Rigoletto

It’s day 15 of the rewrites. For this one I set a time limit and tried to fill it up with random sentences. It’s not pretty.


The most reasonable thing to do is to stop writing. So I will do the opposite to see what happens.

Editing while writing takes a longer amount of time. If one always hesitates committing to what comes to mind, one would not be able to move on. Writing on modern text editors makes to urge to do this stronger. It is ironic. Paper encourages the writer to commit to the written words more. Otherwise, when one edits with paper one still sees the failed attempts. With computers, it’s as if the run-on sentence never happened. There is more time to dawdle.

Also, editing while writing disrupts the flow of thoughts. Thoughts are flimsy. Little distractions cut threads from spools for randomness where they come from.

Writing while reacting to prompts is weird this way. Right now I have ten minutes left to fill up. Because of what I wrote in the last paragraph, I imagine a sewing machine. Where would I go from that thought? But reacting to prompts is also how I managed to go on writing this far. Those “deep” stuff in my previous entries? I was only reacting to academics peddling books on podcasts. Those too are prompts.

Writing is bound to be hard when one is avoiding to write about oneself on purpose. There was a paragraph before this I deleted because I used the pronoun I a little too many times for comfort. I want to write as if I do not exist, but that is impossible. One can only do so much to avoid the first person perspective. When one cannot scratch anything below the surface, writing is a bore.

Because of that, this entry and machine-learning generated texts are not too different. We’re both trying to come up with a collection of words that fit grammatical rules and nothing else. Machines are of course are better at that. I used to use an editor app that corrects my grammar as I type. For this I did not bother. I’m using a borrowed tongue anyway, so I allow myself to lack finesse while writing about nothing.

Twelve minutes to go and I cannot come up with more meaningless words. The easiness is so hard. I will transfer this to the CMS now. Tomorrow’s ought to have more meaning. Eight minutes. Writing this way is not the way to go. Enough for today.


Editing this to something I felt comfortable re-publishing took three passes. The original was so all over the place. For each cluster of thoughts, I tried to find the kernel of what I must have been trying to say. Then I arranged the sentences around those to form paragraphs that seem to say something. After getting the hang of it, it felt methodical. It’s as if I’m following an unspoken algorithm. To be sure, everything is still bovine scat.

Some things I noticed 02/08/2020:
  1. As adults are also children, blame is spread too thin for resolution.
  2. Pomplamoose × Capaldi
  3. Como pluma al viento
  4. Eng subz plz. No time to learn Cantonese.
  5. The costs of nCoV treatment was not free at first.