"I may seem to be a waste of apathy but I can be sweet too"

[larryhammer]

Like most people, I keep a file of draft posts. Some of them have been sitting around for a while.

Subject of post	Reason for not posting
Sample entry from a supposed elven version of The Pillow Book.	The dough has not finished rising.
Notes on teaching myself how to wet-fold origami.	Still learning how.
Comparison of three anthologies of Romantic period poetry.	Still reading and making notes.
Report on my attempt to fold a thousand cranes from a rebranding notecube.	Haven't finished counting how many cranes I folded.
Review of The City of Dreadful Night.	Again, dough hasn't finished rising. Nor has the oven started heating. The pan has been prepared, at least.
Review of Yotsuba&! volume 6.	English edition still not out. Curse you, ADV!
Review of Please Save My Earth.	Need to buy the last half-dozen volumes.
Review of Daniel's The Civil Wars.	Still haven't finished reading.
My new time-management policy.	Too stupid to post.

All of which is my explanation for this GIP.

---L.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I forgot I was supposed to be haunting you like a banshee until you produced the Elven Pillow Book


... I fail at banshee...

Write it! Write it! Write it! --but I can do writer nag :D

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I emphatically agree. Larry, consider yourself officially haunted.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

People keep draft posts? Is this something that ought to be done?

*Feeling very stupid*

[larryhammer]

Only if it's your process, Sherwood. Some of us don't compose (or think) quickly.

---L.

[randimason.livejournal.com]

Yes, but doesn't it then post so far down the queue that your friends will not see it on their friends pages?

(Otherwise known as "have I been doing this wrong for 7 years?")

Also? Do you have instructions on how to string together cranes? I have about a hundred comic book cover ones ready to go...

[larryhammer]

Date it with the day you post it, no matter when you start the draft. (Er, I write them off LJ, and copy the text in.)

I've been using white thread with a knot (or bead) at the end, needle going up from the bottom up through the peak. Traditionally, it's in strings of 40 birds, I believe -- or was it 50?

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I don't compose or think quickly, and sometimes I wonder if I shd be taking the blog thing more seriously. I do stream of consciousness posting, don't tag any of it--if it all got lost tomorrow, who cares? I figure half a dozen people see most of them, if that. Sometimes posts get linked, but they are impossible to predict, so ... eh. But unless one has the voice of Scalzi or is willing to spend ten or twelve hours a day online as Cory Doctorow does, does blogging really make any difference?

[sfmarty.livejournal.com]

I read every word of your posts. Don't respond very often, but you are very gifted.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that, but I wonder about these things.

[larryhammer]

The indirect effects of blogging are extremely hard to measure. Even just looking at the size of a friends-of list isn't helpful, as there's also RSS feeds heading out into the ether with no trackbacks. But even if you're not a Scalzi or a Doctorow, it makes a difference -- it creates a community of people interested in you, and in what you write. Whether it's commensurate to the efforts of writing posts, is again hard to measure, but the direct effects (linkbacks, et cet) are only the tip of the iceberg.

Remember, the average forum is 90% lurkers.

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Anyway, the IMPORTANT thing was, before I got distracted yawping about myself was, I hope you do those poetry posts. I always learn so much.

[larryhammer]

I'm a-working on 'em. Even unto having to wallow through the two-part Prelude. (See what I do for you? See?)

---L.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love Prelude! Look forward to your comments.

[sfmarty.livejournal.com]

As for you, Larry. Have I mentioned lately that I love you and Janni very much. Especially your braaaiiinnssssss/

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

My initial reaction was very close to sartorias's, but as I wrote my comment, I realized I may be doing more drafts than I thought.

In a lot of ways, I look at LJ as an extended conversation. I don't usually script what I'm going to say in a RL conversation, and I don't do a whole lot of tweaking before I post. Except when I do.

The more I looked at this, the more I realized I do things that amount to this, even if I wasn't thinking of them as drafts. The outtakes that I stored away, simply because I couldn't let go of something, even after I'd decided it didn't fit in the current post. The times I've started a post and saved it away because I ran out of time or got interrupted. The times I was struggling to find the right way to say something and threw it into TextPad so I could get the words right.

But, I still think of all those things as exceptions, because most of the time I just log on and post whatever's been running around in my head the most.

[larryhammer]

Ha, he said. And ha: so you were doing mental drafts even before you started typing.

---L.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Maybe as I post. The thought gerbils running around were simply skittering through, or that's often the way it seems to me. It's only as I start to type that they settle down into any really coherent pattern.

But, in the context of your post, weren't you writing about keeping files? ;>

I do have some files--outtakes, like I said before--that may someday jell into posts. But, most of them, I suspect will molder away and crumble into the dust they really are.