Unpublished

The blog is up to 1001 post (1002 including this one).  If you count the unpublished drafts.  I'll announce when I break a thousand published.  Should be soon.  I'm counting because I just decided not to publish one.

Some of the unpublished ones are first drafts of articles that were published.  A few are crap.
But there are a few...

In some I couldn't get the tone right.  There are certain things you can't learn when things are going well.  Learning about inner workings of some organizations requires enough of a consistent type of painful mistake that you can see and come to predict the pattern. Learning anything about the mechanics of a violent assault almost always requires mistakes.  You learn certain things because you are stupid in certain ways...and almost every time I've tried to write about that, it comes off sounding whiny and self-pitying to my own ears.  I simply don't have the skill as a writer to make certain points in the right way.

Same with certain kinds of clarification.  When "Meditations on Violence" first came out, some of the reviewers read diametrically opposite things in the same material. I'd been warned about that by the professional writers, but my first instinct was to explain, to clarify... and that fails on two levels.  First, people will read what they want or expect to read and that includes in the clarification.  Second, it just sounds defensive.  Especially if you are defensive it serves no purpose but to validate the point of view.
Actually, there's a third-- anything you write must stand on its own.  Writing is a telepathic message into the future.  You won't always be alive to clarify.

There are subjects I stay away from, but have strong opinions about.  Especially when the political silly season was on, I wanted to write about economics and politics.  People conflate money and wealth; conflate jobs and work.  But these issues are so tied to the limbic system it would do no good, except give people an excuse to not listen to core things.

Some of the unpublished stuff is just too personal.  I write fairly close to the bone here, share, share some deep water stuff.  But there are some wounds that I'm afraid will always be fresh.  Some complicated feelings that I don't think can ever be shared adequately in the written word.  Some that can only be grasped by a very few people.  And some of this is stuff I want to write, stuff that tries to claw its way out of me and onto paper.  Maybe I'll let K publish it when I croak.

And some of it is just pure mean.  And K tells me not to be mean.