Start Doing Next

I’ve mentioned my curating or indexing a number of times lately. I may not have explained what I meant. 1000 Days grows each day—not always wonderfully so—but grows nonetheless. I know I’m losing some good stuff in the cracks. I’m not too concerned about this happening since much is not worth dredging out of those cracks, but there are some worthwhile pieces mixed in with the sludge. And several older pieces I’d forgotten drifted away too.

So I’m indexing. I pumped all my posts into a spreadsheet and started rereading them post by post. I pull out character names, events, places, invented objects of interest and put them in a wiki. This way they can be linked to each other. Each item resides on it’s own page with summary and detailed information capturing it’s essence. At the end I list the reference rows from the spreadsheet so that I can relocate the source material if needed.

Apart from imagining such an endeavor holds it’s own innate value, I also find the effort invigorates my writing thoughts. Usually these thoughts form into tendrils advancing the thread I lost, but yesterday I indexed a pair of back to back entries that held more interesting characters and concepts than I’ve come up with in a month recently. I wonder if I wrote better ideas then or if my learning since that time helps me see these elements with a more purposeful intent. I suspect it’s the former. I think maybe my writing suffered less from a critical eye. I think I felt less constrained to produce quality and volume and more inspired to produce anything at all. The trouble is that none of that writing went anywhere.

Yet.

I hope my nostalgia will resurrect the worthy and my increased inclination toward structure will prop it up and take it somewhere. Got to stop doing now and start doing next.

325 words on day 563