Posted December 24th 2023
Lately, whenever I play minecraft I feel the urge to build a massive bridge. Something that surpasses architecture, becoming geography, something with a design that presupposes some sort of purpose but whose scale has clearly surpassed whatever it was meant for. And you can walk on it of course. There’s a great view, for sure, hundreds of meters above the ground. Maybe even ride a train across the top. Why is this vision stuck in my head? It’s not about a game anymore, it’s become a symbol, an idea. There’s a bridge but it’s not made of a material and it doesn’t really have a height and is it still a bridge if it doesn’t lead anywhere? Something that looks like it should be an illusion, part of the skybox, just a texture in the distance, but when you get close enough you find it shockingly real and grounded, something that can be touched and traversed. Supassing again geography to become pure geometry, a line that cuts the landscape in half. An amendment to the spheroid of the earth.
I want to write about this bridge. Explore all these different parts of the concept, give them each the time they deserve. Is it like a mountain? Is it natural/manmade/divine? Does it end/does it have to? When a finite being like a human that moves slow and dies fast comes across something so vast, can you treat it like the kind of object it is? If there was a bridge that had an end but took 3 lifetimes to traverse could you see it the same way you would a normal river-crossing bridge? I could make this part of my mythology. Write a fantasy story with it at the center. Make it a set piece, a character, a metaphor. Something is making this idea stick and I need to find out what.
I want to write more and I want to be good at it. But I know that being good at it is a result of writing more, so for now I just want to write more. Centuries aren’t too good at that. If I want to write more I need to be able to write decent sentences on the first try, instead of obsessing over every word and punctuation mark, trying to squeeze every last drop of meaning from what’s given to me.
There’s more to write about than this bridge, it’s just on the mind because the winter break minecraft server is up again. There are other things worth exploring this thoroughly, some vague some specific. And I’ll need more than a century to really dig in to them.
I’ve been writing (nearly) daily for less than two months, and I already feel my relationship with the english language changing. How was this not noticed before? There was so much nuance going over my head this whole time! Trying to get a sequence of sentences in the right tense is deliberate now. And I see these tiny decisions in what I read, too. Rearranging a sentence to put the focal point at the end. Mixing short and long sentences to keep the flow interesting. How it feels wrong to say sentence five times in five sentences. Awful mouthfeel, that word. I’ve never been good with s’s.
And my god, I’m a writer now! I wrote some things! And they’re up on this site and people read it and sometimes they tell me they liked it! And this isn’t something I thought about when starting the century a day thing, that I’m Publishing My Work every single day. By the time I was done writing adding, the new post was routine, almost muscle memory. I thought that the act of writing would be the impactful part, but just having it up somewhere feels really good.
So, is that how you write longer-form posts? I don’t quite remember. Is it legal to post more than 100 words at once? This feels excessive. I’ll- i’ll just put this up now.