Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones

What's going on here, or "An introduction"

Welcome to A Kind of Vector. I don’t yet know what this place is for; I’m treating it as a space for exploration.

I’m not specifically “engineering a daily writing practice,” although it might look like this for a while. I’m building a place to reenergize my relationship with working in public. The point, for now, is to allow the work to go wherever it wants to.

January doesn’t feel like the ideal time to start an experiment like this, because it implies the weight of a“new year’s resolution,” which this isn’t. Still, this is the time when I’m ready, and part of this experiment is about becoming comfortable with setting expectations in public, so… let’s go.

I have a set of ideas I want to explore here, but naming them feels like a disservice to the real nature of the project. My main goals for now are twofold:

1. I want to let themes emerge through the writing rather than starting with a theme and then writing exclusively on that topic. I’ll be “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” I’m looking to validate some intuitions I have about areas I want to put more energy into, in my writing and thinking and work.

2. I want to rebuild my tolerance for working in public, and all of the things that means: making public commitments, hitting (and sometimes missing) self-imposed deadlines, engaging with critics, and building consistency of practice. I want to build up my intrinsic motivation & reward systems, challenge and encourage myself to go deeper and be more consistent, and treat working in public as an important part of my routine. I also want to be more forgiving of my finished products and less committed to reaching perfection before hitting publish.

Thanks for joining. See you soon.

David