If you are on the Zero Knowledge subscription list, your inbox just looked like this:
Twelve emails that showed up in forty-four minutes. The subject lines in Gmail read like a table of contents.
That wasn’t a bug. And it wasn’t me hitting send twelve times for fun.
At the end of August, Bob Baskerville emailed to say he was tired of living at 11,000 feet inside three people’s heads. He was right.
So I started inserting chapters between the ones that were already live, where a new chapter between 31 and 32 is 31.1, and nothing you already bookmarked breaks.
I’ve been writing those fill-in chapters slowly for a month. Over the weekend, I decided to write the remaining twelve so I’d be caught up.
I had them batch published by my system, thinking that would be a cool new feature. However, as each one goes live on the site, the deploy pipeline notices, and Kit fires a chapter email. Twelve chapters means twelve emails, so when I compressed this to a batch publish it looked like a spam run.
Until I wrote the fill-in chapters, too much of the story was happening on the mountain with what Sam, Marcus, and Vlad were doing. Too much mountain, not enough outside world and other characters. So, these chapters pull the camera off the trio on the mountain and onto people who never asked to be in the middle of any of this, but are.
If you have been reading straight through, the chapters you already know are still there, in the same order, with the same numbers. The new ones slot between them. Start wherever the email took you, or go back to the read page and walk the dotted numbers. You’ll also now see a column that shows when I most recently updated a chapter.
My brother Daniel responded to this flood of email with:
“(Feature request) Now I want a chapters read tracker built in for the user side so I can see what I’ve read and what’s new to read. Especially now that you’re jumping around inserting intermediate chapters…”
So, I’m creating that now.
Highlight something. Tell me what you like or don’t like. Or what is confusing. Or wrong. That is still how the best changes get made to this shitty first draft.
I hope you are having fun with this. I am!