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26 August 2025
Recently I re-read the books that I will call the How Can We Love? series, which begins with How Can We Love? and ends with Patience. These are the books listed on this page. As that page lays things out, I think there is a coherence to all those books as a set, and that it's reasonable to say they flow from How Can We Love?, certainly chronologically and biographically, and to some extent thematically. I also read two booklets that I released in the same period (Destruction and Beauty, written and released around the time The Tree With Unimaginable Roots was initially drafted, and Fiducialism, which goes along with Patience, written at around the same time and released at the same time).
"Vignette books": The first was Sometime in the 21st Century. I didn't know what I was doing when I started writing it in 2015. I felt bad, in a way that I thought I could access by writing. In 2011, I had written a lot of short stories. I started writing them by instinct, writing a few lines without knowing what I was writing. Then, I would finish the short story in a more normal, rational way, seeing where the initial "vignette" pointed. In 2015, I just wrote those "vignettes", without writing a corresponding short story. There are four vignette books, Sometime in the 21st Century, The Tree With Unimaginable Roots, Variations, and Silence.
During the writing of the final volume of the How Can We Love? series (Patience), I came to feel that there was something disturbing about the process of writing so instinctively and without knowing exactly what I was writing. Perhaps I was channeling some kind of spirit? Maybe the spirits weren't always good? So I turned against that form of writing.
But then later, I felt like trying to write that way. I have some drafts of attempts to start vignette books, but I lost steam in writing them.
Vignette books (if you write them the way I did), come out of a self off its foundations (despite how the output might not always seem like it). And they might make the most sense to people who are in a similar place. Yet, perhaps they are particularly challenging reading to those who are more settled and normal.
One book, The Tree With Unimaginable Roots, I wrote in 11 sessions at a meetup group where we wrote for 2 hours according to the "pomodoro" style of working, 25 min. on, 5 min. off. So I drafted it in about 22 hours. I used to think it would be cool to write an entire vignette book in 24 hours straight, in front of an audience.
The others I wrote less systematically.
Non-vignette books: Letters to People Who Care and Patience are not vignette books (except a bit at the beginning of Patience and at one point in the middle). Of course, also How Can We Love?, both the part that preceded Sometime in the 21st Century and the part written after.
How Can We Love? is the oldest book I have published still. It has value as a starting point. I wrote earlier that it was a powerful book. I don't feel that power nearly as much as I re-read it in 2025. My current self is probably the wrong person to ask about it. But the basic ideas of it were very powerful to me when I was young. Perhaps someone who had never thought of them would be similarly moved. Yet I don't know if I would 100% recommend this book to young people, because I wouldn't want it to be read uncritically (I don't completely agree with it), yet to really benefit from it requires uncritical or at least less-critical reading.
Maybe some other book will have to be written that captures the power of the best of the ideas of How Can We Love?, or maybe it's best the way it is, to keep some people from having as intense an experience as I had following it.
I think there is good food for thought in How Can We Love? for those living downstream of VMH and the Drowning Child Illustration, expressed in Christian language. It's not exactly what I would write now, if I could and wanted to write a fairly concise introduction to the life path of MSL/VMH, as How Can We Love? was an introduction to the mix of the New Wine System and EA ideology that I started my writing project with. Should such an introduction exist? Maybe. But such things are more of a popularity-seeking thing than a high-fidelity truth-seeking thing, even if they are completely accurate and non-misleading.
Do I think MSL/VMH is trustworthy enough that it's wise to popularize it? I'm not sure. I would rather see it get more scrutiny and testing before pushing hard in that direction. As it is, I think maybe it's just as well that How Can We Love? be an interesting perspective, to be taken with a grain of salt, based on other MSL/VMH (or outside) perspectives. How Can We Love? suggests a VMH-based "statement", almost a political book, asserting a point of view to drive action. Perhaps the reader can use that skeleton to shape their own personal "statement" book, inside their own head, fleshed out with other sources.
In the How Can We Love? series, at this age, the parts I understood best were the most narrative, most conventionally narrative, as well as the non-fiction, although sometimes the philosophical parts, the parts requiring thought, were hard to get through. I can see vignettes and philosophy as being more alien, and maybe now my brain is becoming more conventional in terms of genre.
I also re-read Waiting for Margot recently, which I think belongs in a different series, goes together with Ocean Beach and the Formulalessness posts from 2019, which was a hinge year. But I think it can make sense to read Waiting for Margot in relation to the How Can We Love? series.
Waiting for Margot, like the vignette books, was written very quickly, but not quite in such a heightened, "channeling" kind of way. I think of the foundation of writing as talking to yourself, and drafting a first draft is basically delivering a monologue, talking to yourself on the page. This feels native to me. Whereas, the vignette style of writing reached out outside of me to get words. The difference, then, between "ordinary drafting" and "maybe channeling".
I don't remember clearly, but reading the vignette books, I suspect that sometimes I switched from "channeling" to "ordinary drafting" as I went along in the vignette, as I had done in the set of short stories from 2011.
Waiting for Margot and the How Can We Love? series books are all first drafts, with some editing done after the fact. I generally tried to keep to the first drafts as much as I felt I could, taking a conservative approach to editing. Some of the editing changes the real meaning. Errors in spelling and grammar I tried to eliminate.
For Letters to People Who Care, I hired Arpista Editing to do copy-editing and to consult on world-building. I can recommend working with her based on my experience. Other than that, I did everything myself. Why didn't I hire her or other people to do more copy-editing? I don't exactly remember. Maybe the world-building advice was more what I wanted? I've generally been an independent worker, and maybe the DIY approach is better symbolically.
Unless something comes up that is very important that I clear up, I won't say much if anything more about these books, following something like the "death of the author" idea. (This includes any of my fiction or side projects. I remain open to contributing to discussion about my blogs (as of now, Formulalessness and Following), particularly the worldview that they sketch out, since they are the most recent expressions of it.) When I re-read these books, I see that I interpret them differently at different ages. I see that they do not have one set meaning. I could provide more autobiographical detail, but neither the books themselves, my memory, nor whatever unsystematic diaries or old emails I could research offer a really satisfying, non-misleading picture of what went into the books. (The things that I have published in non-fiction form about myself are generally reliable, but to get a full picture requires more information than that.) The years during which I wrote the How Can We Love? series were challenging, and the years following their completion were even harder for a long time (again, despite this not always coming through in my writing style or content). Whether through whatever psychological mechanism causes veterans to not talk about combat (maybe their brains just don't want to retrieve the memories of their years, as mine does not want to retrieve much of what happened over the last twelve years), or simply because I want to move along the frontier of being myself and not re-live the past (reading old books revives old spirits for a time), I mostly want to move on and not engage any more deeply to the level that could add biographical detail to illuminate what I've written.
I think that authorial intent is a good thing to consider (I am okay with that approach) but in a way, the author of these books "has died". I think if someone had interviewed me carefully back when I was writing the books, and had good insight into the life I was living, I would be satisfied with their perceptions of me, as being basically non-misleading. That could have been the biographical data, expressing my past self apart from simply the text that remains. But I don't think the records I have plus my memory are that good. I could be wrong about the records, but I'm not going to look at them any time soon to find out.
I might find it interesting to read other people's interpretations of my books at some point. I can't fit too much in my head at once, so I'm not sure even under the best of circumstances I could really understand what I've done as a writer. Maybe only other people can really figure that out.