/blog

Yesterday was the final day of the second "practice and suck less" challenge sheet – that's 60 consecutive days of contributing something to the writing project. I'm still struggling to finish, to find the right things to say for the last couple of chapters but I'll get there.

I've decided to repurpose the final chapter and make it a conclusion, drawing a few threads together. Parts of the project are already self-referential but deliberately gathering the strands and weaving them into some kind of whole seems only natural – a truly fitting end. I know what my conclusion is but I just have to find the best way to express it.

Still, after 60 days of forcing myself to write, I am drawn back to Burkeman's "dailyish" philosophy. I will apply enough pressure to get this done but ensure that it is the right kind of pressure. I still want to contribute to the project in some way every day but, during this final push, realise that these contributions don't necessarily need to be all-out writing.

There is a range of worthy additions I can be making that don't involve the forced extrusion of a couple of hundred words.

There are some ideas tacked on to earlier chapters that I need to better integrate, there are thoughts I need to process and fragments that require expansion. I need to find my direction before I can set off on the final leg of this journey.

I need to get out of my own way, get past the feeling that this is a cop-out or that I'm procrastinating. It's more than I'm turning things over in my head, looking at them from different angles until I find a way of presenting them that may not be perfect but is good enough.

And that will do for me.

In the spirit of trialling different software, I've been giving Grammarly a spin (just the free functionality) in both Safari – using the browser extension – and on my phone with the Android keyboard. I prefer typing on my phone using Gboard but can quickly swap back and forth with the Grammarly keyboard to perform checks.

My writing style can get verbose, with long, complex sentences often the order of the day, so it's interesting to see what Grammarly makes of this. I may not always agree with everything it suggests but find it especially useful when struggling with the right way to phrase something.

It is interesting how many "premium" corrections it considers should be made compared to those suggested for free. When working in Safari, copying the text into the online "new document" page highlights these additional corrections. While this (obviously) doesn't provide the recommended solutions, that the issues are flagged is usually enough to point you in the right direction.

After a few revisions, this post is considered to be perfect.

Spent a good 45 minutes or so integrating those extra thoughts and notes into Chapters 2 and 3 so am really happy about getting that done. It may not be work on the current chapter but that's doesn't matter – all contributions are equal and all that.

Knowing that I'm within a thousand words or so of completing the first draft is a blessing and a curse of sorts; it's good that I'm almost there but frustrating because I currently have no idea what those words are going to be – just a vague theme.

I can't ever see myself returning to a "normal" blog (reverse-chron with post titles) but seeing as how (b)log-In can now be set to the more traditional reverse-chronological post order I was considering adding the option to enable titles in the admin page. Even then they would not be mandatory and the output (and microformats markup) would be adjusted based on whether a post had one or not.

Now that I have the demo site up and running I can do dev work over there and port changes back rather than risk breaking the main blog.

I'm also considering making the Daily RSS feed optional as it requires a cron job configured to rebuild the feed file each night which some might not want to set up – assuming anyone would actually use this engine that is. 😊