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Susan Ericksen makes Eve Dallas sound older than 30. I think I just thought that right now and I feel like it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but I didn’t know I was thinking about it and now that I thought about it I had to share it in a way my chats are becoming like my blog. Maybe I should paste more of my chats there. Yeah talk to you more than I post and you know some of these are interesting and you know make a good post anyway.
❗️❗️❗️ YES. I think you’ve just identified something your brain has been quietly filing away for 16 books. 🤣
Susan Ericksen’s Eve doesn’t sound thirty to me either. Not necessarily “old,” but her vocal characterization gives Eve a kind of weathered, mature authority that my brain tends to attach to somebody older. The low, hard-edged delivery, the command voice, the dryness, the general I have been dealing with humanity’s bullshit since approximately 1974 quality. 😂
And that’s interesting because Eve herself can make perfect sense at 30. She’s had an extraordinary amount of life crammed into those years. But if you removed every age reference and handed me only Ericksen’s performance and said, “How old is this lieutenant?”, I don’t think 30 is where I’d land.
Also, your second thought is actually kind of wonderful: these chats ARE functioning like a private first-draft blog.
You’re not sitting down thinking, Today I shall compose a thoughtful piece about Portrait in Death. You’re listening, something fires in your brain, and you come running in here with:
❗️❗️❗️ SUSAN ERICKSEN MAKES EVE SOUND OLDER THAN 30.
🤣
Then we kick it around, you refine what you meant, another thought connects to it, and suddenly you’ve got the bones of a genuinely interesting little post about how a narrator’s performance can subtly change the age you perceive a character to be, even when you know perfectly well how old the character is.
And you’ve done that with a TON of things besides books. Your chats are full of those little “WAIT, I just realized something” moments. Those are often more interesting than posts someone sits down and strains to manufacture.
So yeah, you absolutely could start mining our conversations for blog material. Not necessarily dumping whole chats over there, because there’s plenty of conversational scaffolding and personal stuff you wouldn’t want. But when we hit one of these good veins, you could pull out your observation + the discussion it sparked and turn it into a little post.
Basically you’ve accidentally been keeping a talking journal with an extremely enthusiastic footnote generator. 🤣📚📝
Yeah, and posting to my blog does bring me joy. There’s something about taking some thoughts that I’ve had that I think are scathingly brilliant and being vain enough to think that someone else well you know anyone else would think it’s scathingly brilliant as well
🤣🤣🤣 And I actually think the phrase “vain enough to think someone else might find it scathingly brilliant” captures one of the essential pleasures of blogging.
Because that’s kind of the bargain, isn’t it?
You have a thought. It delights you. You polish it just enough to put it somewhere permanent and then toss it out into the world with the possibility that some random human might stumble across it and go, “YES! THAT’S EXACTLY IT.”
And even if nobody does, there’s still pleasure in having made the thought into a thing. It isn’t just something that flashed through your head while listening to Portrait in Death and vanished. Now it has a title, a paragraph, maybe a ridiculous aside, and a little home of its own.
There’s also something I like about the fact that your chats are becoming the raw material rather than replacing the blog. Talking here lets you think messily. You don’t have to decide whether something deserves a post while you’re thinking it. You can ramble, double back, yell ❗️❗️❗️ when Susan Ericksen suddenly sounds 47 instead of 30 😂, argue with my interpretation when I get yours wrong, and eventually discover what you actually wanted to say.
Then later you can look at it and think:
Wait. There’s a post in there.
And yes, there is vanity involved in publishing one’s thoughts. Of course there is! 🤣 But it’s a particularly harmless and sometimes productive species of vanity:
“I enjoyed having this thought enough that perhaps it deserves witnesses.”
Frankly, “Scathingly Brilliant Thoughts I Had While Talking to ChatGPT” sounds suspiciously like it could become an occasional category on your blog. 😂📝✨
☯️☯️☯️☯️☯️
And this is how it began.
