🏁 Week 10: Good enough

Hi friends,

It’s February, and I’m back with the final edition of this newsletter!

I intended to send this out at week 10 of the project, comfortably before the end of 2022, and it’s now…week 16 🤦 and the beginning of February 2023 ⏰😱. But…all’s well that ends well! I’ve just posted a story that I’m very proud of, and I’m so excited to share it with you all. So without any further delay, here it is: the illustrated interactive “Life Story”!

(An aside: I know the title “Life Story” is supremely unimaginative — if you have any better title ideas, please send them my way!)

Readers who have been following the development of the story will notice that, while there are a few constants — a female protagonist who is obsessed with the Game of Life, a close friend who shares the protagonist’s interest — the narrative I’m sharing today is substantially different from the fragments I’ve shared so far. That’s because I spent the week before Christmas cutting and rewriting the story in response to a subscriber’s feedback (thanks, Nadine! ❤️). What’s left is simpler, tighter, and — I hope — better!

In defense of the tardiness of this final edition of the newsletter, I haven’t been idle over the five weeks since I finished working on the text of the story. I’ve been hard at work on the code powering the interactive Life simulations which are interleaved with the text of the story. If you’re interested in how I got these simulations working, I’ve written up a blog post describing the technical challenges and added an overview of the page’s technical design to the README for the code repository.

Before I conclude this final dispatch, some reflections:

Sharing my work every week on this newsletter has been good for me. It has forced me to focus on getting to “good enough” as quickly as possible. It has forced me to write rather than procrastinate with research.

I obviously underestimated how long it would take me to write the code powering the website. And I didn’t share any of that process on this newsletter. Then again, I didn’t need to. It’s easier for me to get excited about writing code than writing prose. Looking back, I see that I spent three times as much time coding (!) over the past five weeks than I did writing prose over the previous nine weeks. I find this a bit dispiriting, because this was supposed to be a writing project, not a coding project. Still, I know why it turned out that way. All that coding was hard work, but I looked forward to it, because I knew I was making progress. I find writing prose much more mysterious and uncertain. I’m never sure how much progress I’m making — or whether I’ve made progress at all — during a writing session.

Without the self-imposed obligation to share something every week and the (admittedly overstretched) 10-week deadline, I might not have had anything to share until…months? a year? from now (I fiddled with this idea for more than a year before starting work on it in earnest). So: thank you for holding me accountable!

On efficiency: I suspect that perhaps 35% of the code I wrote made it into the final page (I scrapped the first version of the code, written in Elm, for performance reasons; along the way, I also tried and discarded a bunch of attempts to improve performance in Elm).

On the storytelling side, roughly 25% of the scenes I wrote made it into the version of the story I’m sharing today (4/17 scenes), though this accounted for only 10% of the total text I produced over the course of working on the story (including research, notes, questions, and half-baked ideas).

That may sound low, but it’s much higher than the last big writing project I worked on, where less than 2% of the text I produced was fit for the final draft. So, on balance, I’m pretty happy with a 25% success rate.

Of course, there’s still room for improvement. Why did I cut 75% of the scenes I wrote? And how could I have written those scenes differently so that more of them were fit for the current version of the story?

The scenes I discarded can all be traced to two ideas:

1. that the protagonist should be motivated by the idea of stability (from week two)
2. that the story should be about the experience of being a woman in STEM (from week five)

Both were bad ideas because they expanded the scope of the story beyond what I was capable of taking on in ten weeks.

Using the idea of stability to motivate the protagonist required me to invent a bunch of new Life patterns (or at least, come up with some new plausible conjectures about what those patterns might look like). This proved difficult!

I want STEM to be more welcoming for women. But when I tried to write about the protagonist’s travails as a woman in a hostile STEM environment, I felt I didn’t have anything original to offer. Everything I wrote was recycled. For me, the most satisfying part of this effort was an interview I conducted with one of my college math professors to understand her experience as a woman in STEM during my protagonist’s time period. Her experiences were fresh and specific and infuriating in a way that my stock tales of workplace discrimination were not. If she’s willing, I’d love to write up that interview and share it later this year.

I discarded some bad ideas early, like the idea that the protagonist should be Latina — remember when Mariam was briefly named Mira with siblings Diego and Gloria? (because, I reasoned to myself, why not?) — a bad idea because I know nothing about what it’s like to be Latina. In the future, I’d like to recognize more of these scope-expanding bad ideas sooner and squash them so I can stay focused on the story I set out to create.

Anyway, enough reflection.

This is the last dispatch of this special-purpose, 10-issue newsletter. If you’ve enjoyed this story and want to stay up-to-date with what I’m working on next, the best way to do that is to subscribe to my main newsletter. A sneak preview of what I plan to share there over the next few months:

• A long-overdue essay about optimization culture
• A companion short story about a person who turns themself into a neural network in order to optimize their life
• A blog post about the program I’ve written to analyze my notes and help me find connections between all the different things I’m encountering and thinking about
• A walking tour of London I’ll be designing (topic tbd) and leading in September of this year
• …and hopefully more that I haven’t dreamed of yet!

Thanks for following along as I’ve worked on this short story. It means a lot to me that you believed in me and my work enough to sign up and keep reading.

So long,

Justin