guru - Coast Modern


Crying in the Sunshine - Miniature Tigers


San Francisco - The Mowgli’s
Yell It Out - The Derevolutions


Water - Ra Ra Riot


FUTURE BAE - Jimothy Lacoste
My Chinchilla - Cub


Coco Hello - The Modern Strangers


Guts - Elohim

Morning Pages, June 15, 2018

It wasn’t obvious that I should go after her. My romantic gut pushed me in that direction, sure. It was telling me to walk up to her, pick her up, and take her home. It was an instinctive part of my lizard brain. She’s mine, the romantic gut thought. It had been wronged all those years ago and saw an opportunity for the universe to restore balance.

Thankfully, my brain was still in charge. My romantic gut was thinking with chivalrous roots, and none of that was appropriate or practical or smart. She didn’t belong to me, or this new guy. She’d made the decisions that got her where she was. Leaving me was one of them. I had to respect that, because I had to respect her, even if I didn’t fully understand.

So instead I stood in her hallway near a staircase full of her new friends and drank the beer I didn’t bring. It was disgusting. What was this?

Morning Pages, June 12, 2018

The stove handle dug slightly into my back. It wasn’t uncomfortable, I just felt it. I’d put my hand on it before, but it gave. Something about it was weak. Any real downward pressure would dislodge it, and one side would swing down, and it would make the most ungodly noise, direct all eyes in this direction, and I’d ruin the whole party. Maybe I’d keep this in my back pocket as a plan for later. I hoped I was the only one who recognized this weak point.

I’d been camping on this spot for two cycles. First, Finn caught up with me about her job. I barely understood it, a confetti of techno-babble and six sigma spaghetti. She seemed stressed and overworked and not drunk enough. I helped and handed her two as she stood with me, my arm just a little closer to one of the coolers on the other side of the stove.

“You’re a good enabler,” she told me.

“That’s what casual friends who only see each other during intense dramatic moments in their life do,” I said.

“You still don’t know shit about women,” she said.

Morning Pages, Monday, June 11, 2018

Mint green paint on the walls of this place that’s closing at six for a private event. I’ve got fifteen minutes, they say, and then I’ve got to go. And I will go. What am I? Just some guy with a keyboard. I could go home and write but I know I won’t. I’ll go home and the routine will kick in, and that routine never involves writing. It’s all here, in places that close, where I get my best work done.

I’m meek about it. They’ll say, hey, we’re closing up soon. And I’ll usually leave right then. I won’t wait until just before they lock up. I won’t use up every single minute. I’ll take a short breath, and move my stuff back into my bag. I bought the bag to make myself feel more like a writer. It has the style of pockets writers like. Little pouches for pens and chargers and fetish items. The guy who made my coffee asks me about my keyboard. I feel I came off as smug, but it is nice and I like talking about it. And I like typing on it, so long as it’s kurt tweets about tech companies and not my novel. My novel takes a while to arrive. I’ve got to do all the other stuff first. Tweets. Email. Group chat. And then, oh, hell, they’re closing up soon.

My feet hurt. I bought the wrong kind of shoes. These are not writers’ shoes. This is not writers’ tea. This is a writers’ watch, because it’s broken. These are writers’ glasses, because I can look at a screen for 12 hours a day and not tire, even if the novel never opens. They’re closing. I should go. I usually just leave. But I feel like I’m on a roll. I finally crack the damn file. Opening. It bounces. There it is. The last place I left the words.

The music stops. One light turns off. It’s a sign. They’re being nice, but I know the next thing will be someone asking me to go. I pack it up. I didn’t actually type a word. But I saw where I was. I saw my last thoughts. And I’ll think about them on the subway on the way home, where obviously I can’t write because

More Things June 08, 2018

With the help of an IFTTT recipe that turns what I save to Pocket into a Markdown link, I can easily make a linked list blog post again. Hence, the return of More Things.

Articles are ordered from oldest to newest.

The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations

Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk Turns 20

Too lazy to work out, eat well, or save money? Bribe yourself with habit points

We are all trapped in the “Feed”

The stress of making a mindfulness app

Apple’s new product features are an admission of guilt

Being extremely online can only bring you pain

Writing Novels vs Writing Short Stories

If I’m trying to get better as a writer, good enough that I can enter contests and get published and then rob the Kwik E Mart and become Senator, I wonder if slowly writing novel chapters maybe isn’t the best way to go. Also, winding run-on sentences.

I started out as a short story writer. I’ve written short things here and there. But I’ve never actively done them. But maybe that should change. Maybe it’s better to continuously come out with shorter material than spend years working on a thing that goes nowhere.

More Things May 24, 2018

With the help of an IFTTT recipe that turns what I save to Pocket into a Markdown link, I can easily make a linked list blog post again. Hence, the return of More Things.

Articles are ordered from oldest to newest.

“Writing is Thinking”—an annotated twitter thread
Using Drafts As A Main Text Editor
Working with Dropbox Files from Drafts on iOS
How Do We Write Now?
What of the lowly page number
Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Are Great for Creativity
Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom
Plex and The Great Music Rating Project
Inside Nintendo’s secretive creative process
A Modest Guide to Productivity
We need an internet of unmonetisable enthusiasms
I’m Sorry To Report Instagram Is Bad Now
The gender wars of household chores: a feminist comic
Keep The Degree Of Difficulty Down — AVC
What’s Proper Smartphone Etiquette When Watching a Movie at Home?
I Hate My Phone, But Man, I Loved My iPod Nano
A Look Back on Atom and His Package, the One-Man Band That Made Punk Uncool Again
I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
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I Know Your Real Name Now: Thoughts on Chapter 4

This took me over a month to write. Not because I was working on it the whole time but because I was avoiding it. I didn’t know how to end it or frame it and those decisions paralyzed me. Eventuality, I sat down and wrote the three scenes to conclusion, and then reordered them like 6 times until I got it the way I could at least call it good enough for v1.

If you’ve been reading along, you know that I jump around in time. The Intro takes place with the characters in their early thirties, but three chapters take place at the end of high school. In chapter four, I add some memories. Hall remembers back to grade 8, and another school dance. Banks remembers back to the beginning of their relationship.

But the meat of the chapter happens between those two memories. Tich and Finn have dragged Hall out of the dance after the breakup and they have questions, but they’re also a little self involved. They’re a little rosenceantz and guildenstern. They know our protagonist and care, but they’ve got their own stuff going on. These are my favourite types of characters.

One way I’m trying to build this world is by introducing characters who clearly know the four protagonists very well. They know them better than we know them at this point, (definitely better than I know them) so they become these lighthouses in the story that can help you see a little farther.

Thematically, it’s important that Banks remembers a moment between them and Hall remembers something isolated. The greatest reason she had for breaking up with him was that he treated her like a character in his story. He’s not ready to process what that means.