this IS my blog

published weekdays

  • day by day by day

    I can’t write enough about incrementalism.

    The classic proverb asks: how do you eat an elephant?

    One bite at a time.

    I have been writing and creating and writing and making and writing and posting. If I went back in time a year to when I set out on this little writing life adventure and looked out upon the quantity of work that I have banked in the intervening year, I know I would be completely overwhelmed.

    Think of what you can accomplish just doing a little bit each day or even each week.

    If you record ten seconds of video every day for a year, by the end of the year you will have over an hour of footage.

    If you open a document and write one paragraph of one hundred words per day every day for a year you will have a document over thirty six thousand words long.

    If you post one thing online a day every day for a year, you will have over three hundred and sixty posts at the end.

    Incrementalism. One bite at a time.


  • clicks and clutch

    About a month ago I upgraded my keyboard.

    Big deal, you’re thinking. A keyboard is a keyboard is a keyboard.

    Turns out on my little research adventure into finding a more comfortable way to type thousands of words per day I stumbled upon and through a secret gateway into the world of mechanical keyboard subculture.

    For me, investing in a great keyboard is like a chef investing in a sharp knife, an artist seeking out a quality brush, or a carpenter ensuring she can cleanly cut through wood with a quality saw.

    For a big chunk of mechanical keyboard subculture, a great keyboard not only feels great under your fingers, but makes clickity clackity sounds when you type, has an infinite variety of configurable keys and switches, and dances with light and colour on your desk.

    I really just bought it for the typing part, but it’s interesting to know that such subcultures exist and they have pushed through simple practicality and made us a world where high quality versions of basic tools exist and yet are still in reach of simple craftsfolk and work-a-day folks who can make use of them.


  • critical mass

    After a year of pecking away at this thing I’ve learned to think of as a “writing life” I’ve found that I’ve kinda reached a critical mass of projects.

    True. Part of me thought I would have created something worthy of publication by now, but rather that has not been the case. For example, I have a written 80% of a novel. I have penned about thirty scripts for yet-unrecorded podcast episodes. I have typed out a couple of completed short stories that need editing and the bones of at least a dozen more that need focus. My word processor files are now filled with so many personal essays on such a wide range of topics and in such a broad state of completion that I can barely keep track save for just to open one that looks interesting and polish, tweak, add, or prune.

    And. It would be fair to say that I have typed a quarter of a million words in the last year. Sure, I’ve not but published a whole number percentage of those but they exist and they are not without value. Hardly.

    In fact, as I stated, I’m at something of a critical mass. I have such a broad number of great little projects in progress that on any given day I can wake up and type a few hundred words here or few hundred words there and make progress on any one of those projects. Like, if I’m so inclined I can write another chapter in my novel, scope out a few more pages of that comic script I’ve been working on, or edit one of my essays for just a hint more of clarity.

    None of this is wasted effort. It’s all incrementally building and growing and progressing.

    It all just adds bit by bit, drip by drab, onto the whole of my collected efforts.

    And while I may sometimes feel a little discouraged by the lack of publication-readiness of most of it, I am deeply encouraged that so much of it is slowly and steadily moving with momemtum towards that publish-ready state at some point in the future. Maybe even the near future.


  • dabbling

    I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the idea of dabbling.

    There is value in the trying.

    What is failure, after all?

    By my reckoing failure doesn’t necessarily need to be a binary outcome.  

    I mean, just because you’re not a raging success at something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying, does it?  You can fail a little bit and succeed a little bit and maybe at the end of the day you learned a little bit about a new thing, a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the universe.

    Me? I try a lot of things and I’m not necessarily a raging success at any of them.

    So I use the word “failed” in a pretty casual way that isn’t neccessarily meant as a negative. It tried it. I learned something. I moved on. And maybe, yeah, I still dabble in that thing, or own the equipment, or even just think about it from time to time. It was a flop in terms of changing the way I live my day to day life, but now some time later, after the dust has cleared from the effort, it’s all worth reflecting on and definitely not a waste of time or effort for the attempt.

    Oh, sure. There is also value in persistence. There is value in deep learning on a topic, value in practicing for years at one thing and becoming the absolute best at it, honing a craft for those apocryphal ten thousand hours so that you stop being a dabbler or an amature, and instead become something we vaguly define as an expert. And yeah, expertise is valuable. 

    But then maybe some of us are destined to go broad, to not become experts in a singlular field, but rather experts in the universe, prolific tryers of anything once, twice, or until we get bored and try something else.


  • multimodal worlds

    Written word. Spoken audio. Graphic novellas.

    It’s an interesting concept in fashioning a micro-universe in which to set a collection of fictional stories to reach into a multi-modal mentality and try to create different pieces in different formats all within the same world.

    If you know me then it has been no real secret that I’ve spent the last six to eight months writing a paranormal science fiction novel set in a fictionalized city but based on an amalgamation of a few real places I know and love.

    If you know me then you also know that sometimes I get stuck and veer off on personal side projects while I’m supposed to working on other personal side projects.

    Yet sometimes—often—this is just because I have a bit of writers block. And what I’ve learned about writers block is that nothing breaks through the block better than just writing. If that sounds counterintutive, then take a deep breath and think about what it means to be a professional at anything. When you need to get stuff done, you can’t just stop and feel sorry for yourself. Instead, you need to buckle down and keep at it. The same is true for personal projects.

    “But I’m blocked!” You say.

    Well, have I got a solution for you: multimodal world building.

    Can’t quite squeeze out the next chapter of a novel? Work on a short story set in the same universe, telling a quirky tale about the people who work at the restaurant your characters visited a few chapters back.

    Struggling to figure out the plot twist that has you tangled in knots? Draw a cartoon about a minor character from your novel who pops his head into one brief scene as a mention, but has a huge influential backstory to explore.

    Hung up on some funky character development in chapter thirty seven? Write a script for an audio drama centred around the prequel events of your novel and then maybe even record some of it.

    I mean, sure, you’re not putting words into your novel, but the machine keeps working and the words keep flowing and that is sure a heck of a lot better than letting that keyboard gather dust, right?