Writing, Russell Warner

I don't know if it's the footlocker stacked to the brim with spiral-bound notebooks, staring at me and waiting to catch fire or get soaked, or if it's that I'm on my something-like eighth laptop, but it's time to centralize my writing—all of it, as much of it as I can find.

Why? Why not? I suppose philosophically—abstractly—I recognize that everything is temporary. All art will ultimately be destroyed. Even if we escape this little rock of ours, I doubt most of our artifacts will survive our Sun becoming a red giant or the heat-death of the universe. Maybe they will if they’re digital. Maybe beyond the smallest dimensions of space, where gravity spirals into nothing, there is a giant github repository where all information about the universe and its progress is digitally stored in bits of existence and nonexistence.

It’d be nice if that were the case. But until that discovery is made, I’m just trying to put everything I’ve ever written in one place in the cloud. I’ve no delusions about the trappings of celebrity; I don’t want to be famous or even remembered. My work on the other hand... I get such joy from the idea that someone might read something I’ve written and enjoy it! So here it all is. If it was published elsewhere, there’s a footnote in the text.

Technical Note

This is Github, and even though this is my personal cache of writing, I’ve no problem with anyone cloning it and adding to it. Feel free to make corrections, add paragraphs, new characters, write a riff. I make no promises about merging your work with mine, but I’m open to the possibility (especially grammatical and spelling corrections). Leave issues, too. At this point, I see little difference between my writing and my code, which I suppose is part of the reason why I’m putting my writing here.

Directory Structure

It may seem a little odd to just have every story be a directory and all the .md files are generically named poem.md or story.md but there are two reasons for this structure. One, now and then, a piece of written work of mine requires an associated image or figure (particularly my non-fiction work). The easiest way that I know of to include an image in a piece of markdown is to store the image locally in the same directory as the markdown.¹ The other reason is that this structure lends itself to the Svelte way of doing things and the markdown directories can be easily translated into web sites.

See you later.

Footnotes

1. I'm not there yet, but I suspect there will be other assets that I will want to be storing alongside the writing itself. ↩