Sumana

As I celebrate my fifteenth wedding anniversary and think about the long durable things we work on, I am thinking about patience.

"Somebody Will". "I am willing to sacrifice something I don't have / For something I won't have / but somebody will someday."

I've been attempting to work on my patience. I'm working on a book which will be the longest document I've ever written, and which will probably go through more and longer editing and revision passes than anything I've ever made. I'm doing this because I see an infrastructural need in free and open source software, and even if this book succeeds it will take years to change the field. The project of FLOSS, itself, trying to liberate people from being programmed by the software we use, is so huge and slow. And that's only one of the wheels against which I want to put my shoulder; there are so many gross, exploitative, destructive systems I want to smite.

I'm sustained by words by Tressie McMillan Cottom:

"You just have to know that they won your lifetime. It doesn’t mean you don’t try or work or whatever but you have to learn to fight for wins you won’t experience. That’s life, I think. That’s what I get from old Black people. You do it because it needs to be done, not because it’s being done for you."

and by João Costa Vargas:

“Once we accept that we are not wanted. Once we accept that we are not loved. It is very liberating. .... once we accept the logic of the runaway slave.... we can begin to do the work of abolition.”

I am loved; the support of loving friends -- like my spouse -- makes it more possible to accept the possibility, the reality, that I/we have opponents and that they do not love me/us. And to plant seeds that I hope the next generation can harvest.

I am writing a book about open source maintainership. I had planned to get the book to editors/agents by the end of this year; I have made very little progress on it this year so now my goal is to have a small self-published early version of the book available by the end of the year.

Recently I wrote up a blog post about how the hobby writing project I did Sept-Oct felt doable for me, and how to apply those lessons to my book project I've been procrastinating on. Having a little writing prompt every day feels like it will help. I'm also planning on blogging stuff as I write it, or posting it publicly somewhere. Maybe a GitLab repo to start?

November -- there's NaNoWriMo. It's for novels. I saw that there are some rebels who use it for nonfiction, but I don't want to deliberately contravene the goals of NaNoWriMo so I'm not signing up for it formally, but I am committing to writing each day in November as a way to accumulate a lot of progress and momentum for the book.

Today I sat down with Leonard and he helped me restore my faith in my current outline, and I developed a template for each chapter which will make it easier for me to write them, and I wrote seven writing prompts so now I have writing exercises/chapters to start for each day in the coming week.

I also signed up for a daily words community on Dreamwidth, thedailywriter, to give myself people I am accountable to. I will also tell y'all: I want to write 400 words per day in November, as a minimal goal. On good days I know I will blow way past that! But just -- every day I want to write at least 400 words.

Any of you doing daily writing in November? If you're posting daily "I wrote [number] words!" then where are you doing that? (Edited to add: Or whatever your writing goal is -- duration-based, for instance.) I'd like to join in.

[Cross-posted to Cogito, Ergo Sumana]