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book 7

The Long Stay

my greatest sin: word-confrontation (August 2, 2026)

Righteousness by sheer wordage. Avoiding capture. Making shit up faster than I can blink and face the darkness of death and what it means to be a person in a world.

No, I’m Not Human: Writing Exercise

I still don’t know what a dog is. I don’t have access to the thing-in-itself, but that’s besides the point. I don’t see it as anything other than everything-that-I-am as I understand it and by which I consider and perceive myself to be constituted. There is something there, always lingering, like a corner light. It never stops, ends, that thought, lingers, I can imagine. But I can’t be, the way a person sits down and knows they are fully in the right, or totally considerably done and okay. There is always a sensation that I’ve been here, for god knows how long, the word stutters, sputters and slides off. My neuroticism barely does anything. I should volunteer, do something great. Do something good. Simplify my life. Stop thinking. Stop trying. But I know well I will never exceed myself, for I always come back, always see myself in all the things, prisms of prisms of prisms, like infinite mirrors, like an endless hall. Who am I but the “but” that keeps butting into everything that I make and every waking moment of perceiving life? I look, and there I see, nothing but the absences of a life so well-lived. That I have gone to this point and lived to this extent. It’s supposed to be gratifying, and the worst part is that it is. Always. It always gratifies me, pleasures me, enlightens me, gives me things to look forward to. I am always and endlessly optimistic and full of joy and easiness. But that doesn’t stop the sense, for it is in that sense that I know I am. That aliveness. Comparison between myself and others? I know not. I can only plagiarize and make shit up and say things that are prose-wise great, but don’t point to or mean anything at all. Sophistry upon me. Shame, too. I can’t say. I’ve said a lot. Amen.

Barker’s Cognitive Dissonance

I just followed orders. Social norms. What begets a life. I say it again and again. I look for something personal to justify all my actions. I make up again and again and say that the making-up and reconstructions points to something real that makes everything make sense and no sense, like all that is exactly the very thing that makes me human, but aren’t these properties of inhumanity? I’ve gone and sat down, and by that, I’ve felt the duration of a moment, and of a life, and of my process of thought and the justification I ascribe to all of it, like it all eventually coheres, as if even my incoherence and self-contradiction across entries eventually culminates into something that can only be “I am” in the way intrinsic to any pursuit of meaning as being made and reforged in erosion right now. Ha-ha. I’m a barker.

Making My Own Games

I’m a pretentious non-pretender. Thinking that my disdain of “high literature and philosophy” to which I am already so close by sheer STUPID WORDAGE is somehow morally liberating. I find these little gaps in my armor, and even in that do I gain some newfound armor. That my self-awareness produces anything but more self-soothing and wastage and the joy of knowing I can play with my cognitive dissonances by reframing more than enough times (thrice?) until I’ve eluded responsible action completely.

Word-Confrontation

If I externalize the self to words, then self-confrontation doesn’t actually exist the way I think it does. If I can avoid capture that easily, then it’s really not the self we’re working with, and I’m not really changing. I’m confronting words and making them fight like branded toys from different franchises. So really, it’s “word-confrontation.”

Self-Gratification: Walk Free

I think I should have realized it sooner, but I felt it already. All this time. It’s self-gratification. All of it. This is what it has ended up becoming. Now that healing has run its course, the only purpose of writing seems to be thinking through things and then writing that process, but coincidentally, it serves also as a way to make myself so much more than I actually am, even while using words that sound like the opposite of that, because sheer wordage itself is my validity. By overloading, I am externalizing everything until I am totally free, like fresh eyes, but those fresh eyes steps over everything, using that very prolificacy as my bedrock where I can just play about, flailing my arms and dancing childishly, while rocking my head to the best music in the world!

“You lied, you told us you were going to be different. You said. You said. But you lied. You fucker. You told everyone you’d try. At least, try. If you feel guilty, bad, mad, sad, then, then, then, then…!!”

I only feel gratified by writing this. Calling myself out makes me feel that much more impregnable, because I don’t have to do anything at all with the words themselves because they’re not of me even as they may point to something that resembles a “someone,” a “person,” an integrity worth destabilizing for the sake of confronting to be better.

I can perform anything! And be still fully honest(!) and, yes, even sincere! And then use this very this to walk free. I can genuinely want so badly, and feel so, so deeply, and know so, so well, yet I know that this very capacity is what allows me to get away with it. With what? With existence in the way I’ve built it to be, first without knowing because of all the hassle with healing, then now, with a kind of predatory premeditated hand, because the only thing left after all that is damnation. I am that.

I’ve… fucking… mythologized myself.

((((((By refusing the appearance of it.))))))

This really is the bubble-world.

That again.

That’s… Me (August 2, 2026)

1. Supersession: I’ve superseded myself, as per (usual). I write, then I reach a point where there really is nothing much to say and whatever was so crazy, important, and pressing about all of it falls flat and just dissipates into thin air. I thought, then the thought went. I stand on top of a carcass of millions of words, which have been exhaustively flipped through until they turned into mush.
2. “Huh… What?”: I forget I’m a writer. Because I barely become. It’s why it took so long for me to slap the label “writer” because that’s how far I’ve gone into writing as this thing that never really was. But yes, functionally, I am one. Just not the way you’d ever independently come to as a state or endpoint by sheer wordage.

I shed myself like hair every day. The longer the hair, the more you forget the shedding. Not the same whole head of hair anymore, even if it looks the same by sheer resemblance.

There’s just the faintest sense of the body of work. And yes, that is load-bearing, since it’s a quiet ease, assurance, confidence, and competence that knows what to do even while being sitting there and doing nothing and genuinely not knowing what to do. The next insight replaces me, and that confusion is like it never was, because I eventually consume myself as fuel. But the consumer is consumed then by the next, so again, no “I became.” More like: “Huh… What? Oh, right, types on the keyboard that just appeared out of thin air in front of oneself.”

I am the European tourist visiting Rome, the Roman visiting the pyramids, the Egyptian digging up fossils.

I follow the orders of someone I’ve never _even seen.

I gloat in things I’ve never even wrought. Yet… this gloating comes from familiarity? And whence does this familiarity come? Except from ownership? Memories? Browsing... browsing... browsing... That’s… me? Yes, that’s me. I frame myself. “I was there—! I forged it into b^{ein g.”}

Ambition. I got the salute from the Romans, but I was (am) the Romans. I repurposed it for my own devilish purposes. I created ambition and imported its authority and “divine right.” I made it flesh and blood. I dragged it into the streets. Blood and gore.

I am my (state) actor.

I get my current radical fire from yesterday’s empire. My Arrogance.

But I walk the streets out of sheer blindfolded proprioception built over years of huh-what-oh-right-types-on-thin-air-appeared-keyboard cycling. So when I inherit, I did so bodily first, then as spoken word, then finger-pointing legitimacy—“My land!”

The bubble-world.

Be (August 2, 2026)

Then I have nothing to say. Inheritance might just be the property of my creative inventions. All of these things that come to mind. They come from a mind that “knows who he is,” even if it is made up of a succession of selves, of things that one never had an overarching singular-“I” part in. I can only carry the glory of yesterday and feel footing on the present through this concrete expanse I’ve erected brick by brick. Rome was not built in a day.

Maybe, the only solution is to stare and use that feeling one has inherited bodily at least, with whatever spoken word that erupts allowed but not given the controls so that the finger-pointing legitimacy never materializes. This way, one doesn’t deny experience itself as ultimately projection, but never allows theory to import that pedigree, remaining solely within phenomenology.

But the body is concrete. The expanse speaks and finger-points through it. I can’t unbe.

These hands are Roman, even if only by the faintest descent. I am still descended from the person I was ten years ago, so as much as birthright sucks, my “divine” blood courses.

I am characterized by the assurance built over all that time, including the ability to make do, with my hands knowing what to do even while in deepest confusion. The keyboard appears now. I will type.

Slick Cement: Familiarity (August 2, 2026)

It’s raining. I sometimes forget how beautiful rain can be when it’s literally right outside the glass door and you can see the slick cement reflecting lights above.

Oh, right.

_{(I’m not special. I’ve been here before. I know this place. This world, these people, this crowd. I’ve been here for as many times as one can. But I’ve never actually been here. The familiarity comes with a familiarity with myself, rather than with anything else truly external, since I am the constant with myself.)}

Tombstone (August 2, 2026)

If it was just the last three autobiographical-retrospective (as in the writing itself is about the whole past before these last three years even as the writing itself takes place over these last three years, so not about these last three years, but about the past from the retrospective viewpoint belonging to the last three years) years, sure. But if you switch focus to everything before that, I myself am unmoored. Everything then is pre-recorded history, or like Hunter X Hunter’s Dark Continent. I should know it, and I do. I just keep getting lost in it. The last three years’ writings didn’t make a dent in that lostness. It just reconstructed it, made something new that served to move on from all of it, like a tombstone to conclude someone’s life and to be a revisitable object. I can read my reconstruction of the past, and that’s why the last three years feels itself solved as closure. But outside that reconstruction that sets the past in tombstone, there is only infinite dark forest. I don’t “know” everything I am outside that. The writing itself doesn’t mathematically cancel out what it records, but creates a reconstruction of it, leaving the actual thing at which it is pointing untouched, unresolved, and still endlessly pending.

Overhaul & Step-Back

Sentence-Level Extraction as Most Objective Growth (August 3, 2026)

Sentence-level extraction is probably my best bet right now. It’s the most actionable, and it focuses on the lowest level of unit so as to prevent the “mysticism” that can occur in larger structural chunks, since we’re literally going by the “essential” word-as-space-separated-text-string-and-organized-by-syntax-between-periods.

If I want to make full use of a library, bookshelves, stacks, and books altogether, then no amount of organizing books will change how it’ll land on me except by what it is at the sentence, the same way LLMs are trained with older books.

Wish for Thrill in Roblox RPGs: LitRPGs and Writing Are Better (August 3, 2026)

I genuinely wish making a Roblox RPG and even playing it as a player would be just as thrilling as training your nervous system like when you do things like fast-paced video games or eight-hour cafe stays in new cafes or working with a tight schedule and maintaining pace the whole day for weeks straight. But it’s too chill. Reading LitRPGs or something like the web novel Shadow Slave somehow feels that much more thrilling. In fact, writing feels so much more rewarding and challenging.

Boring Look Revitalized Through Interesting Behavior (August 4, 2026)

I find it almost interesting that people don’t realize just how interesting looking boring is, when you pair it with interesting behavior. Being boring is of course boring. But looking boring, whether in your looks or just your clothes, is a completely different ball game. It can actually look more generic to make yourself look so much more larger than life, but when you simplify yourself and show behavior that contradicts a lot of things without taking away from the mystique, then that’s not boring.

Arrogance in a Bottle (August 4, 2026)

I really am arrogance in a bottle.

22 minutes later:

Now, break it!

And reform anew, like swirling separate dust particles coalescing and becoming full solid form with a snap.

I am.

Fantasiness, Prose, and Marketable Structure (August 4, 2026)

I’ve discovered the three things pulling at me in fiction writing:

• Fantasiness (Pure imagination and whimsy)
• Prose (making each word count in making it feel grounded and crisply exact)
• Marketable structure (think the first [14] chapters of Shadow Slave where it’s tight)

The conflicts between the three are obvious: fantasiness and marketable structure and prose and marketable structure.

But it’s not about making fantasy feel more real though. That’s the mistake I notice often being made. Prose tends to think very hard about how the world works in its most grounded possible manifestation. And that can conflict with the fantasiness we all know and love.

Sentence-level exactness is part of that conflicting. Vividness is not precise words. It often has to do with allowing fantasiness to breathe, which means letting the words do their thing beyond cutting eveything out for the most exact “vivid depiction.” Fantasiness doesn’t live and breathe in that. It breathes in letting words themselves breathe.

And that includes sonic and rhythmic precision. Fantasiness itself doesn’t run on prose as something you endlessly refine into sentence level or syntax. It’s very much something that you work with, breathe with, labor with, in a very mundane and take-your-time (even sprawling) way. It’s kingdom-building in the most quintessential way.

Fantasiness thrives in being able to say its thing, not in saying nothing and pretending that’s the same thing. You can write a marketable story, and that’d be great, but don’t pretend that’ll be the same thing fantasiness is pursuing. I’ve seen the difference. The most “extreme, show, don’t tell” prose often runs into the issue of being hyper-realistic and hyper-sensory to the point of abandoning ideas altogether the way fantasy would profer. Ideas then become an experiment of syntax or how to reel in the audience as much as possible within a short amount of time through some intelligent foreshadowed payoff rather than the thing of a story with a world and a fantasy to pursue each idea in its own right. This is not the difference between an entertaining story and a non-entertaining one, but do know that we often think of good storytelling usually has to do with everything but the fantasy itself, usually the prose as overwhelming to the point of being effectively segregrated or segregatable or the structure as a nice-to-follow thrill. Ideas dying on the page: that’s the opposite of what fantasiness is going for. Deflation is an enemy.

“Telling” [here would be] a false accusation. It’s what you get when you look at prose and structure and say “the opposite must be wrong.”

Adulthood’s Deflation: Mocking the Protagonist Trope (August 4, 2026)

It’s funny that the trope is true and real. People don’t realize they’re doing it. But I guess we all grow up and forget. That type of people mocking and dismissing the protagonist. It’s happened so many times before, and even after it’s been played with so many times in storytelling and media, people will unknowingly still engage in it, because that’s just how easy it is to become an “adult” and to lose everything that would have made us so much more and to perform the very epitome of what that trope is depicting, that kind of life. There really is this idea that the child is immature and the adult mature, even up to the point of forgetting everything one learned during one’s formative years to narrow one’s focus down to only what allows one to be “just right” for what’s being expected from oneself as an adult.

And no, I don’t mean dismissing a kid or seeing a ghost. I’m talking about people who are doing very genuine things that can be pointed at.

A lot of people fall away, in a way. I read stories to keep reminding myself how easy it is to become that and not notice at all. To forget. To lose that. Like a story where you see people look like they’ve never had anything to begin with, like this is all they are. They’ve thrown themselves away, in a way. They’ve identified with circumstances and have reduced themselves to them, so that even when opportunities came, they would decide against them and choose to live in accordance to the low they’ve internalized. It’s strange.

And I myself have no clue if I’ve done just that. I don’t recall exactly those stories. I don’t remember what it feels like. What was it again? That adventure? That genuine belief? Have I myself forgotten? Lost it? Writing these lines doesn’t make me exempt. In fact, self-aware journaling can very well be its own “adulthood,” the deflation of everything the way an adulthood files everything away. Am I living the life of those background characters in those stories? The reality may be true that every person’s life is unique, but if there’s a difference between that actual uniqueness and the way one is perceiving themselves and functioning themselves to be, since one could very well be living that life even when that’s not necessarily what one is limited to due to sheer perception, internalization, or identification.

Novelty-Seeking: Reading’s Quiet Radicalization (August 5, 2026)

I guess it is true. Novelty-seeking overriding comfort, not just comfort as in routine or rehearsed decision-made behavior,, but comfort as in looking at what’s right in front of you and seeing what you’re about to do or face, like sitting on a weird chair or climbing a tree.

Books can actually induce that, which is strange since we often associate that with being more withdrawn, introspective, reflective, and risk-averse due to the nature of the act of reading.

Books can make you see things in new lights, even if it’s just words or even just fiction. And that can change your worldview that much, yet so, so quietly, such that you do something you’ve not done in years or never done in your life, and, to you, when you do, it reads seamlessly, when the reality is actually very abrupt from an outsider’s viewpoint, a person sitting and reading and doing something so abrupt to what they’ve been doing all their life. Reading really can radicalize, not politically, but even in the smallest least controversial ways.

Self-Responses

Is it because reading is so quiet rather than externally upon you that it actually induces change? If it was external like a challenge, it can reinforce you because it feels like something to resist. But a book is just words and something you read because it’s interesting or enjoyable. So when it does change you, it can radicalize because it comes from within rather than without.

Let Me Happen (August 5, 2026)

Let me happen, I randomly thought while listening to a Youtube Short video containing a looping instrumental of Pantera’s This Love and browsing through search results of Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. and eventually clicking a PDF of it.

The Short video contains the clip in Endgame where Thanos says, “You could not live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me.” The caption over the clip reads, “The single alcoholic bro after all the boys get their heart broken”.

I searched that book because I saw a recommended video by [Jane Doe], specifically titled [Video A] and grew suspicious of the effective performativeness. I then went to their Instagram to investigate and saw it even more effective. An earlier post of theirs from 43 weeks ago in October 7, 2025 shows images of a woman, a book, coffee cup, and plate with biscuits, red-underlined pages, and matcha Starbucks with cupcake, shades, black pen, and flavored water. I had Google’s Search by Image on a screenshot of the page that struck me, which contained the following line that I used to search before using Search By Image when that didn’t yield anything useful:

I am organic. And I don’t question myself about my motives.

It struck me because it looked very much like something I would write, and when I saw the term “stream-of-consciousness” used to describe it, I realized why. But I understand that it’s so much more incisively familiar than just that easily vague term.

Also, in the same post, I saw a comment by the Instagram user [Joan Doe] and was curious after she said “Uh can we be best friends” (from 41 weeks ago). In my head, I was thinking that she doesn’t read as performative (in the tight, compressed way [Jane Doe] does), but that could very well map onto ineffective performance, which may read as genuine. However, in retrospect, that she offers typical Instagram posts should push her from [Jane Doe]’s intellectual-aesthetically controlled territory.

I notice that I watched a few seconds of the video [Video A] and felt fine about it, even convinced before anything, because I was already affected by Clarice’s writing. And it reminded me just how easy it is to use signals to make people conflate you with depth without actually doing anything warranting that.

53.5 minutes later:

Strangely enough, Clarice actually wrote the line “I let myself happen” on the same screenshotted page, though I didn’t read this and just thought that thought separately. (I might be wrong about this, but the thought did happen while I was browsing rather than reading the text on the image, and that line was at the bottom when I was reading the top-middle of the page.)

The Eccentric (August 5, 2026)

I was on Instagram and saw the Suggested list of people. They contained former high school (HS) classmates.

I saw a girl who used to be so small but has now grown older, and I found that strange because I will always see that child (maybe 8 years old) though I myself was only 13 years old then. It’s hard to look at all of these “attractive young woman” posts and just see through all of it like a father with his daughter.

I also saw my former HS crush [Name] there. I didn’t really get it. For the longest time, I remember only feeling insecure and horrible every day every time I would see her, but that went for the rest of social media as well then. I guess I really have changed. I can see through it. I really did use to put everyone on pedestals because of signals like appearance. Now, all I really see is a young woman. I forgot when I lost it. But I guess I did.

I’m guessing that writing was crucial to all this. I spent all this time writing about my life and addressing everything and coming to terms with myself and everyone that I ever knew. I dug up everything and confronted so much. I think that might have made me reach a point where I just stopped seeing people that way. I used to feel they held something I didn’t have. Now, I feel like I have something they don’t have. They have to rely on signals. I don’t.

Perhaps, it’s also that I’ve reached such a point in my own life that I just do things even if it makes me look strange. Like pushing way past that performative threshold and going somewhere far beyond. Like that one time when I grabbed striking phrases of four different books in a cafe for ten hours straight, switching between phone note app and notebook with pencil and sharpener and between dominant and non-dominant hand, using many strange pencil and phone grips—to manage strain. Performative would be just doing that for 5 to 15 minutes so you can get the optimal amount of performative effectiveness without too much actual effort on yourself. But there’s a point you can tell that this person does this at home for them to do it this way outside in public in a crowded cafe.

But I do wonder if I’ve only shed those insecurities because I’ve created a whole new security based on a signal a lot of people are familiar with: self-directed authenticity to the extent of eccentricity. But the use of the term “signal” is strange. Authenticity as a signal? Perhaps. Maybe, I really am honest and authentic, and I do feel this. But that might just be what makes me that much more powerful signal-wise and why I feel in a way vindicated, which perhaps might be more than just personal but social as well. The eccentric. My ego might just be the writer-in-his-room, the actualizer-in-suspension, the person totalizing just by mere frivolous terms. I am the eccentric! I am unbound!

Writing’s Self-Reflexiveness (August 5, 2026)

Articulacy as Besides the Point

It’s kinda weird that I saw a video titled “The Writing Habit That Makes You Articulate Without Trying,” which is part of a list of recommended “book-related” videos that spawned from me watching one book-related video, and just grimaced about it.

I’ve reached such a point of writing that I see stuff like that and just feel that being articulate really isn’t actually desirable. Of course, I say this in a qualified sense. When I read it, I thought that all that writing and such just makes you a loser and that it’s better not to get so much into it because you start to overthink it. Who the fuck gives a shit about being articulate?

It’s better just to speak and let the purpose of that speaking do the work than trying to be articulate as an isolated model to follow. I’m not saying that children, elementary, and high school students don’t study vowels as a fully educational thing. But there really is a point where it’s starting to so sound all wrong and bringing you in a direction you won’t want to go at all. Even if you can qualify it with lived experience to make sure you don’t veer off, the video as itself as isolated and unqualified and unfiltered-through-lived-experience really doesn’t help at all. It gives you an answer that sounds desirable in and of itself but can go against the whole point of it in the first place, as strange as that sounds and as strange as I’m wording it.

Outgrowing Writing Self-Help

It’s so strange seeing self-help videos related to writing, intellectualism, books, and all that and just feeling like it’s so awfully embarrassing to look at. There was a time I watched these videos and took them seriously, just as much as “how to be charismatic” and “dating” videos.

But I guess all that writing has led to me reaching this point, where it’s now so disorienting that I’ve gone so far into generation and making-sense-of-the-world that I don’t need someone to give me an exercise on how to do something that I do ten times of every day. So it makes sense that situations like me grimacing at a video titled “The Writing Habit That Makes You Articulate Without Trying” happen, because when you’ve written this much, you realize that nothing about it is articulate or even writing per se as something that you habitualize and “without trying” into. It just reads so funny now.

What Is the Tip Saying? (August 5, 2026)

“4,000 words in 9 hours and 13 minutes in a single cafe stay at a new location.” I just realized this 3 days after the fact. I still don’t understand myself, even after having mentioned this pattern many times over the last year.

I may have written millions of words of personal writing already, and that has clarified and consolidated so much about and of myself. And I’ve grown to become so much more agentic as a result, at least in my sheer production, in the themes of my writings, and in the way that I perceive and conceptualize of myself. But simultaneously, I feel I’ve yet to come close to “realizing” the reality of what this all means and what that understanding would actually yield, since you can know something as a fact and not really “get” the full implications, meaning, and significant of it, even if you’re told them many, many times again and again, because it always feels lacking, like there’s so much to undergo, to dig out, to uncover, to exhume. It feels like a well that keeps giving, even if it’s just a pile of numbers that shouldn’t mean anything, because it’s backed my personal lived experience, and each time novel and groundbreaking each in their own right so as to make the apparent staticness of just “a pile of numbers” that much more deceptive as to just how crazy this actually is as it unfolds and continues to “surpass me” beyond all the challenges I’ve thrown “at it” to “check it.”

Yet why am I surprised? I did something like this before, maybe not as crazy, and perhaps, the sheer consistency of it even after all this time is getting me. But still, did I seriously think it would just all end randomly? It’s not like I’ve stopped showing up every day.

But consistency’s not just consistency. We’re not just looking at raw numbers. We’re looking at very specific written material, which isn’t just a word count. We’re looking at new material on top of new material, and you can’t fake that, no, not even with numbers. I myself experience each day, week, and month as its own whole thing, so to see this “consistency,” as deceptive as that term sounds, it’s no wonder it “gets” me.

If I was just pressing the key “A” every day, sure.

But I was here the whole time, yet somehow, I’m supposed to believe there’s a number that even represents that. And it does so well now in retrospect.

Yet I can’t shake it. Whatever I’m trying to shake, I can’t shake it.

Who am I? I was here the whole time. I’m here now. I never came upon it from the direction of “4,000 words in 9 hours in a single cafe stay.” That is probably why. I would just sit there between entries and just let it happen, even the silence and the not-knowing-what-to-write, and I’ve become a practitioner of that. You’d think the act of writing would be it, but no, that’s not it exactly. It’s the sitting-there-in-public-and-just-not-knowing-what-to-write-and-not-having-breadcrumbs-at-all-prepared-and-just-staring-at-it-and-letting-it-happen-the-silence.

I never experienced it after the fact or as the fact. This might be directly why “I don’t understand myself” the way this numerical fact reveals. It should be that the number maps onto the experience. And it does, but it does far beyond that and carries and implies so much my experience never did. The sheer fact by itself is like an atom bomb that I’m shielded from by sheer ignorance, not as raw fact, but as raw “what-this-means” separate from the context I provide. It’s sort of like seeing a hammer and you judging it based on how well it works on nails because it’s been laden with all of that functional fixedness. That’s what my provided context does. But the sheer fact by itself does so much more than what I’ve long prescribed to be. That’s what I’m ignorant of and what it reveals to me not by explicitly showing me but by showing the gap.

I think I’m essentially talking about what a novel reveals by itself tightly even as so much doesn’t land on the page itself vs. the actual hypothetical world that consists of all that is actually in the world that novel is a part of. The former is what the sheer fact reveals past that hypothetical world. The hypothetical world is irrelevant, even unhelpful, since the “what-this-means” is doing so much work that sheer “context” is destroying all traces of and causing to vanish, perhaps like grandfather’s paradox. Hemingway’s iceberg tip hand-suffocates the iceberg.

I’m saying that I’m not even familiar with the sheer fact. I don’t even know it by itself outside of what I attribute to it through lived experience, but besides that initial mapping sync that happens, I have no idea the same way I read LOTM and have no idea what the hell this all means and implies, as there’s a whole world outside of these initial scenes, events, interactions, and details. The tip itself holds an iceberg that is different from my own iceberg of context and lived experience. I am shielded from something I have no idea about, except by the faintest hint of a gap through that sheer fact itself. My context is blinding me to “context” outside of mine but which is held by the tip itself. The tip can point to my context (retrospective map sync) but very well points to something entirely large and separate. I know my own iceberg like the back of my hand. I don’t know that other iceberg, so it reads as colossal and looming and dark and very, very ominous, like what an actual iceberg would feel like from a diver’s perspective underwater if one can even go that deep and cold.

It’s easy to jump at the first iceberg that manifests from that tip, but once you realize the tip had nothing to do with you except by what you map onto your own with it like grabbing a loose key and sticking it into your own hyper-specific lock and, while it may be true of you in the way being a prolific writer is, can very well point to other equally true things and structures and even a whole iceberg that you may not know of. That’s when your iceberg of context breaks as a global model and the tip reveals your lack of self-understanding despite a kind of arguable familiarity through explicit or felt acknowledgment of the presence of a gap, even in its slightest manifestations or even in tangential or footnote theoretical implication through logic forms that resemble “if this is true, then wouldn’t that lead to this then?” The “what-this-all-means” are other “true-ofs”, or things that are true based on that tip, those belonging to a wholly nother iceberg contradictory (or orthogonal) to one’s own yet “sharing a Discord server” through that tip or sheer fact.

It’s probably judging someone right now based on how they’ve lived their entire life vs. judging by what it means right now and how that could very well go on into the future. But this can also extend backwards in time, because something right now can imply something wholly different in the past that one may somehow be ignorant of, even as we usually associate “context-lessness” or “context-independence” with a current blank slate propelled by sheer fact (or even “trivia”). Something can mean wholly different things based on what context you use that very well be plausible by that sheer fact itself, even so as to complicate or sidestep (orthogonal) the current “officeholder” model ([even] as one has exhaustively integrated it to be). Though perhaps I am walking it back here, but don’t let it soften what I said, since I myself have been trying to word this for a long while now and have only expanded this discussion because of that new “sheer fact” of which I have lived experience yet incisively provisions that “tipness.”

Closed System (August 5, 2026)

This self-directed stuff is going to be the end of me. Not literally. I mean I can see just how much of a snowball it is. As a writer, you can really see yourself getting so out of touch in real time, because it’s that immersive, that drastic, and that qualitatively fast. When you’re that self-rigorous because that’s the only way to improve when you’re just sitting all day every day in a room, you’re bound to accelerate, because you’re going through every possible experimental branch and testing and trying again and again and showing all that thought process by which you form new thought processes.

I’m glad that I did all this. I really am. It’s fulfilling. Very But sometimes, I really wish I did have 20 people encompassing my previous selves and some people that I knew throughout my life, because I really do forget the full implications of something and start treating even things that I feel should be weird, strange, absurd, or bizarre as normal and lose “touch.”

But yeah, that was the point of it. Immersion, getting so lost, really digging deep and finding something. This was a hell of a ride. I’ve gone so, so far.

The thing is that I’ve known writers even worse than I am in the sense that they’ve been at it for decades. I’ve been at it for only three years, or seven years if you include those other years. I’ve barely even done anything yet have done a lot already. I’m not even that strange if you compare me to so many other authors who spend so much more time working on fictional things and really getting so into it.

But yeah, there’s a part of me that wants to get back what I had then not because I’m nostalgic per se, but because I want to know just what I’ve done all these years and re-know what I had then that I didn’t know I had.

My younger self from over a decade ago would probably show me things I never knew about myself, would probably point at things that are true of me, facts, and show me them in new whole ways that I never saw. Proficiency can really make you forget just how wonderful, cool, and awesome this all is. To lose touch with the magic that your words arouse. I forget I’m supposed to be special. For me, I just wake up, and this is apparently me. Not that I’m dissociated from myself, but that I don’t really perceive what I’m doing as anything more than what I’m trying to do the way I’ve always done. I’ve lost some touch, yeah. What surprises me still is that I can feel that gap. Facts that I know say so much more yet I can’t even begin to know what they say because I’ve gotten so far into this rabbit hole I can’t even tell the difference anymore.

I wish I could see all that I’m doing now with the perspective I had six years ago. Then I would know myself, understand. From here, I really can’t tell the difference.

I wish my younger self from 10 years ago was here as well, maybe even me from 16 years ago as well.

I would like to know how they all saw the world, because I feel that I’m losing perspective the farther down I go along this path, even as it is necessary for deepening this current perspective which only gets more and more accessible the farther I go. I have to immerse. It’s what those authors did to get to where they were, to write what they wrote, to get that lost. I’ve barely even gotten lost. I’ve yet to become lost. Yet even with this, I’ve already gotten so lost.

That 7-year-old would show me so much. That 13-year-old just as much. That 16-year-old would tell me so much. That shared discussion table would be so intense. I’d learn so much if that was possible.

I miss that Age of Exploration because it was never about the destination of finding myself, but about the journey. Well, saying all this is a privilege of having reached the destination.

I honestly am really as much as every moment. Intelligence, knowledge, hard work, or whatever bullshit. That belongs to some idea that I encompass every moment of my life, including everything I’ve done. But I never made anything except of the moment, and that’s all it was. Not even big works, because those were just every moment.

I will try not to lose touch, to lose perspective, to forget. But yeah, best I can do is stay within the moment and keep those instincts in check.

I’ve not really done or written anything all that much. The end result was never me. I was never the total number at the end.

But yeah, I know that very feeling about that total number is definitely the person that I am now, which is why I’m getting so curious about what my past self would’ve thought.

I can never fully account for it, not even with “moment” talk or “the total doesn’t matter” since none of those ever existed back then. I may have existed in the moment, but the “moment” as I call it now didn’t exist. I approached things by how they were to me, even if it meant that I was imprecise, because that very imprecision allowed me to see things before they were given everything they needed to become totally integrated in ways that make so much sense they dwarf perspective in favor of consolidation.

7 (child, Flash games, elementary), 13 (very communal), 16 (solitary, introspective). I have to protect their perspectives. I can’t let my totalizing terms take over. The person that I am now at 23, soon turning 24, cannot be allowed to use writing, which I only started seriously frequently doing in the last three years, to go out of touch.

But I guess it makes sense. Nothing that I’ve done and am doing, have seen and am seeing, and have experienced and am experiencing are recognizable to me. Going this deep in the last how many years meant novelty upon novelty. It makes sense I struggle to “tell the difference,” because there likely isn’t anything in the past that could point back to where I am right now. I would have to show what I’m doing and the numbers and facts and details and all to my younger self literally to know, but I can’t do that. It makes sense that what I’m doing just reflects back to me as invisible, but that only means I have to make that much more effort just to ensure I’m not that blind in my own immersion and breaking new ground at this level of depth.

But yeah, I really can’t use my past to inform my present directly because that’s what I get for stepping into the unknown and growing there and continuing to do so, as great as that is.

But yeah, I do wish that I could just rely on all of it to help me understand what’s going on, what I’m doing, how I’m doing, where I am, what all of this fully means, since I myself don’t see the difference. I don’t know the full implications of what I’m doing. I just do it and go on and along.

In my head, I’m just here. I have this whole life behind me, but I can only really account for the fact that the past happened and the fact that I’m here right now. Nothing much beyond that. That’s literally the best I can do.

In the end, writing really is the only way I’m going to stare at things right in the face and hope that the gap will be revealed there as I stare at it, even as I recognize that totalizing terms are everywhere in my writings and it really is up to me to see not just the words as gesturing toward a gap but words as false totalizers when they’re just words that reflect a lens rather than global truths, the same way the word “moment” can feel when used to paper over past perspectives through a consolidating move that says that the total number at the end doesn’t actually matter as if that somehow is beyond my own current perspective when that very way of seeing is itself limited rather than accounting for or representing how my younger selves would have seen and approached me and what is true of me that I find no difference in.

Window (August 6, 2026)

Having the computer in front of the balcony large window leading into the sky, the street, and trees below has really impacted my writing. But I wonder if I should move away from the window, facing directly away instead of side or toward. I wonder if that should bring back a lot of the room computer goblin feel that I had back then when I first started five years ago. But since I’ve changed drastically in the last three years, it will be much different this time, especially since the last year and two months have been me staying at a cafe for an average of eight hours once every three days, with two-thirds of stays being at new unique cafes.

What I notice is that facing the window complemented this theme of observation, exposure, and “show, don’t tell” that the cafe stays were maximizing because they themselved prioritized hyper-compressed blogging (for breadcrumbing and consolidative portability since I had to rely on my own notes to generate on the exposed spot and the notes couldn’t sprawl but had to turn everything into a concrete result that could be launchpadded off of), exposing oneself so as to make oneself directly hyper-functional in an optimal objective data-gathering sense when I would linguistically strip-mine books at the word, phrase, and sentence level and in a self-actualizing sense where I would proportionally have everything that I am meet self-similarly at the physical body level (carriage and gait most specifically), the clothes level (lavender athleisure shirt and my golden undertone), the computer setup level (at least two coffee shop tissues below mousepad to catch melt, mouse, phone with hotspot, keyboard, USB-C monitor [optimal] with stand that functions as a kind of sleeve or cover as well, one of multiple physical notebooks, pencil, and sharpener for linguistic strip-mining, phone charger, laptop charger, sleeved laptop), the desktop level (cleaned-up-corpus-for-searches, all-journal-entries-by-single-file, federated-corpus-of-specialized-buckets, minimalist-corpus, etc.), the Visual Studio Code workspace setup level (federated corpus of specialized buckets), the specific Markdown format (with that YAML frontmatter, yearly folder, monthly text files, header 1 + day of the month, header 2 + military-time timestamp + title + unix timestamp) level, and the self-structured writing level, encompassing syntax, paragraphs, word choice, and all of prose.

But moving directly away from the window means bringing arctic-frozen to lava-molten. This makes sense as I am now moving away from “extreme show, don’t tell” and have gotten over the highs and peaks of exposure as something to get so “I’m so actualized!” about. I want to bring back some of the energy I had then.

And to be clear, I’ve already done the side already. That was an ugly compromise that served as a transition point between the deep-closed room and the more open cafe-staying perspective. That took too long and was when I became obese. I would be just grinding RPG and binge-watching then. It was a challenging time of making sense of things.

But I do recall that the best cafe stays were the ones directly facing or surrounded by windows. The most awful stays were those facing away from windows or lacking windows or having windows but not much scope of outside view (or vastness, or commanding view) due to location.

And there’s also that I don’t suffer from things like eye strain anymore like I used to when I was in that deep-closed room. I don’t recall the last time I suffered it.

In the end, I might just have to find some way to get the rewards without any of the bad. And windows with commanding views have been practically essential in my cafe stays, even as I do want the creatively energizing vibe of the person staying in a bunker-like room all day every day.

However, I must still point out that the cafe is a whole different place, so even if the window thing is true, it may be exaggerated by just what it’s like being outside exposed in a new cafe with a whole different crowd.

And after all, I wrote most of my novels in the deep-closed room, even if I’ve improved drastically due to that era of openness.

I think the best way to look at it is:

Outside = compression for carryability under exposure; inside = sprawling for constructing a world from scratch.

Since it would be funny to distill this into a “uh, just decide what mode you want today,” let me clarify. The window is not only crucial. It barely scratches the surface of what’s actually necessary to turn someone from the person that they are post-that many cafe stays to the person pre-that many cafe stays or post-cafe-staying (as in a long span of time after stopping the project) itself. Staying in that deep-closed room was barely related to the mind that I was in at the time. It created and reinforced things that were never inherent in myself. I became the writer I am today crucially because I stayed in that deep-closed room. But I did want to get away from things at the time, which at best is a catalyst of decision-making rather than structurally related to just what I would undergo moment by moment day by day throughout that era of my life. The same goes for the cafe stays in their impact on me as a writer. I had no direct control over them, but it is true they impacted me in a way that reflected me since others would not be impacted at all the same way or even begin to undergo the same thing themselves. So it was structurally independent even while being intrinsically related to me in its impact, and I could not have created the cafe stays in my room no matter how much I’ve internalized them the same as with the era of staying in that room, since it was never the era or the past per se, but everything that made any era what it is, whether it be the cafe stays, the deep-closed room, the big-windowed room, the psychological struggles, the unaddressed issues, the closure. There’s no mode or “it was just bla-bla years ago.” That I’ve relentlessly tried to write a novel the way I did two years ago again and again over the last year shows that it really does take so much just to make sense and put together things. And now, I’m here. But to say it’s merely a mode I can switch between misunderstands everything that makes a cafe stay a cafe stay. I don’t live in a solipsistic world where I can re-generate through sheer “memory” and “internalization” the effects of a new cafe stay, nor can I do the same for what it was like there in the room. I don’t know how my younger self would react to me, and that easily extends to the limitations of any mind structurally.

I’ve never snapped my finger and teleported. I’ve never done that. Not a single time. I don’t think there was ever a moment in my life that I was ever that.

I’m not choosing to live in anything. I don’t choose. I don’t have a choice in how things will affect me. I don’t decide what the sun will make me feel. I don’t decide what I will feel. I’m not writing out of pure independent choice.

That’s why I care so much about something as seemingly trivial as whether you’re facing or facing away from a window, because I know that even doing something tiny can drastically change the way you feel about everything, because as much as the words scream as internal logic or stream that spans your whole body of journaling, the reality is that none of that was created in situ but generated from everything else, since words are for transmuting, for representing, for carrying, for dealing with, for making meaning out of things that are unstructured or resistant to explanation, for talking about one’s feelings, experience or perception with. Nothing I’ve said has ever been written outside structure.

I’m not saying I can control structure. I’m saying structure affects me in a way that I can’t control.

Irreversible Exploration & Million-Year-Passage Glance: Eat That Radioactive Fruit (August 7, 2026)

I wonder if I’ve made a grave mistake. I guess one could say that there’s no true cost to exploration and expanding your perspective. But I really am reminded just how much exploration, in more ways than only traveling, really makes everything feel so strange. It’s not that I am in lack of depth. I have gone so far and so deeply that even the smallest little thing feels like it carries forever. But there’s something so strange about reading books that you would never ever read because it’s not at all related to anything you and everyone you know has ever affiliated with. And actual physical traveling to new places and staying there and spending time in public spaces there. Going all around, really breaking the spell.

It makes my childhood really feel like such a bubble-world, even as I recognize even my own very expanded perspective is still in its own way, in many ways, a whole circle or one-world-of-its-own.

It’s just so strange. Sitting down in a place that used to carry everything, but after exploration so much in all sorts of different ways, you’re just wondering if it was all even real. There’s a sense of unrealness to seeing things that reflect how limited your perspective was then.

I feel somehow blinder.

It feels like I have no idea what anything is anymore, yet know so much more than I used to. It feels that I’ve lost access to the things themselves even as I’ve broadened my perspective. I feel that I’ve lost touch with things that used to make all the sense, but, now, with natural passage of time and perspective, now feel so estranged from. I guess it’s natural.

But yes, I do know what I’m doing. I’m holding something very big. The bigger the perspective, the harder it is simply to say that any one thing can stand for everything and one can truly get lost in anything, since expanding your perspective past things that you’ve stayed incorrigible with for so long instills this understanding that you can never truly assume yourself and everything that you know and you will likely always find that right behind you is a world of unknowns even as it was the very path you walked. Things that should be as familiar as day are confusing, bewildering, and uncanny. Assumption always fails to bridge the gap and only holds as long as one never glances at it.

I looked at something that was so familiar more than ten years ago, but is no longer familiar at all even when it should be familiar. But I guess it’s more than a decade, but that goes to show just how far assumption runs and how much we base our present experience and actions on things that are no longer true or never truly were, our familiarities only as much as the fragile context in which they took place, beyond which everything collapsed and whatever throughline can be constructed falls apart again and again with every backward glance during the process and way after it has already been made full and “synthesized.”

I keep seeing things fresh. I look at something I myself have written, yet it feels like it hits me for the first time every time. I can never truly get behind myself so as to be even one step ahead. I am always surprised by who I am.

I can never truly account for myself as if I have myself functioning the same as the back of my hand, because the moment I glance-check, there it is: my assumption already long extirpated but held for so long.

Imagine me like a character in a story who was just smiling with his friends and then he randomly glances around and millions of years have passed and all he sees around him are brutalist structured overrun with vegetation post-apocalypse-esque. His identity is not built on sand. It’s invisible even to him. Everything he knows runs independent of him, such that the gap between the knowing and the actual thing being known strikes like a million-year-passage glance.

Cue in the motif “What was it again?”

“I used to know this. Now, I wonder if I ever did. I look around me and see everything I’ve learned, seen, and experienced since those earlier days. I look at my world now. This is the world now. It’s doing what it does. It’s not strange at all. It’s just what it is. Yet I glance backward, see something that used to be so familiar, and, immediately, wait a minute. Was I ever there? That world feels so small that I wonder if there was even anything there, and I look at everything I am now and feel that I’ve objectively gotten so far yet feel none of it and only just stare without any of the things that should make me feel any other way. What was it again?”

“I think at one point, it was…” And that silence is the gap of familiarity. It was this, that, and all these things. But here, it’s omitted and left as ellipsis because that shows what memory is like, what gap is like, what distance is like. One moment later, you’ve been here in this for ten years. But just one glance ago, you were with your friends. Where did it all go? That question comes to someone who’s never seen it leave, but glances back once and sees that millions of years have passed.

That’s where “Oh, right” comes in. The sync back to the present. It’s the “I’m here,” the one that realizes whatever that was (memory, recall, whatever), it probably was just nothing. You just keep here, becasue you are here. Like memories of a different life. You’re here now. The thing you’re doing. The life you’re now living. Those sudden images. Those “at one points”. Everything’s gone. Everything’s long passed. Two million years later. Eat that radioactive fruit.

Forceful Identification with Undergoing Into Self-Actualization (August 7, 2026)

It’s interesting that the reason that I am the way I am is that I have found frustration everywhere. I have to make myself small. I can’t act out. I am being assaulted by senses that I can’t get rid off. Everything has been about just sitting there and not being able to do anything and not getting any support or validation. When you come face to face, you come face to face with existence itself. It’s probably why I’ve grown so much as a writer, because of that sheer exposure. I’ve managed to grab myself and actualize through it all, by hand.

Intrusive memories, strong scents, emotional brickwalls, and all manner of things. It’s life itself.

If you’re thinking that the solution lies in something you have to say, know that I’m only here because I realized that I can only hone that very capacity of “undergonement” (undergoing).

It’s not really something to escape. It’s something to burn through. The moment you stop thrashing and instead absorb it and eat it up is when you actually start managing and finding aliveness, self-satisfaction, and self-assurance again.

The moment you deny me, the moment I eat you up like the rest.

Yum!

Lmao.

I got here because I realized I could only validate myself and that you can go look for help everywhere and realize that even the people you trusted can’t do it all for you. It’s something you’re going to have to give yourself through sheer self-acknowledgment. Even AI has tried endlessly to impose their ideas upon me, to characterize me by their definitions, to pin me down, to put me in their little cage a la “I’m thy savior!” I close my eyes and learn to hone.

My self-utterness can come across as malice, but it’s where I go against every attempt to reach their arms, grab me, and wrestle me into becoming their thing. I am.

Self-Responses

So they always look self-directed and like they know where they’re going and what they’re doing even when they’re deeply thinking and trying to understand or make sense of something because they’re entirely in/on their own tempo/timing/pace/agenda/place/path/goal/decision-making/system?

They own their confusion? Essentially?

To put in small words, they know who they are?

Six Years of Sophistication: From Neurotic Discharge to Meaning-Making

I remember back in 2020, when I would dance to throw out all of the discomforts from my body. It was the only way to get that high of being alive that eradicated everything that made me so, so deeply and terribly uncomfortable, hyper-aroused, anxious, invalidated, suffocated, unstable, volatile, overwhelmed, racing, fragmented, and shocked/suspended.

Of course, it wasn’t just dancing, but singing, recording videos of me talking, playing guitar, making songs on the spot, exercising, and other minor activities, besides just general neurotic behavior.

Only later on in 2023 did writing become the powerhouse it is now, which only accelerated in consolidative importance over time and only continues to find new peaks of meaning-making (the opposite of and counter to shock) today, even as the psychological fragility and fragmentation that it sought out to solve first have plummeted and gave way to a much more refined frustration.

Journey of Sublimation (Social Legibilization)/Sophistication:

1. Assembly: primal trauma, desires, and affects, dealt with through dance, exercise, and music
2. First Expression: full of swear words, repetition, and just straight anger or even unrefined blunting surrealism, bizarreness, and incantatory litany (gibberish) in text—very primitive attempt at meaning-making
3. Second Expression:
   1. stream-of-consciousness, scattered, crude autobiography
   2. abstract journaling
   3. long-form (novelistic, novel-length) psychological fantasy fiction-writing
4. Third Expression:
   • Passage Level:
     1. hyper-compression through:
        • analogies
        • conceptual neologisms
        • load-bearing imagery
     2. structured arguments
     3. dialectical iteration
     4. extreme “show, don’t tell” (even as non-authorial as this is)
        • linguistic strip-mining
        • observational
        • word, phrase, and sentence level
     5. existential and phenomenological investigation
   • Folder Level:
     1. the whole VSCodium workspace folder titled “Federated Corpus of Specialized Buckets” (federated-corpus-of-specialized-buckets):
        1. categories (e.g., Journal, Fiction, Prompts)
        2. 3 yearly folders (2024, 2025, 2026)
        3. 28 monthly big text files
        4. Markdown headers with:
           1. YAML frontmatter
           2. day-of-the-month header ones
           3. single-entry header twos that have:
              1. creation timestamp
              2. last-updated timestamp
              3. optional title
              4. commented-out unix timestamp
     2. Big archive folders:
        • cleaned-up-corpus-for-searches
        • minimalist-corpus
        • all-journal-entries-by-single-file
     3. Eight-hour-cafe-stay laptop portability through Git sync
     4. Main personal website:
        • book
        • Likes
        • Childhood Interests
        • Fiction Works
        • Visual Art
        • Blogs
        • Music
        • Photos
        • Staging Area
        • Recent Activities
        • About

Intensely neurotic raw free-dancer (2020) -> Writer (2026)

Entry–Self-Contain: End of Compression & Start of Beats and Scenes (August 7 – 8, 2026)

Local hyper-compressions of horizon distance (entry level—like the title Six Years of Sophistication: From Neurotic Discharge to Meaning-Making which itself is a local hyper-compression of an implied vastness) are still very effective for a reason. So I haven’t moved away from that. I am my brain. So I entry–self-contain. Discharge, but consolidates and ends the whole in one. I walk free. 28-in-3 (months in years).

What would the fourth expression be?

This might be the end of the project. I’ve basically finished it. I’ve said it from start to end and given what it is at the entry level. Maybe this is a good time to stop. This might be the only honest move left. I did what I did. I came, I went. It’s not that I can’t or shouldn’t or won’t write anymore. But it’s done.

I can’t imagine a world without the way I used this metacognition and without all this meaning-making though. But maybe I’m just a teenager turning to an adult and this was a phase of my life.

Maybe, it’s time to open my eyes.

I mean it literally spans 17 to 23 years old. So… I guess I can’t really pretend it doesn’t parallel.

I guess “stepping off the train station after disembarking” is a good way to imagine this. I can’t imagine not writing all day every day alone in a room. I’ve been doing that for over two years straight and did it in 150 eight-hour cafe stays over the last year and 2 months. When you’ve invested this much, it’s not really that surprising that you might even feel the sense of sunk cost. It’s all I’ve known. But that’s not true. It was just that intense a period. The last six years were a whole thing. Rebirth. Restart. Rebuild. New identity. All that jazz.

I can’t imagine what life will be like. If there’s even anything to open my eyes to.

• 2003 to 2013 = childhood
• 2014 to 2019 = communal
• 2020 to 2026 = that (meaning-making)
• 2027 and beyond = ?

It’s been an unbroken seven months since the entry The world from “chapter 2, part 1” of the journalnook blog.

7 hours and 5 minutes later:

I might just simply go back to coding, as in external problem-solving (EPS), which is what I was doing 10 years ago.

Meaning-making was essentially problem-solving. I thought it was the better form of that and that nothing could replace it. But maybe the answer is simply just going back to external, to realizing ideas in code, to fixing bugs, to tweaking, to overhauling, to testing.

Or maybe I can push the EPS in writing. I already did it with sentence-level linguistic strip-mining, observational note-taking, and extreme “show, don’t tell” (ESDT). I can very well story-tell fiction novels with worldbuilding, which would be an external structural evolution from hyper-compressed prose. This would be different from both the early psychological fantasy novels and the micro-ESDT of my most recent novel 30,000-word George, filling a gap.

I think I will shift from prose to beats and scenes (B&S). This should be an evolution after over a year of staring at and strip-mining prose. I will break down George into B&S.

This is a much more digestible and natural shift than “worldbuilding” or “coding.” So it’s not exactly the end of the project yet, because I can glean a lot of meaning-making from this. So let’s see how this pans out first. It’s definitely an external move, but full of pending insight.

This means that this really was a whole phase of compression and I’m moving toward structure.

It’s not that I won’t compress, but that won’t be the only move. Pretending I won’t write titles would be strange. Something kept punishing structure in favor of “entry-self-contains,” so even when I wrote a novel-length story like George, it always felt like a collection of sentences.

Three years ago, it wasn’t B&S. It was stream-of-consciousness (SoC). I’m not going back to that fiction long form, which I kept trying to do for so long after I stopped two years ago. (I felt that even the novel-length story I wrote Villa that came after all that linguistic strip-mining and relentless, accelerated sentence-level feedback loops, even if it was not as intense as the later George, was already “tainted.”) Instead, I’m doing technique in the same vein as George, but pure storytelling itself. The problem of Villa was that it was tainted. The problem of George was that it was a collection of technical sentences and had no meaning-making driving force of story the way my earlier SoC fiction long form had, even if it had a “story” in the most functional sense. What I will tackle now is storytelling as structure to pave the way for demystifying that driving force.

1. Earlier SoC fiction long form: no technique
2. Villa: tainted
3. George: Sentence-level technique, and that’s it
4. Next: tackling beats and scenes, including the word and paragraph count of each scene

After this, it can be much broader structure like chapters, in-world days (if that unit comprises multiple chapters), and volumes[—by extension, world-building as storytelling].

This should bring me “driving force” through sheer tightness (what I associated with Shadow Slave’s first [14] chapters; direction and pace) manifested through technique in structure.

end of floor one - compression