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outline for ancillary dath ilan post
check in A clean slate for getting back to memoir editing? (Maybe I should also clean up the mess of unchecked local notes files that you thankfully can't see while browsing the repository.) I had the "Facing Reality" review coda in a not-checked-in file, I think because I was planning on just pushing out the review without the coda, but if the whole post is shelved for now, it can sit on the shelf together.
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memoir: fresh look TODOs, yank dath ilan comments to ancillary post
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memoir: yank out a new pt. 3?!? "Dangerous Idea" was getting long, and it has a very natural cutpoint (starting HRT/promising not to yell under my own name) ... so, I guess I'll use the cutpoint (now that I've thought of a title)? "If Clarity" is also long, but I'd really rather not split it, because I don't think it has such a natural cutpoint (and making this Whole Dumb Story more than 7 parts would be ridiculous). If I can keep it under 30K, I think that'll be fine. (Or maybe "It does not, actually, have a happy ending" in December 2019 is the natural cutpoint, and then next post would be relatively short, but not too short, because it covers both "Trans Kids on the Margin" (early 2020) and the "Lenore" disaster (late 2020)? Okay, maybe we'll do 8 parts. Don't worry about it now.)
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yank out a new pt. 7?!? Okay, maybe we will go to seven parts (eight, counting "Sexual Dimorphism")? The Planecrash analysis was so long that it deserves to be mostly its own post (the file broke 30K words), which can also include the epilogue/conclusion. And, if I'm shooting for ~18K word posts rather than ~30K word posts, it's likely that pt. 2 will undergo a similar split ("Blanchardian awakening" vs. "going crazy" is a very natural break). But then "If Clarity" is still long ... I don't think I want to go to eight parts if I can avoid it. Or is it crazy that the Eliezerfic fight gets its own post?! Surely it's not that important a part of the story?! I don't know. After I have a gapless draft, I should hire a professional editor. But to do that—I need a gapless draft.
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memoir: yank out a new pt. 6?! "Agreeing With Stalin" was starting to push 30K words, and I still have the bulk of the Eliezerfic fight analysis to write, and the analysis of what's wrong with the "agreeing with Stalin" policy deserves to be the central focus of its own blog post, without too much Diary-like blather hanging off either end of it.
memoir: yank out a new pt. 4!! Previously, I was imagining a three part structure, with the middle part being substantially bigger: "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea" (20K words), "Hill of Validity" (40K words), "Agreeing With Stalin" (20K words). The reason for keeping the middle part so large was because I thought the period from November 2018 (the Twitter thread that started the civil war) to September 2020 (the end of the Category War) was a unit that should be kept together. But when I started looking for the median of the piece by wordcount, it turns out it was actually after the discussion of "... Boundaries?" That actually is a good cutoff point! That is, previously I was thinking the structure was "2017 AGP freakout", "Category War", "political epilogue"—and I wasn't happy with how that put the December 2020 psychiatric disaster at the top of the political epilogue. (If it didn't belong in the story of the Category War ending September 2020, it chronologically fit in at the beginning of the next post.) But if Nov. 2018–Apr. 2019 is its own part, then the next part becomes the Whole Dumb Story of my alliance with the Vassarites, and it is natural for that to end with the psychiatric disaster of December 2020! I also get to use an awesome partial quote from Michael as a title (which just occured to me now while trying to think of a title). A 4·20K tetrology is better for readers than a middle-lop-sided 20K/40K/20K trilogy. There are also seem to be psychological/motivational benefits: this way, I'm actually done with pt. 3! (No TODO blocks, and probably not even that much editing.) If I finish what's now pt. 5 soon (seems doable), then I "just" have to go back an fill in the history for pt.s 2 and 4. I also think it changes the focus, in a good way?! By framing pt. 4 as the story of the Vassarites, I feel more like I'm telling a story, rather than writing a hate letter about Yudkowsky. I think this is good for me.
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check in I got distracted from this blog/project by a Dolphin War and was crazy for a while. Clean the slate.
drafting "Reply to Nate Soares"
check in, including textbook notes and trilogy shoveling The already-written content for "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea" and "Hill of Validity" are such a mess that I want them in different files: start the draft clean from the begining, and shovel in prewritten content as it fits into the narrative.