The Active Pursuit of Incompletion
Daniel Webster embarked on a fool's mission when he resolved to produce a dictionary, for his product would simply have to be incomplete or never be finished. It's been a work in process for two hundred years and will forever be on its way to completion without ever arriving. Still, we can hold a dictionary and look up words even though the book's eternally less than comprehensive. What in this world does not resemble this? My Publishing work will never be finished. Neither will your work. We still engage, with diminishing belief that we fully understand anything, emerging experts at not being an expert in anything yet. I seem asymptotic to myself, a work in process and not one in the process of completing but in the active pursuit of incompletion. It has never been a lick different here, and don't let anybody tell you differently!
Weekly Writing Summary
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I began my writing week confessing to a shortcoming just short of sin in *A-Eye, where I admitted that I'd started using an Artificially Intelligent editing engine to proof my writing. This posting proved the most popular this period. "I never learned my grammar. I mean that I never could remember the rules. I have always relied upon a kind of intuition instead, a felt sense that resulted in my own quirky style, which might be an alternative way of saying that I have always written wrong."

" … a rather bleak and lonely job …"
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I reported on the increasingly complicated process of publishing my daily stories in Choreography. "I understand that nobody's ever figured out how to document Choreography, though there's a notation; it requires a tremendous amount of interpretation. Dance routines depend upon repetition on top of the originating inspiration."

"I build my castle upon shifting sands."
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I mused about the taming I do when preparing my stories for publishing in Homogenizing. "When creating, the writer wisely ignored many of the lessons their teachers tried to impart in favor of listening to their small, almost still voices emanating from their heart. Hearts do not know crap about comma placement, however, and no amount of intuition, no matter how damned well-intended, can predict what a Grammar Nazi might insist. It seems helpful to pass the work by Hoyle to gain his perspective, but a writer must never cede creative rights to any rule book."
“ … only become accessible once Homogenized …”
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I watched myself stumble into one sure and unavoidable result of professional practicing, KnowingNuthingness. "I am learning that everyone occasionally catches themself KnowingNuthingness. The question then transforms from, "How do I demonstrate my competence? into "How might I humbly perform my practice?" The former screams a neediness as if the practitioner could not possibly afford to make mistakes in the practice. The latter accepts some underlying fallibility, a kind of knowing about incomplete knowing that might delineate the difference between a wannabe and an authentic practitioner."

"It's an unfair trade …"
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I caught myself slowing down and stalling, a state I defensively labeled StrategicHesitation. "Head in clouds, navigation becomes iffy—head above clouds, landings, speculative. We operate to big what-ifs when we first attempt to make any improvement. A step in what seems like the right direction will almost always be easier to recover from than any leap made in any direction."

"I might just be playing chicken with myself."
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I apologize for attempting to describe the quirky means I have been attempting Publishing in Parallelling. "I maintain and manage a massively parallel publishing system consisting of many disparate parts conceptually connected but otherwise distant from and invisible to each other. I serve as the sole integrating factor, for only I know where the bodies have been buried because I was the one who buried every one."
"My world, like yours, thrives on such intentions."
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I ended my writing week by comparing my preparation for Publishing to Bletting, a strategic rotting. "I catch myself wondering whether I wrote this. It seems so much different with color, texture, and flavor aged within a whit of turning rotten."
" … maturing into final form."
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I found this writing week profoundly frustrating as well as enormously reassuring. I caught myself being myself when wrestling with incorporating artificial intelligence technology into my Publishing, perhaps because that was its first encounter with any intelligence. Unsurprisingly, the resulting choreography astounded me. I caught myself knowing nothing again, a familiar sensation, before invoking strategic hesitation. I realized that I had been multitasking, maintaining a massively parallel system, before ending my writing week, acknowledging that my sense that my stories had been rotting might just have been some necessary bletting of them. This writing week perfectly represented what I intended to describe as MetaProcessing.
Thank you for following along!
©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved