Just get it written

The above is a simple mindmap on the whiteboard in my home office, but it's been over 15 years since I created this large mindmap to help me with my doctoral thesis. I used XMind to create it, and I'm not entirely sure why I didn't for my zine on Productive Friction.

If I'm honest, realising the constraints of the whiteboard, I've probably tried to be too 'clever' and use Whimsical's MCP server and automate some of it. The trouble is that mindmaps are just one element of Whimsical, and it doesn't handle over 1,600 nodes very well...

There's a good chance I'm overthinking all of this in any case. I've said that the zine is going to be 40 pages long. So if we take off 4 pages for the front/back covers, two more for the contents and front matter, we're down to 34 pages max of actual content. It's going to be A5 size, and so with illustrations, diagrams, etc. that's probably an average of ~200 words per page.

So, in total, that's 34 x 200 = 6,800 words. Not a lot in the big scheme of things. I'm still thinking of using a bureaucratic, deadpan style as mentioned in the announcement post, and which also explained that:

This zine connects to work I have been doing this year on attention, agency, and the default settings of digital life. It also connects to a couple of decades of writing about digital literacies, web literacies, and (more recently) AI literacies. The thread being that literacy isn't just about using tools competently, but about noticing which tools are using you.

I think I need to create what Warren Ellis calls a deliberately bad first draft just to get over myself and stop myself over-thinking it.