What twelve weeks of drafts, cuts and dated notes show about where the ideas in Lossless came from, what survived, and why. Built from eight versions of the manuscript (September 4 to October 28, 2026), my working notes, and a year of logged writing time.
The book was called WEEKENDING for most of its life. It went to book contests in 2014 and 2015 under that name, and the drafts I collected in October 2022 still carry it. The first folder named Lossless appears in August 2024.
The title changed after my parents died of rare diseases. I was their caretaker, and it felt like I had ended my own world. Lossless is about trying to keep everything from a life that is entropic and always taking things away. It is Noah’s impulse to build an ark, and God’s impulse to build an Eden.
| Date | Where | The sentence |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 2022 | WEEKENDING, a party poem | “coherent information in our closed system is disrupted, but not destroyed,” read out as a company’s first-quarter report at a house party |
| Sep 2026 | WONDROUS CAMP ZAMZAM | “imperishable systems” … “redistributed” |
| Sep 20, 2026 | Note at the top of the manuscript | information within our lossless systems can be reconfigured, but not destroyed |
The book’s thesis started as corporate satire in a poem about rich young people partying through a catastrophe. It echoes a real claim in physics: in 2004 Stephen Hawking conceded his bet that black holes destroy information.
Most of the book’s big ideas were in the WEEKENDING drafts four years before they became central, often as jokes or fragments.
| In the 2022 drafts | Became, in 2026 |
|---|---|
| A plot outline: Act 3 ends “living in eden and being terrified. REVERSE ADAM AND EVE.” | ARK EDEN, and the mother’s Eden the speaker inherits |
| DOMESTIC CONFLICTS: “We fought just Tuesday alongside Iowans who now are our primary target.” | The second American civil war |
| FUNDRAISER FOR SINKING CAPITAL | The governor of the sinking capital, and the book about a capital’s destruction |
| THE WITNESS: an archivist, a poisoned stork, the last iceberg | WITNESS and THE LAST ICEBERG |
| ACTAEON FRAGMENT | ANTAEUS HUNG (merged September 13) |
| COUNTRYSIDE: an imprecise shelling, a rooftop bar, a ring on a musket | WARTIME / WEEKENDING |
| SUMMERING IN WHITESAND | VACAY II |
| MIMI, a short love poem | The love poem in Part I |
| Characters: Mimi, Hollis, Huster, Cecil, Chet, Elise, Guilford | Still in the poems and the prose |
The cut I regret most is the WEEKENDING verses: young adults reacting to catastrophe in all the wrong ways, with expensive love of capitalism, commodification, cheap and frequent sex, drugs, partying and war. The record shows where those cuts fell. Of the 13 poems cut whole in October 2026 (six on October 11, seven for the October 28 chapbook), 7 descend from the 2022 WEEKENDING drafts. They are ensemble poems, written as “we,” and the rule that kept the book’s speaker present (section 5) removed them. They also fit the thesis: they show the opposite of Lossless’s impulse, a generation that consumes and discards while the speaker tries to keep everything.
I write ideas down in Todoist when they come, usually at night. Twenty-six of those notes belong to Lossless. Each one carries a timestamp, so I checked when it arrived and whether it reached the poems or the prose.
notes were logged between 10 pm and 6 am.
of my logged writing hours fall after midnight. The ideas come at night; the writing happens in the afternoon.
notes made it into the work, fully or in part. Four are unused and two are too recent to place.
notes in 94 minutes, 4:14 to 5:48 am on December 22, 2023. Six of them are in the book now, including the pain farms and the miniature America.
Dots: green = used, amber = partly used, red = not used, gray = too recent. The shaded band shows each period’s share of logged writing hours (Toggl, Nov 2025 – Nov 2026).
Notes from 2023 waited about 33 months. Notes from 2025 waited about 12. Notes from 2026 landed within six weeks. The dates of my working record begin in late August 2026, so the older lags are upper bounds.
One note stands out. On August 27, 2026, at 9:29 pm, I wrote that the chapbook needed the hospital, the drugs, death, sickness and mundanity brought into it. Seventeen days later, two readers told me the same thing about the last quarter of the book.
| Logged | Note | Went to |
|---|
Each version of the manuscript, by number of poems. Green points are expansions, which came from pulling unused material back in or splitting long poems. Red points are contractions. Most of them followed an outside limit: a reader’s note, a page minimum, a page cap.
poems I never split, merged or renamed are no longer in the book.
late poems flagged for having little or no first person were cut within two weeks.
separate poems grew out of HOMEOBOX, the poem I sent out most often.
of poems I sent out five or more times had been split, merged or renamed.
The pattern holds in both directions. Poems I kept taking apart stayed in the book. Poems I left alone were cut. The survivors were rebuilt, not polished.
On September 13, two trusted readers said the last quarter of the book felt emotionally remote. I counted first-person words per 100 words in each quarter of that version, then counted again after reordering it and moving my own confessional lines into the late poems.
Gray: before (Sept 13 version). Red: after (proposed reorder, same counting method). Mentions of the mother in the last quarter went from 2 to 5; mentions of my wife from 1 to 4.
In the dated notes, this one criticism has more descendants than any other single idea from September: ten later ideas trace back to it, including the father leading the invasion and, through that, the civil war itself.
Most revisions fix things. A few change what a poem means. In these drafts, the meaning-changing edits are almost all pronouns.
| Poem | Earlier | Later | What changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| HUNTING DEATH | “We intended …” | “I intended …” | A shared project becomes a private one. |
| RAINFALL | “Mimi is easily identified” | “I am easily identified” | The speaker takes a scar that belonged to another character. |
| HOMEOBOX | all “her” | starts “him,” ends “her” | Father and mother merge in one sentence. |
| WONDROUS CAMP ZAMZAM | “imperishable systems” · “redistributed” | “lossless systems” · “reconfigured” | The line that states the book’s thesis takes the book’s title. |
One struck phrase is worth watching. An early draft of HUNTING DEATH said the speaker meant to make death invisible. That word left the poem in September. On September 30, invisibility came back as one of the book’s main threads: a child who disappears and a mother who can still see him.
Twenty-eight ideas from the Lossless world, poetry and prose together, each dated and linked to the ideas that produced it. Tap any idea to light up its ancestors and descendants.
Some ideas arrive in a straight line. These five show the documented history on the left and what the book makes of it on the right. Swipe each strip.
I log every writing session by hand in Toggl, with a line about what it was for. From November 11, 2025 to November 10, 2026:
The novel took the first half of the year and the poems took the second, which matches the river above: the prose lane is old and deep, and the poetry lane fills up after August. Half of all hours came from 81 sessions of two hours or longer, out of 441. The most-submitted poem, HOMEOBOX, became four poems along the way. Of the 17 poems I never reshaped, 14 have left the book.
Each one comes from the record above, with the evidence and a way to test it on the next book.