Shards

This is not a manual.
It is not a recovery journal.
It is not a manifesto.

It is a record of how my ability to write got lost as my brain changed.
And what enabled me to restart.

My mind is still here.
I still think, feel, imagine, understand.
But my brain
—the very machine that holds and organizes all of it—
is failing to keep structure.
It loses focus. It drops connections.
It forgets what it just held.
My memory is corrupted.
Not total. Not catastrophic. Yet.
But enough to matter.
Enough to break continuity.
Enough to make it utterly unreliable.
A pity I cannot just exchange the RAM stick.

That does not mean I cannot write. It means I cannot hold everything in the air at once, every character thread, plot twist, detail, emotional pivot, symbolic echo, thematic boundary.

What I love about writing lives in two extremes:

1. World-building
Laying the bones of a story. Creating scenes that do not just fill space, but pull the whole arc forward. Finding the moments that matter, the structures that breathe.

2. Scene work
Tuning. Honing. Pouring over every sentence until the story flows like music—sometimes soft, sometimes roaring. Melodies. A breath before the drop. Then the gut-punch of the kick drum, low and sharp. The build. The flow. The hit.

Neither of those demands unbroken concentration or high-capacity working memory.
They reward depth, not multitasking.
One part of the work is about shape.
The other is about rhythm.
Both forgive slowness.

World-building lights my brain up. Scene tuning gives me joy.
But they do not make a story. They are the bones and flesh. Something still has to connect them. Something has to build the skeleton. The draft.

Drafting?
It hurts. Not emotionally—cognitively. Literally.
It pains my mind to see my brain struggle.
It is painful to try and fail to remember.
Drafting demands wide focus. Forward motion. Tolerance for imperfection.
My brain does not want to do any of that.
It gets restless.
Bored.
Distracted.
Tired.

What my brain wants is to write a sentence and then dive in. Shape, sculpt, make it sing.
What it cannot do is power through a first draft with placeholders and half-formed beats.

In my 20s, I wrote constantly— about 15,000 pages in total. Books, serials, stories. All digital.
Started on an Amstrad CPC464.
In my 30s, I wrote about 1,000 pages.
I have not written anything of significance since then.

Not because the ideas stopped.
Not because I forgot how to write.
But because the act of drafting, the translation of thought into structured prose, broke.
World-building still works.
Scene-tuning still gives joy.
But the step in between?
That part does not function anymore.

Every new idea starts strong. Two paragraphs.
Then it stops.
I fine-tune those paragraphs for days, weeks. Flow, rhythm, breath, impact. I do not carry on. The story stops right there.
It is not procrastination. It’s not perfectionism.
It’s how my brain engages now. Deep focus. Micro-iteration. Flow over scaffolding.

Those two paragraphs hit.
They are perfect.
But stories do not live in fragments. They live in arcs, in sequences, in scenes that need to exist first before they can be tuned.

This was not a change in the way I work.
This was a quiet erosion that led to a total systematic breakdown.

This is a slow, visible loss of creative function.
And I get to witness every part of it.
Lucky me.

I used to hold entire models of quantum chromodynamics in my mind. I understood, not just because of the formulas, but because I knew.
I am a physicist.

My brain was not just sharp—it was broad, playful, alive. I could tell one part to create a universe, every single star, while listening to music with another part.
Now?
That mind is slipping.
The sharp part got disconnected.

There is no underlying medical condition. We tested for those.
Yes, we tested for that, too.

I do not kid myself. I am not looking for hope or turnaround.
I am not waiting to “get better.”
I’m watching the break happen in real time.
Focus decays. Access narrows. Drafting died.
The levers don’t respond. Not like they used to.
Not enough to build big anymore.

You may have noticed that my posts have more typos now than they had 5 years ago. I sure do.
That is not autocorrect failing.
That is me finally overwhelming autocorrect with the number of errors I make. Plus, it is me not even seeing the typos when reading through what I wrote before I post.

I like my brain. I really do.
We’ve been together through quite a lot these last 50 years.
It’s full of ideas. Still.
But they don’t land. Ideas vanish before I can catch them.
It’s like fireworks underwater. Brilliant. Quiet. Gone.

I don’t lack ideas.
I lack the mechanism to hold them.
To pin them down before they dissolve.

And that’s the worst part.
Because I think some of the ideas were pretty good.
I just cannot use them. Not fast enough. Not clearly enough.
Not like before.

My social usernames end in -b52.
That wasn’t a random pick.
It took years—and quite a few destroyed bots—to get me to realize.

On Twitter, I started as mac-b5.
When that bot crashed because of internal short-circuits caused by tears of joy leaking into the core, we went through b6, b7, b8, b10 (we skipped b9 because doh!), and finally arrived at b52.

I like the b52 version of the macbot. It stuck.
It feels right.
People know it’s for the B-52s. I love their music, their lyrics.
What people do not know: it’s one song.
Detour Thru Your Mind.

That song is my brain.
A strange loop. A surreal descent. Bright ideas, sudden shifts, disappearing threads.
Doctors with absurd diagnoses. Motion without direction. Lyrics running backwards.
A key popping out of my nose, only to be instantly forgotten. A door that opens and reveals—nothing.
Answers with no questions.
This song is not a metaphor.

It’s a map to my brain.

I used to have a map of my mind. Full of paths, all properly referenced. Most likely accompanied by a complex spreadsheet full of details.
I didn’t always know the outcome—but I knew the terrain. I had paths, patterns, workarounds. I knew how to reach the idea, how to build toward the shape of something.

Now?

I still have the peaks. The rivers. The brilliant vistas.
But the trails are gone.
Ideas rise like distant mountains, but I can’t reach them.
The trails are gone.

I do see the irony in that.
I make maps.
I speak maps.

I provide topography and details for sled dog races. I show safe paths. I warn where to turn so you don't fall from the face of the earth.

There are dogs singing in my maps.
That single colon in "No. In your face, wind!" still makes me choke.

Every donation drive is a map.
But inside my own mind?
Nothing is charted anymore.

Here be dragons.

I lost the map.
And I know it.

When I first joined Twitter, I wasn’t looking for community.
I was looking for a searchable memory.
A way to store moments, ideas, fragments.
To build an external memory—something I could come back to.

Many of the Penny threads started that way:
An attempt to pin memory to text.
To preserve something that might otherwise slip away.
It didn’t work.

Because I forget it’s there.
I forget what I have already written.
I forget that I’ve already written.
Even when I build a structure meant to catch what falls,
I forget to use the safety net.

What I found instead were people.
A kind of fragmented chorus speaking in multiples of 280 characters.
And when it came time to tell stories or run donation drives, I found something else:

Breaking everything I say into 280-character posts works for me.
That seems to be the amount my working memory can still hold.
Posts do not overwhelm me. They do not demand structure.
They force clarity.

Focus.

One beat at a time.
No pressure to draft.
No pressure to shape the arc in advance.
Just the next line.
And the next.
That's why my longer threads tend to meander all over the place.

This doesn’t let me write stories. But it lets me say things. It gives me a pace. A form.
Each post becomes a self-contained unit—complete, but stackable.
It’s not storytelling.
It’s scaffolding.
It gets me partway there.

Short posts cannot expand into a story. But they are stackable.
If I could find a way to create something to stack them on.
If I could solve the drafting problem.

So I made a tool.

I installed a local large language model on my PC. No internet. No cloud. No broad knowledge of everything. 
Just a tool, trained on everything I’ve ever written—15,000 pages of stories, ideas, notes.
It runs on the energy of a medium-sized light bulb.
We talked and discussed for months—about my work, my patterns, my processes.
We structured, sorted, analyzed. Turned all of that into documents, so that the LLM does not forget over time.
Based on this, we created a well-defined set of rules and limits.

Now, whenever an idea sparks in my brain, I tell the LLM—before the spark fades.
It catches what I can’t hold. Sorts. Catalogs. Organizes. According to our shared ruleset.
I read through that catalog often. Ideas spark ideas. When there is enough—when the landscape starts forming—I begin to build.
Outlines.
Landmarks.
Peaks and rivers.

Emotional topography.

The model draws the trails. It sorts the bones into a skeleton—the one thing I can no longer do myself.
And once I have that draft? Then I can do what I love best. Form, sculpt, create. Flow, emotion, drama, tears, laughter. Music.

Is This Art?
I don’t know.
And deep down I do not care.
Not a single word in these stories was written by the LLM. Everything got modified, expanded, or shortened by me.
Let me put it this way: I am using a tool to create—but I would never sell these stories for money.

All I know is this:
In the last three months, I have written more than 500 pages worth of stories. I am 30 chapters deep in a novel. I am following my ideas, sculpting the terrain where the ideas spark. The LLM takes care of the trail so I can fill in the scenery.
After twenty years of silence—I am able to finish stories again.