# 20

I haven't opened this site in so long that it forgot I was logged in. Or was it when Brave updated and logged me out of everything?

I want to start writing consistently. Recently I read Silent Witch, a Japanese web novel. I was tracking my pace and it really helped me with the consistency.

In 2020 I was making a game in Unity and tracking my progress. It also helped.

I've been thinking I should track my writing, too. I'm not sure about the system, but I think similarly to the Silent Witch, I will just wing it and update it as I go. But the system is just the tip of the iceberg of questions. I'm writing here as a kind of warm up. To ease myself in. But does this post even count is one of the questions.

1. Why?
2. What?
3. Do I write in English or Russian?
4. Does private writing count, something that stays on my PC in notes?
5. Does public writing count, if it's just a rambling journal entry like this one?
6. If it needs to be public, where do I put it?
7. If I focus on quantity that much, do I abandon quality?

Let me tackle these questions, make the tracking sheet and call it a day I guess.

## Why

The trigger for this latest urge to write was a podcast with Patrick McKenzie. He spoke about this a few times over the years, but basically - if you have a collection of technical or other interesting writings, it becomes a good asset, which is good to have. Every single piece becomes an asset.

Additionally, many people mention how writing helps focus your thinking. "If you haven't written a thought, it's as if you never had it".

I want to leave digital artifacts after myself. Even if it's something barely anyone cares about, I want to be able to write something and claim my tiny corner of knowledge.

So, my reasons for writing are:

1. Leaving digital artifacts, because it's cool
2. Creating pieces of writing as assets because it's useful
3. Focusing my thinking
4. Something else I can't quite phrase yet. Similar to the urge to write when I read a bad fanfic. "I want this to exist, and I know I have the power to do so".

Everything above points to technical writings. I also want to write fiction and personal opinions. And a journal, like here. The reasons here are not as noble I guess. It's just me treating the Internet itself as a huge social media platform.

## What

I know the key type of writing I'm aiming at is the technical one. "My experience with LLMs". "My expeirience trying to write a pairwise ranking system". "My experience trying to set up a local speech-to-text system". These are interesting, these are great, they are valuable.

However, they are hard. Each one requires experience, they are not essays. And here, in this particular writing exercise, I aim at quantity, not quality. I want to learn what it means to write. I started making analogies and they didn't work in my favor. It may be a futile exercise, and maybe I'll rethink it halfway, but I also don't want to burn out, so I'm going to continue even if it's futile.

This exercise is basically "writing every day", with some additional rules. I can't write a technical report every day, so it's going to be mostly journaling and thoughts I had, with maybe some fiction. Maybe "treating internet as a social media" is the most honest reason for why I'm writing this. I want my thoughts, my random ideas to also become assets. Instead of saying "oh yeah, I read that book, it was fine I guess?", I could say "I wrote a review and saved my ideas so I can go back to them later".

This wiki is kind of already perfectly structured, isn't it? It's supposed to be a wiki of my mind, which I abandoned. So maybe that's what I'm going to write. This exact wiki. (Maybe a different engine).


## Language

Some of the friends I'd like to share my writings with don't know English, only Russian. However, if I want my writing to be accessible to the internet, including my international friends, it's better to write in English.

Originally I didn't know what I was going to write, but now that I'm convincing myself to continue filling up this wiki, I know it's going to be in English.

## Does private count?

I would say "only fiction". It's easy to just write up something random on any topic if I know I'm not posting it anywhere. This whole page right now is a stream of thoughts, but I'm at least somewhat trying to contain myself. In private notes, it's all going to be too random and noisy. Not an asset, not useful for thinking, just cheating for the quotas.

An exception is a high-effort post on something I don't want to post. Journal-like entries and ramblings - only public. Effortposts - private is also OK.

## Does public count if it's a journal like this?

Let's say it does.

This rule may change.

I'm thinking of including some weighting - maybe each journal-word counts half as much towards my daily goal as a non-journal one? For not, to make it simple and easy for the start - it just counts.

## Where do I put it?

I didn't know what I was writing the question, but now I know it's going to be this wiki.

Wait. But this question was important because I wanted to be able to share my new writings with people. Maybe I can make telegram/twitter posts about new posts here. Would be fun to have an RSS, but I should have some worthy writings first.

## Do I abandon quality?

Picking the wiki as what I write helped here.

Weighing function will help, too.

I'll think more about the content, but the priority is going to be:

1. Effort-post if I can
2. Reviews of media, more complex ideas
3. Journaling

Maybe journaling would even be harder to write because I don't want to write much about the recent happeings in my life here. So I don't think I'd be able to cheat my system with a thousand word essay about how good my lunch was or something, even if I wanted.

## Basically

I write this mind-palance-wiki again. I try to write it more like what I used to do in telegram, or what I do in obsidian - just stream of consciousness notes. Not essays. Not reports. Not a high effort blog.

I started writing some memories about my past projects. That sounds like a fun thing to continue.

I wrote more that 1000 words here. It sounds more than enough. I think I'll make my goal 500 or even less than that. I ended up going 10x my goal for the Silent Witch, and here too - I'll always my able to increase it, so I should start small. Today is Sunday, so I don't have work, so I can potentially write more. I've been writing for about 30 minutes. 30 minutes per day sounds fine. Maybe even too much at first. We'll see.

Oh, I should also write more about Japan here. And my N2 disaster. Well, I have ideas for the next few days, and we'll see if I run out.