Outlines and Deadlines

This never works without a deadline and it never works well without an outline.  So line line line and all that.

Deadline - December 31st, 2013.

I started thinking about the preface today while biking up to work.

Here's kinda the gist:

There is no secret agenda here.  Let me lay this out as honestly as possible.  I want immortality.  I want it through the medium of ideas.  I want those ideas to contribute to human culture.  These ideas are not researched, tested or peer reviewed.  They are ideas.

Then I thought about how much I appreciate when structure and content are used to reinforce each other.... you know, like when someone is trying to convey and idea... and they can kind of sketch the shape of it... kind of point vaguely towards it... but they get lost and drift away and things start to come apart and sentences start to run on and pretty soon you've forgotten the point of the whole thing.

Which reminded me of Godel, Escher, Bach because it's hard to imagine a better intertwining of meaning and structure in the context of a philosophy piece and not think of that book - the way that the strucutre of the conversations among characters reflect the things they are talking about.

Dialog?  Treatise?  Conversation?  Story?  Why stick with one method.  Make the method fit the message.

So yeah, back to the preface.  One other thought I started to have was to have four or five different prefaces, all written in different voices but making the same points to get the reader into that mode of seeing different ways of belief and doubt.  What would those voices be?  Not sure.

It's occurring to me now that another payoff that I'll gain from writing an outline is that I won't have to write linearly - I can skip from piece to piece.

Oh yeah.  Outline deadline by December 31st, 2012.