Hello friends, happy Boxing Day! I’m still using Typora, which is super fun. It’s makes writing blog posts so much easier. And it’s about as customizable as I’d need or want. A friend said they use Typora for their fiction writing too, which is pretty zany! I’m kind of considering it. I’ve always found Scrivener to be a bit over-designed for my taste, with too many options and too much customizability.
The sad thing about being a science fiction writer is that you love whizmos and gadgets, but writing is still pretty old-fashioned. The act of composition hasn’t been substantially improved since the invention of the word processor (and, I’d argue, it’s still essentially the same as it was back when people were composing using pen and paper, but that argument relies heavily on one’s definition of the word ‘essentially.’) So it’s always fun to discover a new word processing modality.
You might’ve noticed that I’ve been using more links now than I used to. That’s because I always found hunting down the links to be a fiddly, annoying process. But with Typora and markdown, whenever I think of something that needs linking, I just surround it with brackets, [like this][]. Then at the end of the document I create a link reference, like this:
[like this]: link goes here.
I think it’s pretty nifty. Of course I’ll get tired of it eventually, just as one gets tired of most things. But for now it’s fun.
In terms of writing I have very little going on, just working on doing the line edits for my young adult book. Then will have to start work on my super secret nonfiction project that I hope to announce in January!
Books I’m Currently Reading
- Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl
- Vindication of the Rights of Man by Mary Wollstonecraft
- Superman: The Golden Age, vol I by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
- Catwoman in the East End by Darwyn Cooke and Ed Brubaker
- Cruel Summer by Ed Brubaker and Simon Phillips
The Husserl I’ve been reading very slowly for at least a month (am halfway through!) I think it’s honestly the best entry-point for Husserl. I believe that I previously read another of his: Ideas. But that felt very internal to some purely philosophical problems of consciousness and epistemology, whereas in this one ties it all in together with the big question: What is it possible to know? And how can we start to breach the boundaries of what we think is possible.
Vindication of the Rights of Man is the work that made Wollstonecraft famous. It’s a response to Edmund Burke’s Notes on the Revolution in France. Burke’s is a foundational conservative document. It may very well be the first elucidation of movement conservatism as an ideology, within a liberal democracy. I read it upwards of ten years ago, so I don’t entirely remember what it said, but as I recall, it’s a polemic against the concept of radical change. Wollstonecraft’s reply is like, you tell us that we’re bound by tradition? But where does that stop? When are we allowed to change anything? What makes it striking is the intemperate, personal tone. It’s not a matter of academic debate for Wollstonecraft, she goes hard at Burke. I found her extremely convincing. In the years since, we’ve seen the dangers of revolution, but at the time it’s hard to imagine not being in favor of the French Revolution.
The graphic novels are what I’ve actually been reading the most of. Went through a Brubaker phase. Really like the work, but it’s subtle. At first I was like…these are just typical crime stories. But it’s something in how he draws this world together and shows how shaky it is, and, moreover, how its generational: how kids grow up with unstable home lives and then they replicate the same patterns as adults (even as they do their best to avoid them). This makes it sound like a work of sociology, and it is, a little bit, sociological. But the characters are also very human. Definitely work that grows on you the more of it you read.
