Editor Wanted: Because Less Is More

Las Vegas, 4/18/2012.   Weather will finally hit the 80s today - it has been hotter at home in Vermont so far this week than here in Nevada.  Groups and small talk.  Tweet talks.

Had a long after-dinner discussion with someone whom I deeply respect in our little computer refurbishing community last night.  I know something in the blog wasn't resonating with him, thought we'd have a drink and he'd give me some guidance.   He's 11 years older than me, started out as a hippy scavenging from his job on a garbage truck, amazed by what people throw away.

Benjamin Franklin at work on a printing press. Repro of a Charles Mills painting

While he said he could respect the long-bomb "Foreign Affairs" posts, that he simply didn't have time for them, and said more importantly that my denser posts, digressions, and obscure historical parallels were losing people he hoped would be my allies.  He says that groups in the refurbishing community, in particular, could become a groundswell of support for the "geeks of color", the counter- obsolescence planning, and other crusades I'm engaging.

Sounds like a case for less is more.

Now, this blog began (if you go back to the first years posts) as a journal I was convinced that no one at all was reading.   I was shocked by the first comment ever posted... "Not quite no one."

Well, my secret desire is that I'm going to have time one day to tear all 2000 pages (including a number of as-yet unpublished posts that I wasn't happy with) down into 249 pages that say something that hasn't been said in a way that more people would listen to.  I don't happen to care whether that's during my lifetime.  I'm acutely, or rather chronicaly aware I could die next year.

My evening mentor said that's fine, but he'd like to see me pay $14 per hour to some college student or professor just to edit each post as it comes out.  After listening to him, it seems ironically more arrogant not to pursue the idea.

Below the fold... I can't help myself.  There are other writers besides Franklin and I who went all stream of consciousness, without an editor, and require professors to bird-dog their most relevant passages...

Try reading Marx

In the meantime, what I've been doing is taking the diamonds less-in-the-rough and giving them to professional periodicals, like Motherboard.tv, Waste and Recycling News, and Big Think.  Sometimes they get run, sometimes not.  They get edited.

There has been, overall, a cooling down in 2012.  Hopefully the steel of my argument is hardening, and I can find someone to sharpen it.  The posts like this one - writers writing about the act of writing - I cannot think of anyone who'd want to read it, except perhaps for someone who really cares about the same environmental and social and legal causes I care about, who wants to watch the birthing of a seminal work.  I'm a proud father who sees my baby blog for its potential to change the world, and can love it as only a father can, seeing flaws as something which I have faith it will outgrow.

The most important things in our lives consume us, as parents, in every detail.  It's part of caring about someone or something more than you care about yourself.  Little in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has to do with anything he did as a statesman or inventor.  It's about a young guy who wanted to be a publisher, and his trips to buy used and semiknockdown printing press parts, the people he met he respected, and those misguided, who gave him the unremarkable experiences which somehow made him worth reading.


Sigh... that last paragraph has to go...  I'll never be de Tocqueville or Franklin.  I need to write for a public which has many more distractions than we had in the 1800s and 1900s, not to myself.  There are a million kitty cat youtube videos out there which will bring world peace by distracting future Hitlers from making Kampfs.

The purpose of the editor is like a schoolteacher.   If I try home-schooling my entire blog, who knows what it will grow up to be, but it will likely be less socially connected and accessible and friendly.

Just how important do I think recycling is?  I chose it as a career in high school.  It's the perfect combination of the least important job in social circles, and yet environmentally valiant.  It's as old as the second arrowhead.  But there's so much more beneath it than most people are saying about it.  Patent extension doctrine, exchange and trade between rich and poor, internet revolutions, racial profiling, carbon policy... all in the blue box on curb, or hewed from the landfill in .

Whom the hell did he think he was writing for?