i wrote a whole book about introspection, in part because i believe i’m pretty good at it, and i believe i’ve gotten a lot of value from it, and i’ve helped lots of people get value from getting better at it too. but that doesn’t mean i actually introspect a lot, or even “as much as would be optimal for me”. come to think of it i haven’t done much “proper” introspective journaling in quite some time, which seems like a bit of a fail on my part. so maybe i’ll do some now, in real time
i have always been someone with many competing interests and curiosities, which is something that has been both wonderful and terrible for me, sometimes simultaneously. i have so many things i’d like to be doing, and if i’m not careful, i end up spending all my time and energy simply switching between them, without making any substantial progress on anything. sometimes i manage to convince myself that this is fine, actually, and that i’m doing a kind of meta-work by going around touching everything, a sort of “management by walking around”, tending to my mental garden with little touches. but sometimes it feels quite apparent that i’m “just” avoiding doing anything, because of inertia, or flinching from discomfort. this often feels to me like i’ve been sitting too long in a bath, which was pleasant and warm earlier, but has now gone cold.
one of the reasons i’ve been taking so long with my substack posts is that i want the essays to be really good, and i haven’t properly articulated what “really good” means to me. so i’m stymied by vagueness. i know that even with my substack, with a tagline “all the channels at once”, I stubbornly want to achieve many things simultaneously. have i listed them out before? I vaguely feel like I have. Have I listed them out in a substack post? I’m not so sure. In which case it’s probably worth repeating myself, since evidently I didn’t get the message clearly enough myself the first time, if there was a first time and i wasn’t just imagining it or writing it in my notes or drafts somewhere.
part of me wants my substack to be autobiographical. i’ve been wanting to write my memoirs since i was a kid. before I wrote and published Friendly Ambitious Nerd, one of my projects was to publish an ebook memoir titled Naughty Boy. That project now feels sorta quaint and irrelevant, FAN does a better job in some respects. So I then wondered, should I repurpose Naughty Boy into maybe a series of substack essays? like, 3-5 essays about my life so far? A part of me got excited about the idea, but another part pushed back saying “that’s too self-indulgent, that’s too much about myself, Voltaic Verses is supposed to be all the channels at once, not just The Visakan Veerasamy Channel.” And then I got disheartened for a while, but then I thought about it further and realized, hey, it’s not like I ever stick to any one single topic anyway. If I did write a series of autobiographical essays, it would be inevitable that they would contain other things as well. I would definitely find ways to sneak in commentaries about culture, and I’d likely talk about history, and quote a bunch of cool people. So I’m still open to the idea of trying to condense my entire life into a handful of essays.
part of me wants my substack to be about creativity and the creative process, but not too much. one of my favorite books of all time is Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art, and I feel like I could probably write my own remix of that book. But I don’t want to be a creative who writes primarily about creativity. That feels too self-referential for my taste. Stephen Pressfield himself wrote screenplays and he wrote at least a couple of novels, one about golf and another about the Battle of Thermopylae, before he wrote about writing. I think that’s the right way to do things. I do have the draft of a novel about local music, maybe I could tell that story? I also have a collection of drafts and sketches of short stories that I’d like to put together someday, but that feels a bit premature. But maybe I could talk about that. A post about my love of stories in general, I think is something I’ve circled around writing so much that it’s worn me out.
part of me wants my substack to be what I’d describe as “old timey magazine columns”. lemme quote from an old thread: “made a couple of new friends yesterday and they asked completely reasonable questions about my work, which I don’t actually get very often and don’t really have great answers to. “What do you write about?” I’m a bit of a media theorist, a bit of an old-timey magazine columnist…
the annoying thing about my work is that I’m trying to do trickster shit, and the worst or hardest way to do trickster shit is to advertise that outright. One frame is that I’m trying to “do education” without labelling myself an educator, without lecturing or preaching…
another frame I used is that “it’s sort of like being a travel writer but not necessarily actually writing about going to different countries, more about seeing with new eyes”
another is that it’s about trying to get people to see how they see.
Herb wrote jokes, gossip, puns and anecdotes for 60 years as “a continuous love letter to San Francisco” and I’d basically like to do my version of that, for nerds worldwide. he wrote 16,000 columns of 1,000 words each, coined the term “beatnik”, popularized the term “hippie”. This is pretty much the spirit of what I wanna be doing with my writing. His columns offer “everything you expect from an entire newspaper”
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we don’t root for perfect characters or for perfect authors. we’re looking for something real
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what else do i want my substacks to do? i want them to have great quotes in them, pointers, references, trails for people to follow. you should always come away from a visakanv substack post with at least one new curiosity, something to add to your to-read/watch list. was recently reminded of how Maxis games like SimCity and The Sims came with lists of recommended reading. I loved that so much.
abandoned