Tom
e73455d2ca
theory/ EVIDENCE.md + THEORY.md, shared by everything a-days-walk/ Book One: CHAPTERS, CRAFT, FIELD_BRIEF, OUTLINE, drafts/ seasonal-intelligence/ Book Two: OUTLINE essays/ the six pieces archive/ superseded originals, unmaintained by design PORTFOLIO.md the split and the sequence Adds a README to each directory. Cross-references updated to the new layout; archive/ references left broken deliberately, as those are historical documents. Also revises chapter 6 of Book One: the notification scene is now four items rather than four hundred, since the narrator is a light user. The low volume is stronger evidence than a flood would have been - it is the case the attention-economy account cannot explain. Tracked as A26 in the argument ledger, planted in the prologue and chapter 1.
Essays
Six pieces, publishable before either book exists. They do four jobs: find out whether the voice is there, test which ideas land before a year is spent on them, build the platform any publisher will ask about, and each one becomes a chapter draft.
Written roughly in ascending order of difficulty. Claims are governed by ../theory/EVIDENCE.md; for register, ../a-days-walk/CRAFT.md applies to anything that will end up in Book One.
1. Stress Hunger
Personal essay · ~2,000 words · needs nothing you don't already have
Ravenous after a day at a desk. Barely hungry after four days walking with a pack. The observation, the cortisol literature, and an honest admission that the specific mechanism is a guess.
Write this first. Shortest distance to a finished piece, pure voice, lowest stakes. It requires no trail, no research trip and no permission. If writing it is a pleasure, the book is worth two years. If it's a grind, that's worth knowing now.
→ Book One ch. 12
2. Why 5,000 Steps in a Forest Beat 10,000 in a Corridor
~1,500 words
The salience-environment argument on Bratman 2015 — ninety minutes in grassland versus ninety minutes on a road, same duration, different brains coming back. Best evidence-to-length ratio in the whole project and the most shareable thing in it.
→ Book One ch. 12
3. The Dopamine Detox Is the Wrong Fix
~2,500 words · contrarian
The reward-hacking story is real but shallow; the mechanism is misfiled relevance. The detox literature is behind you — abstinence has the weakest record, and changing how people use platforms beats quitting.
→ Book One ch. 6 and 10
4. Within a Day's Walk
~4,000 words · the flagship
The three-distance model itself. This is the piece a book proposal gets built on. Write it fourth, once the first three have taught you the register.
Pitch high: Aeon, Noema, The New Atlantis. In Czech, Vesmír, Respekt or Deník N would each take a different version of it.
→ Book One Part II
5. The Middle of the Night
~2,500 words
Biphasic sleep, with the Ekirch/Yetish dispute as the story rather than a footnote. The contested evidence makes it better: a thing we assumed was human nature turns out to be a Western European habit.
→ Book Two ch. 4
6. January Is the Worst Time to Change Your Life
~1,500 words · seasonal hook
Publish in late December. Tests Book Two's market for almost nothing, and the argument survives even though the neuroscience doesn't — because it's made from cultural design, not brain states.
→ Book Two ch. 6
Sequence
- Essays 1–3 — three months. Find the voice; confirm you want this.
- Essay 4, pitched high — the credibility piece.
- Book One proposal plus three sample chapters.
The only irreversible mistake available right now is spending another twelve months on structure. Essay 1 is roughly a weekend.