#1 - What is This Thing? (July 2022)
Why do a blog about developing a book? To be honest, my initial instinct was that this is a bad idea — an act of narcissism. The fear of publicly airing uninteresting content without the self-awareness to realize that is the case is a powerful restraint that under most conditions would keep me from doing this.
But some recent experiences on social media (yes, yes, I realize that this brings its whole bank of flashing red lights) have brought me around. On something of a lark, I tweeted a few images of interesting finds while doing research in the Library of Congress. The urge was purely playful but actually led to some beneficial exchanges.
That happy experience with sharing is the inspiration for this blog. It validated that my sense of what was interesting was at least shared by a few other souls. (Of course, if I have no sense at all as to what historic items are of interest, then I have absolutely no business writing a book and I should figure that out as soon as possible!) Twitter can only go so far, so the refresh of the website was a good opportunity to go to a more flexible format that can accommodate all of the great stuff that I am finding.
That leads to another reason for this blog. With so much great material, it will serve as an outlet for content that will not receive due attention (or maybe any attention at all) in the final manuscript. It is both an opportunity to share the highlights of my intellectual journey while also offering the opportunity for others to help shape that journey through feedback on Twitter and LinkedIn. At the least, it will be fun, though I hope that it might also help make the typical monologue of writing a book into a dialogue to everyone’s benefit.
Thanks for coming along on the intellectual journey!