I’m catching up on this blog (I Write for Yesterday when I skip a day), because it’s been hard for me to think of topics. For me, it’s February 7, and I just wrote the February 4 post about the Fantastic Four teaser’s portrayal of AI a few minutes ago. I actually had the idea for this post first, which was going to incorporate yesterday’s, but I broke that out to stand-alone.

This is all to say, I think it’s always (or very often) possible to turn anything you think of into a blog post, or any Thing-based media, if (like me) you spent a lot of time watching YouTube recaps of the FF teaser. I wasted a lot of time on February 4th doing that, but I believe in Monetizing Waste, and even though this blog doesn’t make money directly, I got two posts out of it, so that’s enough.

I learned about the concept of sweep edits from Joanna Wiebe’s talk at a Business of Software conference. The basic idea is that when you edit a piece, you pick one kind of thing to fix and do only that in a sweep. Then, you go back to the beginning and pick another problem and do a new sweep.

I hired an editor to help me with Swimming in Tech Debt, and I’m looking through the revisions and suggestions and trying to figure out a process for making the next draft. I was talking to someone about this earlier, and then I remembered that I should do sweep editing. I do this for blog posts, but for some reason, it didn’t occur to me right away when I got the edit back. The revisions and comments beckoned me to address them serially, but I should not do that.

Here is what I think my sweeps will be

1. Make factual corrections. The editor might have inadvertently changed the meaning of something with a change. I want to get the text back to being accurate.
2. Address comments. The editor made suggestions and I need to just go through each comment and decide what to do. I need to either reject the comment or add it to a todo list. I’ll resolve the comments that don’t need more writing and leave in the ones that do.
3. Relate the text to my central metaphor of swimming rather than drowning.
4. Read it aloud. I want to make sure it still sounds like me.

After this, I will have a list of things I need to write, so I’ll do that list one by one. I will try to group them into sweeps that are of a similar type and then amend the above list to make it easier for the next chapter.

I am sure that this list is wrong, but it’s a starting point for now.

I got a Supernote Manta about four weeks ago, and I wrote Supernote Manta First Impressions after using it for two days. Looking that post over, the only thing different is that I found out that you can use handwriting instead of typing in a lot of contexts by tapping the globe icon that shows up on the keyboard. This is marginally better than typing (which is very bad), so I still hope that it can get better in software updates. But, those impressions were about the visceral feel of the device, not how useful it is in practice.

After four weeks, I continue to be happy with Supernote as a replacement for paper journals. I have been using paper for my whole life, so I didn’t think this would be possible, and maybe it’s specific to me, but here are the reasons why I find it better than paper:

1. My ideal journal has a lot of pages. In 2024, my journal was almost 400 pages. It has gotten too big to carry. On the Supernote, I don’t have to think about this at all. I created a custom journal that has a page for each day and a lot more.
2. I like editing. I have come to rely on undo and cut/paste. I never had this with paper and didn’t consider this when moving to a tablet, but now I realize how important it is to me.
3. It’s also great for reading. The Supernote with the Kindle app is as good as my Kindle device, which I don’t use any more. So, in addition to not lugging my paper journal, I can also not take the Kindle (which was always in my daily carry).
4. It has all of my journals. I keep different kinds of journals. I have my daily, bullet-like journal, but I also have project specific ones and others (see Write While True Episode 21: Dedicated Journals). They are all slowly being migrated into the Supernote.

All of this would not matter at all if the writing on the device wasn’t comparable to paper. It is.

For me, the biggest downside (compared to paper) is that it is monochrome. I practice Two Color Journaling, where most writing is in black and important things are in red. I have been using other cues to highlight (symbols, boxes, the highlighter). It’s ok. I don’t think the new Remarkable (with color) would meet my other criteria, but it’s something to think about for the future. I guess I hope that color e-ink becomes ubiquitous and is available in a future Supernote.

In Triple the number of blog posts you write and the follow-up to it, I gave some examples of how to triple the number of posts you write. This is the third post in that series, where I will tell you why I even think this is a good idea.

Again, I will turn to Art and Fear [affiliate link], because another lesson I learned from it is that the point of making art is because of the effect it has on the maker. Writing is how you become a writer, so doing it more will make you better, faster.

I prefer that reason to something like: the Google algorithm prefers it, or it’s easier to share on social media, or your AdSense revenue will go up if readers need to click around. There are no ads on this site, so I don’t care about CPM prices or page views. I would love for my SEO to be better or for more people to share my work, but the best way to do that is to just make a lot of good work.

I have no idea which posts will do better than others. I have written before that the highest traffic page from search is my UML Cheatsheet. The second highest had been my explanation of the tech that The Wizard of Oz used to make his ghostly head. Those two posts are over 10 years old. Lately, my review of the Supernote Manta has climbed to the top of that list. I would never have predicted that these would draw the most search traffic.

In Blog Posts, Randomness, and Optionality, I wrote that every post is a lottery ticket to some future benefit. I can’t predict what will happen to each one, but I know that having a lot is good.

In yesterday’s post, I had some ideas for tripling the number of posts you write, but I forgot one source of posts: the follow-up.

I had mentioned that Art and Fear [affiliate link] had been the source of my advice to focus on ideas that have thousands of variations (not ideas for single posts). Another lesson from that book is that old (flawed) work is the inspiration for new work. I frequently read my posts hoping to find that it’s flawed in a way that inspires me to write more on the topic.

Now, this post might be a contrived example. I wish I could say that I planned it this way when I wrote the first post, but I’m not that clever. But I did read yesterday’s post and think: why did I not plan out three posts on how to triple my number of posts? And then I thought: what would I have planned? And this post is not what I would have planned, but it’s what came out of thinking about what more I had more to say on this topic.

The reason I am able to do this is that my posts are not meant to be my exhaustive view. I am following my advice to Lower the Bar to Practice, and that means I publish posts when they are good enough to publish, not the best they could be. I know that there’s always room to add more later.

One of lessons I got from Art and Fear [affiliate link] was to not focus on ideas for a new piece of art, but instead to find ideas for Thousands of Variations and use that to produce A Life’s Work. I do that in the large with this blog, but you could also do it for each new post. If you have an idea for a post, try to think of two more that are closely related.

Sometimes, while writing, I realize that I need to explain something in an aside. Instead of doing that, I write that aside as a post first, which I can link to. The aside may not seem like enough, but I find that when I can give it its own space, I can expand on the idea. But I do it even if it seems short.

Another thing that happens in my first drafts, is that I discover in my first pass edit that a paragraph or two just doesn’t fit at all—it’s not an aside, I was just rambling. I don’t delete the text, I move it to my notes as the seed of a new idea. I discussed this in Write While True Episode 6: Editing First Drafts. If those paragraphs are developed enough, I’ll start a quick draft in my blog editor to look at later.

Finally, some posts are cohesive, but just too long. Those can usually be broken up into a few parts, which make it easier to digest. The individual posts are often easier to link to because they are focused. For example, I learned three lessons from Art and Fear, but by breaking out the “Thousands of Variations” into its own podcast, I got three podcasts out of those lessons, but also, this one is easier to refer to.