Whither Writing (A Ten-Year Retrospective)

Writing is in a weird place at the moment. And yet I am compelled to continue doing it. (In between travel and kidney stones.)

Is there some deeper meaning to the traffic cone on Sherlock’s head? Or is it just silly vandalism? Most people seemed to think it was the latter, but I think it was a hidden symbol of some mystery. How could it not be?

I.

June 25 was the tenth anniversary of my blog. I understand that, traditionally, an anniversary post would come out on the actual day, or at least the same week, but I blew past the occasion without even realizing it. And then, even when I did realize it, I was too busy with other stuff to jump on it. In fact I haven’t posted anything since July 3. I must have been overcome by the patriotic fervor of our nation’s 250th anniversary.¹

As a better person than me has said, it’s self-indulgent, and even unseemly to dwell overly long on one’s recent gap in writing. But this is destined to be a very self-indulgent post so I’m going to ignore her (obviously wise) advice, and explain the gap in great detail. July 3 was two days after my first experience passing a kidney stone. Then two days after that (July 5) I went on a week-long road-trip around the Pacific Northwest.

The map shows the trip as starting in Crescent City. Actually I flew into Eugene. Drove to Crescent City. Picked up my friend from a conference of radical environmentalists. And then drove back through Eugene on the way to Port Angeles.

After that, I spent a lot of my writing time revising a paper I’m hoping to publish in an LDS academic journal. I was on a tight deadline because on July 27 I was flying out to attend Gen Con for a week. I went straight from Indianapolis to Scotland, for a vacation with my wife, where I was cursed to pass yet another kidney stone in Edinburgh, within sight of the (Sir Walter) Scott Monument.

Taken from my hotel room after the pain had started but before I started involuntary moaning…

While returning from Scotland, near the end of the ten-hour flight from Amsterdam to SLC, I was struck by a horrible stomach bug.² Fortunately I managed to hang on until we landed before puking (though I was still on the airplane) and the next four days were not fun. (I know. TMI!) When I recovered from that I had basically three weeks of stuff to catch up on, and I had just about finished digging out when I took off again to help my daughter move to DC. I returned from that last Tuesday. All of which is to say it’s been an eventful couple of months.

Certainly the various trials, tribulations, and travel explain much of the gap, but I don’t think they explain all of it. I definitely have suffered from a decrease in my writing mojo lately. I wasn’t surprised by this. Summer is not a period generally associated with isolated, indoor activities. Over ten years of doing anything, one’s energy is going to ebb and flow. And finally writing is in a very weird place at the moment. Fortunately, on the one hand, while ten years of activity does tire one out, on the other hand a ten-year anniversary provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on what I was trying to do, where things stand, and whither I might go.

What do I mean when I say that “writing is in a weird place”? Well, there’s obviously the increasing quality of LLMs, and their ability to generate a post similar to mine in a few minutes.³ But also there is the enormous increase in the number of people producing some kind of content—people who are trying to make their voices and POVs stand out in an increasingly crowded information jungle. As someone who writes very much “on the side” and has no real desire to engage in the Darwinian struggle of subscriber-count fitness, what do I think I’m doing?

II.

Perhaps it’s best to start by looking back at what I was trying to do.

As I mentioned, I started the blog in 2016. At that point I was a year and a half into a lawsuit which had devastated my income while at the same time costing me a huge amount of money. (See my post about those dark days for a full accounting of the craziness.)

When you’re not working, you imagine that you’re going to do all sorts of things: read books, go hiking, play video games, etc. And maybe some people do those things, but most people I know who find themselves in this situation are so consumed by worries about the future, anger over the past, and generalized second-guessing that they largely freeze up. Mid-2016 was when I finally started to unfreeze. I was still several months away from re-establishing my business, and nearly two years away from the official end of the lawsuit, but I wasn’t actively spending money on attorneys, so I was feeling pretty good. But I digress…

In this moment of optimism I decided to start We Are Not Saved.⁴ Initially things were going to be more focused on religion. I’ve never shied away from religion at any point, but my religious focus was more overt at the beginning. Part of my motivation for starting the blog is that I thought (and still think) that the LDS church has some very interesting things to say about many of the modern “mysteries”: AI, Fermi’s Paradox, the Simulation Hypothesis, and potential civilizational exhaustion. The last category includes the terrain of all of our modern trends: loneliness, transhumanism, technological acceleration, and existential risk. As it turns out, these things quickly came to dominate. Perhaps those first few years represent the blog’s peak, when I had the greatest surplus of time, energy, and confidence. I remember someone strongly recommending my blog, but only the early stuff. Perhaps they have a point, but when I look back on those earlier posts I’m dismayed by my unearned certainty on many a subject. Which is not to say I wasn’t right, but I was also blithely unaware of opposing arguments.

Fortunately, I wasn’t unaware of my ignorance, and in order to combat it, I read, a LOT. This is good if you can absorb and remember it. If you can’t, it’s just costly and pointless signaling. This led to me deciding to review everything I read. I wanted a resource I could draw on years later to remind me what books I had read and what I thought of them.

I’m not sure why I decided to review EVERY book I read. (I mean does He Who Fights with Monsters 8 really need its own review so that 10 years later I can remember how much it annoyed me?⁵)And why every book, but zero movies, or long-form podcasts, or TV series? But I digress again. (I told you it was going to be self-indulgent.)

Eventually my rule about reviewing everything combined with increasing busyness led to this space being not much other than book reviews. And at this point, after a two-month gap I’m 51 books behind, so either I do nothing but catch up, or I pivot.⁶ But that’s the future. I still need to talk about the present.

III.

Here’s an interesting statistic I came across:

Take the Substack publications advertising a “thousands of subscribers” badge. As of July 2026, 15,800 of them have published nothing in 60 days, against 13,700 that are still going. More than half of that badge population has stopped, and the badge looks identical either way.

I don’t have thousands of subscribers, so what keeps me writing when over half the people who do have thousands of subscribers have backed off from regular publication?⁷

Clearly I can’t be motivated by subscriber quantity. (I am motivated by subscriber quality, and I think I’ve done pretty good on that front.) Even more clearly it can’t be for the money or the fame. I think, like most people who write for any significant period, at the root there has to be some sort of compulsion. You can’t not write.⁸

But what compels me? And did I lose sight of it over the last ten years? Did it gradually drift into something I had to do as opposed to something I wanted to do? Certainly I think there was a large element of “You have to get your reviews out for all these books” that was weighing me down over the last few months (even before the saga related above). And this weight, along with kidney stones, travel, and the increasing demands of my business, was eventually too much. (So much navel gazing!)

It’s a cliche, but also, like most cliches, representative of a foundational truth. The only way to maintain and enjoy a creative endeavor like this one is by drawing from a deep personal well of opinionated passion. And to the extent that my early stuff was good, and my later stuff was workmanlike, it’s because I deviated from that original, opinionated passion. This should not be taken as saying that my recent stuff was bad. I think a lot of it was quite good, but I suspect there was an obligation to the whole thing which dulled its edge. So what does that mean for the future?

IV.

The short answer is that I’m going to try to write less out of obligation and more from my compulsion to say what I think needs to be said. On top of this, despite my desire for nuance and understanding, I need to be more direct and more fearless. Because, as has been proclaimed, the hour is late (more on this in my next post as well).

As part of this I need to remove some of my sense of obligation, or all of the obligation I feel to my writing. The big thing is book reviews, but also any sort of schedule.⁹ There’s another cliche people like to use here, “It’s not about quantity. It’s about quality.” But that’s a deflection. Writing is threading the needle between the two. Much like sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, only in the age of AI the edge of the world lies just beyond them, and you can hear the ocean cascading into the abyss.

To get concrete, and perhaps a little tedious, the big change I’ve decided to make is with book reviews. For the vast majority of them I won’t be spending any time polishing them up for public consumption.¹⁰ Individual reviews will go out as Substack Notes. Then the plan is to post one, old-style, review each month. (I’m going to shoot for the beginning of the month, but see the aforementioned point about scheduling.) This review will link to the Notes for all the other reviews in that month, so at that point you can decide if any of them sound interesting.

That’s the end of the minutia, and almost the end of the introspection. I’m hoping that when people (the elect?) look back on my writing they will feel something similar to what Winston Churchill expressed after the Battle of El Alamein:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Which is to say I hope to be writing for a very long time yet, and as long as I write I will continue to maintain that Jeremiah was not just referring to his day, but our day as well when he said:

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

That’s even more true now than it was ten years ago, and it’s time to start unleashing some jeremiads.

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The primary moral to this post is that kidney stones suck! But the secondary moral is that anyone, no matter how old, no matter how broken, no matter how crazy, has the power within them to write a rambling post that very few people read. If you are one of those few, consider subscribing, or commenting, or restacking, or any of the dozens of other things people can do these days to boost something on the internet.

1. Which has so far been underwhelming. At the time of the bicentennial I was five, with only the very dimmest memories from the time, and it still seemed like a bigger deal than what we ended up doing this year. I blame both sides: the left for hating the idea of patriotism and the right for reducing it to kitsch. (Yes, that’s a hasty generalization, but all I have space for in a footnote.)

2. AI thinks it was norovirus, but who knows.

3. I’m counting the time it takes to craft the prompt, and some back and forth. The actual generation is even less.

4. My next post will go deeper into this phrase, and Jeremiah 8:20, which is where the phrase originates. I had initially intended to combine this post with the exegesis, but I eventually decided against it.

5. Looking back at the review now, there was some good stuff in there. But there were still probably better uses of my time.

6. Okay, I was already pretty behind before the “late unpleasantness”. I didn’t read 51 books in the last two months…

7. I’m using the phrase “backed off” as opposed to stopped. If I was in charge I would probably use something closer to “nothing in the last six months” as my standard for a stopped substack. But also the percentage has to be far greater for those with fewer than a thousand subscribers. In any case, if you’re curious, I double-checked and it will be 59 days between this post and that last one, so regardless of the correct criterion for “stopping” I have not met it. But it was a close-run thing.

8. I wish I had an additional compulsion to post on Twitter, interact with people on Discord, or be active on a message board. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m blessed to not have that compulsion. But I will say all the really successful writers seem to have both.

9. Everyone hopes that it will turn out that the oppressive nature of keeping to a schedule was stressing them out enough that they were paradoxically less productive. And that once they get rid of those expectations they will actually be more productive. That’s never how it works. But I wasn’t on much of a schedule anyway, so I don’t think there will be much of a difference.

10. There’s a time management system called the pomodoro, where you work in 25-minute blocks. I plan to spend no more than one pomodoro (or possibly two for important books) collecting whatever notes or thoughts I have and putting it into the world as a Substack Note. I hope to keep them charming and funny. Maybe they’ll be even more charming and funny (though see the previous footnote for how a similar delusion plays out).