Spartan_Warrior wrote:Today we're heading to the county fair and I'm picking up some homesteading books from the library. At a certain point, though, I would have to start actually doing things to build practical knowledge and skill, but I'm really reluctant to start gardens, get chickens, et cetera, when I pretty much know the absolute maximum I'll stay in this house is five years. Maybe I shouldn't let that stop me?
Go ahead and do it and consider it tuition money which will be well spent even if it fails. I've been flip-flopping a lot in the past between being a nomad and being a homesteader. I thought and still think that homesteading is the rational choice (the vector with the most consilience behind it anyway), so I figured I could turn our house into this urban homestead as a practice run for a small farm somewhere in Vt like the Nearings. My plans were to eventually dig out the entire lawn and over a few years transform it into this massively intensive food production facility. I'd save rain water. I'd have three different compost operations going. I'd even go as far as keeping rabbits in the basement like Possum-living; and maybe even some unpermitted chickens like a lot of other people seem to do around here. However, I realized after the initial year that I simply don't enjoy the process that much. It's very similar to the recent [url=
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=8006]STEM[/thread] in which I never really done much gardening before but figured it was a good idea and therefore tried it ... and found that I don't inherently enjoy the garden equivalence of debugging or reading manuals. Yes, I got the seed catalog. Some people think that's the most exciting thing to come in at the beginning of the season. I haven't opened mine yet. On top of that, the garden stuff (and worse, the house stuff) requires at least some maintenance that takes away attention from things I'd rather be doing. I now appreciate Zuckerberg's statements about preferring young people, not because they're young, but because they haven't signed up for a bunch of "maintenance" yet.
So I am happy that I figured all this out before I literally, not figuratively, bought the farm. I'm only out a hundred bucks and a few hundred hours. An actual homestead would have been a much more expensive mistake to make. If you know for sure that you're going to move, then instead of growing food, grow pretty flowers ... figure out whether it excites you to have the best landscaped back/front yard on the street. That will likely have some sales value when the house goes. If that's fun, food will be even funner. If it isn't, ...
Spartan_Warrior wrote:Funny you should say that; to be honest, the only thing I'm remotely inclined to write at the moment would be a 1984-meets-Blade Runner style dystopian sci-fi that I could use to metaphorically rail against the sociopolitical situation/future. Obviously inspired by my most recent political misadventures. The main reason I can't motivate myself isn't the money, though, but the lack of readership. (Related, of course, but one has bothered me far more than the other.) It feels like a waste of my voice, like shouting into a pillow (or at a protest). I don't know what I expected, but I guess my vanity has not been satisfied by this platform.
The ideal audience to write for is "your slightly younger self but without knowledge you now have". I recently saw it repeated in some Feynman book. This is a hard lesson to learn or accept. I used to know it intuitively, but then the success of the ERE book kinda made me forget it and I started thinking way too much about my audience or my potential audience for my next book; how different subjects or words would go over with different groups; how the same words would be understood quite differently at different stages of competence. That was the lesson I learned from the reader feedback of the ERE book and it has more or less stymied me from finishing other books. I've started almost a dozen, but they never get finished before I change my mind about something because I figure that I should also address readership subgroup Y and that how I addressed subgroup X might be incompatible. I didn't have that problem when I wrote the ERE book. I was writing it for me and the approximately 30-50 core blog readers I expected to buy it. I need to get my head back to that stage.
While the above rule seems to be non-fiction based, the fiction-based rule I've heard is that you write because you have these stories in your head that need to come out. Writing them down creates a kind of closure on the story. In that way it's similar to solidifying non-fiction knowledge above. I write something down so I no longer have to keep the juggling balls airborne in my head. Maybe these stories are political comments. They can be.
In any case, if writing for fame, your input effort has practically no effect on the result insofar as the writing goes. If you were writing for fame or money, the key focus should be on consumer research and marketing. In such a case your writing only has to be good enough. If you're writing to be seen or protest, do it directly via a blog. Write blog posts that are interesting to your target group and then comment liberally on other similar blogs. There's some Sun Tzu to this: "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win". If you don't mind some 'tough love', protesting seems a lot more like going to war first ... as does writing and then trying to become famous.
