I wrote a book!

Well, sort of.

"I'm number 1 for anybody down to fudge the metrics
I'm Dumbledore for anybody down to smudge the lenses"
Aesop Rock on Lice- Yoohoo

Hey y'all, it's been a while since I've sent out an email. I was on a pretty good streak there with the weekly newsletter too, 22 weeks in a row if my math serves me. I had to take a break, though I wasn't anticipating quite this large of one—18 weeks—almost as long of a stretch as I was sending out the Friday emails. The break was partially a result of burnout, I'll elaborate more on that in a moment, but mostly it was because I was working on something else—the largest writing project I've taken on to date. And as the clickbaity title of this post claims, I wrote a book!

Well, sort of... if you’re down to fudge the metrics. Let me explain.

The Compendium

Since the first week of June 2024, I've been working on a deep dive into Aesop Rock's discography with the goal of uncovering all of the references and allusions he's made to other art in his lyrics. That means every movie, TV show, song/album, video game, book (and more). I listened to over 400 songs between every solo album, EP, collaboration project, feature on other artist’s songs, and every other rarity I could find--reading all of the lyrics and annotating along the way.

I then compiled all of these annotated lyrics into what I've dubbed Aesop Rock: A Compendium of Influence:

A ~60,000 word collection (inconveniently) split into 3 parts (Thanks buggy Substack editor!) complete with all of the annotated lyrics and a collected reference index with time-stamped links and/or additional reading for most of the references.

Because of the length of the project and it being split up into 3 parts, I didn't send it out as an email. I know that some of you subscribers I know personally have seen it, and the new folks who subscribed after seeing it, but for those of you who haven't seen it yet, here it is:

• Part 1— Solo Albums & EPs

• Part 2— Collabs, Singles, Features, and Other Rarities

• Part 3— The Reference Index, Credits, and Other Bits

• Plus an extremely stripped-down TLDR on Reddit

Sort of? What's the deal?

Throughout the entirety of the project, I've struggled with the idea of considering it a "book," at least in the traditional sense. I'd best consider it a reference work, so it's a book in the sense that an encyclopedia or a dictionary would be considered one.

I think my struggle is in the fact that it's not a collection of original material as I would expect from another non-fiction book. While those books often include quotes and excerpts from other works to make their case, they don't to the extent that the Compendium does. This leads me to feel like I didn't "write" a book but rather "assembled” one.

The sole fact that's helping me not feel that way is the amount of hours and effort it required to complete, and how that’s likely on par with what an author might dedicate to a more traditional book, like a novel or a non-fiction work. I'm sure the number of hours to write a book varies wildly, but the ~400 hours or so I spent on The Compendium should probably earn the classification on that alone. I was piss poor at keeping track of the time I spent working throughout the project, but I'm confident that I spent at least an hour on each of the 400+ songs between all of the passes I did. It could be more, or it could be less, but 400 feels like a good estimate.

And at the end of the day, a project like this doesn’t lend itself to ever being “finished.” A benefit of publishing this online versus a traditional print book is that I can more easily update it as I need to. It’s a living document that will be updated as new songs come out or as references I inevitably missed or got wrong are pointed out to me.

Also, I’m considering this only the first part of an even larger endeavor to then go through and engage with the things referenced—using the Reference Index as a roadmap of numerous rabbit holes to go down—watch all of the movies, read all of the books, listen to all of the music mentioned, etc., and document it along the way.

The absence

The extended break from sending out the weekly emails was nice, and much needed to dedicate the time to finishing The Compendium. I found I was spending an exorbitant amount of time each week dedicated to the emails that I barely had any time to work on The Compendium, which was relegated to primarily a few hours on weekends. I was trying to keep the balance but as time management isn't exactly my strongest skill, I needed to indulge in an extended period of imbalance to finish what I needed to. I'm incredibly grateful that I did because it taught me some key things about my creative process and work ethic. It also helped give me an idea of how I want the website and my writing to look moving forward.

One of the biggest goals with launching 1kcrane.com in March of last year was to use writing as the means to develop a deeper connection with the things that I love, be it music, movies, books, or whatever else, and to then share that with others so that they would hopefully discover something new they could love too.

After about a decade and a half of frying my brain and attention span on social media and short-form content, I've been craving to swim in deeper waters for a change and finally get out of the unfulfilling tide pool of mindless entertainment. I've since realized that this goal was undermined by how I'd decided to go about it by sending out a weekly newsletter.

I was initially inspired by Austin Kleon's ‘10 things worth sharing this week’ newsletter and also Better Than Food's Patreon-only ‘Better Than Friday’. I initially tried out that approach of presenting a list of things I enjoyed that week but I found that it felt a bit shallower than I wanted, and I found myself wanting to write more than just a couple sentences for each thing. This made the emails feel bloated and disjointed as a result. And they took a whole lot more time to put together than I realized they would.

I was gung ho when I launched the site. I had this grand image in my head that I was going to publish one weekly email for free subscribers, one for paid subscribers (to model Kleon's), and additional posts for both tiers. Yeah... that didn't pan out too well. I quickly dropped down to just the one weekly email and even then, that still took a lot of time, from trying to consume new content to find interesting things to include, to then writing about them. I failed to realize that these people I was trying to imitate are full-time content creators and that I am not one, I work a 9-5 and I was trying to match the output and quality of people who making a living at this sort of thing.

Okay, so that didn't work how I thought it would. So to try and fix the "shallow" feeling, I switched to keeping to one thing that piqued my interest that week. This style for the emails felt a lot better—it felt "right". I found that I was naturally defaulting to exploring how seemingly disparate things were connected by cataloging my personal experience with the art I consume (which I rather enjoyed.) The issue though was trying to do it on a weekly schedule, which didn't fix the "shallow" problem.

• For one,

  It's difficult to "force" those sorts of moments to then become nucleation points to expand upon. I was always on the lookout, thinking of what the next newsletter topic would be, that I could hardly enjoy the topic I was currently working on.

• And two,

  I ran into the same lack-of-time factor I experienced with the weekly list style of newsletter. Some of the posts required me to listen to several albums or podcasts and others would have required me to read full books or watch movies which I couldn't reasonably figure out how to do on a weekly deadline on top of my day job, working on The Compendium, maintaining my journaling and Morning Pages habit, among other projects and life happenings.

It felt unsustainable and I was burning out FAST. It all became too much in late August while on a trip to Minneapolis to see P.O.S.—his first show in a number of years, in his hometown no less. Here’s the full set, he even gave me a shoutout at 11:11 for flying in from Denver just for the show.

While there, instead of enjoying the city, all I could think about was the work I wasn't doing, either on The Compendium or on the newsletter. The last night there, the thoughts led me to a failed attempt at sleep, which ultimately found me posted up in front of a closed Caribou Coffee in Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport around 2 am, writing, trying to make sense of whatever I was feeling. I wrote, and I wrote, and then I wrote some more, thinking it would be a great topic for that coming week’s newsletter.

But in the following days, the draft kept growing, and growing, and growing, and I couldn't figure out how to edit it down into something I could send out that Friday. Come Thursday evening and I still wasn't finished, I decided that I needed to miss a week and that I needed a break. I still have the draft but haven't tried to go through it since, about 3800 words of something I've yet to figure out. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to finishing it.

So, what's next?

This leads me to my plans for 1kcrane.com moving forward:

• I really enjoyed going as deep as I did on one subject, so that's the direction I'm going—not necessarily Compendium scale projects all the time, spending hundreds of hours per post is also unsustainable for its own reasons. I'll continue writing similar types of posts as I was, though now I can go deeper with the extra time. Also, expect more deep-dive styles of posts.

• No more weekly emails and I'm not committing to any definitive schedule as of right now: no promises of biweekly, monthly, quarterly, etc., though I might try and maintain one for my own sake of finishing work—having no deadlines isn't great for me either because then I never actually finish anything. So expect the emails to appear more sporadically than not for a while.

I'm not 100% sure how it'll look yet, but I don't need to. I'm just grateful to be back to it and to have the opportunity to figure it out.

Thanks y'all for still being here, and Happy belated New Year!
1kcrane