Free Refills

For necessary background, please go read Stalker Update.

On Wednesday morning, I came upstairs (my room is in the basement), and found this on the floor by the dining room table:

“What the literal fuck?” I said out loud.

Last week, in discussing my work, I remarked that none of us are served by holding back our gifts. “Let your light shine,” I said.

That brought something up for me. My dad used to say about me that I “hid my light under a bushel.” I don’t think he’d say that anymore. I think he’d enjoy watching me continue to expand into who I am. I wish he were here to see it.

This sentiment has been expressed far more elegantly than I am able.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

III. Hard Hat Required: Area Under Construction

I’ve said this since the earliest days of Free Refills, but it still matters: I am building something here. I am using what’s already here to build something lasting. I intend that process to build a more solid foundation going forward. But beyond that, I am also building something that is Free Refills as a whole, an online … something. We don’t actually have a word for it yet.

Free Refills is supposed to support the work and be a container for the work, but in a certain sense, it is also the work itself. Obviously you can read my writing here. You can watch it be built here. You can even watch as I find may way to what exactly it is that I am building, be it piece, book, or website. But there’s an underlying philosophy guiding everything I do. It derives from the nature of the Internet itself, but has at best just barely begun to be explored, despite twenty-seven years having passed since Tim Berners-Lee gave us the first browser, ushering in the mainstream Internet Age.

Everything I do here is predicated on the idea that, when it comes to content creation and dissemination, there is something radically different about the Internet era from what came before, and Free Refills is an experiment in a new way of doing things, built on a foundation of abundance rather than scarcity. Once we were given a machine that allowed infinite and essentially costless perfect copies, the whole idea of the scarcity implicit in the sell-the-next-unit approach no longer really made sense. The only thing that’s kept it alive is momentum and an unwillingness to imagine something better. We saw the demise of scarcity already take down the old music industry, but because of the furious, politically connected denial of the previously powerful, what’s arisen in its place kind of sucks. We’re far better served in choosing to embrace abundance. I express this intent and hope right here in the Free Refills name. And if–actually, let’s instead say when–I pull this off (with your help, of course), it will be seen as one way (but not the only way) of doing things that’s vastly better than what came before.

And this matters. Without trying to be too highfalutin about it, the very core of everything ill that afflicts us is the sense that there simply isn’t enough, and so we must struggle. But there is enough. I’m sure of it. There is enough for everyone.

II. The work needs to be remarkable.

The people who care enough to read what I’m doing now–that’s you– need to care enough and believe in the work enough to recommend it to others, word of mouth surely being the best path to a steady readership, a steady readership (I believe) being one of the first steps to coaching clients and thus a regular income stream.

While it’s lovely to ask you to pass Free Refills on to others–and I am! Please recommend this work to others! Our cups runneth over!–to actually inspire word of mouth, the work needs to be remarkable. It needs to be remarkable in the literal sense, “deserving notice, comment, or attention,” but I believe it also needs to be remarkable in the colloquial sense, “something striking, unusual, even amazing.” Why? Well, first of all and most importantly, because I’m capable of work of that quality. No one in the world is served by me operating at less than my full potential. (By the way, I make this statement not as just a comment to myself about myself, but also as a piece of advice I want to consistently share with the world at large: no one in the world is ever served by you holding back your gifts. No one, not ever. Let your light shine.)

Second of all, because in a world with as many options as ours for engaging with content, anything less than the second meaning of remarkable isn’t likely to hold people’s interest for long.

I have my work cut out for me. I guess I better start sewing.

From One More Thing Before We Dive In:

I could aim to make Free Refills play an essential part in supporting the advancement of my career …

If the work I’ve done on Free Refills has failed to support the advancement of my career or has done so inadequately, then what do I need to do to change it? Over the next three days, I’ll present three principles that, taken together, should make a substantial difference.

I. The work has to matter long-term.

The writing has to have lasting value. There is no point in doing all this work if the ultimate outcome is that these pieces are, in the worst possible sense, just blogposts: merely writings about whatever was on my mind on a given day, losing more and more value as they recede from the present. Life is surely too short to waste my time doing work like that–nor to ask you to read it.

If the pieces are to have lasting value, then I need to conceptualize them as such from the very get-go. It’s okay if occasionally something ephemeral grabs my attention, but I can no longer allow it to be a habit.

So what’s the key to producing writing of lasting value? I am coming to believe that the only work that ends up mattering for long is long-form writing, especially books.

Therefore I need to figure out how to make everything that goes up on Free Refills either function as part of a greater whole–as something that can be assembled into part of a book or at least a long-form essay–or else contributes directly to that goal: pieces could offer commentary, request help, express uncertainty, or describe something I am wrestling with. All my daily work needs to function within these contexts.

It’s not entirely obvious to me yet how to organize my time to make it so. Do I work on multiple projects at the same time? (Given how my brain works, the answer is by necessity likely to be yes.) How do I organize various projects on the site? (I actually have some good ideas about this question.) How do I best change my approach to the daily work to achieve all this? (My best answer: play with it. Keep what works, discard the rest.)

This change in approach and mindset should on its own have a major impact on the long-term value of the writing.

Before we go on, read this piece from August 19, 2015. (You can ignore the first paragraph.)

One More Thing Before We Dive In

That was written over two years ago, and it expresses essentially the same things that I was writing about last week. I point it out here today because the last two paragraphs say better than I have recently been able to the thinking regarding Free Refills and what it is I’m doing and hoping to do here.

I’m not thrilled to see that I haven’t come very far with respect to this issue in the two years since I published that piece. On the other hand, it’s good to see me express succinctly what it is that I’m trying to do here, and to see that I’ve been connected to a certain vision from the very start.

Related to the cohesion (or not) of the writings on Free Refills, I’ve been playing with the word piece, in both the sense of “an item of artistic composition” as well as “part of a whole.”

My exploration of those meanings took me to the OED, and, holy crap, if you want to find yourself heading down a rabbit hole, check out the OED’s etymology of the word piece. The OED finds attestations of piece as “part of a whole” all the way back in ~1230. It dates piece meaning “an item of artistic composition” to 1542. It’s not really clear where the divergence in meaning originally came from. At some point, was there some kind of shared cultural understanding that all art flowed from some sort of Platonic-formed ur-Art, some great Whole of which every piece was a piece? The OED doesn’t appear to know.

My usage of piece rather than post goes all the way back to early May of 2015, back in season one, in response to my initial declaration that, whatever it is I was/am doing here, it sure as hell isn’t blogging.

Should I succeed in my goal of turning pieces in the first sense, above, into pieces in the second, I think my initial declaration will be vindicated.

I cannot count the number of times in which I’ve declared here on Free Refills that I need to approach the writing in a different way, that my current methods have outlived their usefulness. (Can’t count them yet, anyway; presumably I’ll know the answer once I’ve read all 700ish pieces.) The very first such declaration came during season one, so this has been going on for quite a while.

Energetics 101: If you say you need to make a change and you do nothing to bring it about, you are dealing with a block. I recently realized that a big part of the reason I don’t have time to explore my vision for the site or to find new approaches to the writing is that day by day I’m too busy getting pieces up. Every single day, I find myself butting up against my deadline. In many ways, I’m pretty much right where I was not long after starting this project, back when I first noticed that writing and publishing a piece every day was all the work I had time for.

This suggests that I’m using the work itself to be a block to the growth of the work. If that’s true, I better be figuring out right away how to change it. I cannot and will not use my writing as a treadmill to appear to move forward while actually keeping myself in the same place. Surely I am better than that. I’ll do whatever it takes to make that change.

I’ve noticed something, though: over the past few weeks, I’ve been pleased to see greater quality and depth to the work. (There were stretches this spring and summer in which I was basically doing the bare minimum to keep my writing promises, though given what was happening in my life, that’s pretty understandable.) I propose that that that ascendancy presages exactly the shift that I am seeking.

Upon reading season one of Free Refills from start to finish, I had this observation: the pieces read far, far better in chronological order than in the reverse. From the very beginning of the project, I was building my pieces on the ones that came before them. The whole eternal-present, each-piece-self-contained thing on which most blogging is predicated was never how I did things here.