“We are all digital notebooks now,” Warren Ellis wrote. “Writing just for ourselves and whoever finds their way to our caves to look over our shoulders as we scribble thoughts down in public and daub pictures on the walls.”

I’ve stopped publishing notes and journal entries on my blog because I’ve mostly been writing in my notebooks now. I’ve been writing for at least an hour every day since the start of last year, a span of about 636 days. I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of pages in my notebooks, and when I couple that with the time spent trying to live my life as best as I can, I’ve simply stopped making time for this online space of mine. I feel kinda meh about it, honestly. The only reason I’m writing this entry is because I want to publish something at least once a month, keeping some trivial streak of mine alive.

Warren was writing about something he calls a “social media winter,” this idea that “social media doesn’t create ‘growth’ any more.” “If you use social [media] to keep up with your friends,” Warren wrote, “then get them to move to new channels with you and keep them close.” Facebook, Instagram, and especially Snapchat have been daily companions to me for the past year, and I have enjoyed myself tremendously on them because my friends are on there. Contrary to my past feelings on them, my time on social media this year has been nothing but positive. They’re not without their problems, but what doesn’t have problems nowadays? So again, couple this with my time spent in my notebooks and living my life, and I’ve frankly lost most of my motivation to tend to this little digital notebook of mine.

And yet…

I like having an online presence. I like having my own little digital garden with my name on it and my words and my photos and my everything on it. Even now, as I’m writing this, I’m feeling those old feelings of pleasure and contentment and even calmness that comes with writing something for myself and for the 2 people who have added this site to their RSS readers. I read Warren’s post on the day he published it, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. This idea was planted then and has been growing throughout the week, and sure, I probably could’ve explored it some more in my notebook, but he’s talking about the web, about blogging more specifically, and I feel like my response to it should be on the web, too.

I’ve gone through spurts of intense productivity and long stretches of silence, and I’m not sure where I fall on that spectrum now. I have ideas and desires and plans for this digital notebook of mine, but I don’t know what will come of it. Life has been incredibly fun and challenging this year, and I’ve enjoyed writing about it in my notebooks and talking about it with the people I care about the most, so I’m not quite sure how to fit this place into my life right now. This could be the start of something fun and cool, or it could simply be the ravings of a madman. Not sure yet.

I guess we’ll find out, right?

In the end, NaBloPoMo was a blast, and I’m going to miss it.

“What could go wrong?” I asked in my introductory post. Thirty posts later, and I can safely say that I loved every minute I blogged in November, and goddammit, I’m going to keep blogging, aren’t I? Fuck’s sake.

In the last month, I wrote over 16,000 words, for an average about 500 words a post. Do I have a favorite? In a way, they’re all my favorite (laaaame), but I see them all connected as the stuff I wrote in “November.” These are my “November” posts, and they all tell a story of how I lived this month.

Okay, if I had to choose, my post, On Spider-Man, a Friend, and a Broken Heart, was my favorite because of how personal it was and how I was able to weave a video game review into it. I didn’t think I could do that, but I think I pulled it off. You be the judge. This was also my longest post, and the one that took the most out of me, in a good way. Something to think about for the future.

Will I do this again next year? I hope not because—goddammit—I think I’m going to keep going. Maybe not daily (I’m definitely taking tomorrow off), but more regularly for sure. I want to continue writing my weekly notes on Fridays, and I think I’d like to continue my Sunday Appreciation posts, too. The latter might be once or twice a month, not sure yet.

All in all, I had lots of fun, and I hope to keep going. So let’s keep going!

The Posts

1. National Blog Posting Month
2. It Starts Here
3. An Attempt
4. Admitting I Make Mistakes, and That’s Okay
5. Architects and Gardeners
6. What Is My Best Writing?
7. Old Tools and New Tools
8. Zero Draft
9. A Matter of Perspective
10. Bought Some More Music
11. Notes for November 11, 2022
12. Dance Like Nobody’s Watching
13. Clean Air
14. Something Adorable
15. 15 Good Ones Will Do
16. Literally Advanced Civilization
17. Creating My Own MTV Music Channel
18. Notes for November 18, 2022
19. This Is Just Life
20. No Perfect Days
21. Cold and Dreary
22. 101 Films
23. Slept In
24. Grateful for the Small Things
25. Notes for November 25, 2022
26. On Spider-Man, a Friend, and a Broken Heart
27. Sunday Appreciation: Headspace
28. Friendly Competition
29. Kneecap Magician
30. NaBloPoMo 2022 Recap (this post you’re currently reading)

I’ve done lots of sleeping and not enough reading this week, so this edition of my Notes (original name, huh?) will be shortish. Yeah, that’s the excuse I’m going with… Anyways! Here are some notes from today, this 25th day of November, 2022:

New lens

My new XF16-55mm lens arrived today. First impressions:

• It’s big
• It’s beautiful

That’s it because I haven’t really had a chance to play with it yet. Because Montana is very cold right now and because UPS doesn’t heat their trucks, my lens was ice cold as soon as I unpacked it. When I went to use it, condensation fogged up the lens, so I couldn’t really use it on anything. That’s fine because I wasn’t going to go out to shoot anything today anyway. Maybe this weekend?

Black Friday

How many people were ridiculously spammed today by emails from wish.com? Anyways, I setup a rule to automatically mark them all as spam, and my inbox has been quiet ever since.

I took advantage of some sales, many of which I did not really have my eye on, but when I saw them, I was like, why not? That’s how they get you. Well, me, at least.

Here are some of the deals I took advantage of:

• 25% off a lifetime license to Plex Pass. I’ve been using Plex for years, and I’ve always had my eye on this, so I decided to take advantage of it now. Doing so gave me access to Plexamp, quite possibly the best music player I’ve ever used. It’s not without some major flaws, but the good parts far outweigh the bad. I’ve been thinking of doing a deep dive into it… I just have to write it.
• A lifetime license for GameTrack+. I discovered this app a few weeks ago when my guilt over my backlog finally forced me to do something about it. I downloaded the app, added over 100 games into it, and realized that 1) this app is fantastic, and 2) I wanted the ability to add more lists, which, alas, was hidden behind a paywall. $20 for a lifetime pass was worth it for me.
• 50% off a basic Xnapper license. Another app I discovered a few weeks ago. I noticed some web development blogs using it for their screenshots, and I thought it looked really cool. Once I bought the license, I used it on this post from a few days ago. Simple and nice. I like it.
• 50% off Every Layout, Heydon Pickering & Andy Bell’s awesome CSS course. I love web development, and I’m always looking to improve my skills. I cannot wait to get started on this.

Video Games

I finished Spider-Man: Miles Morales yesterday, and my goodness. I have so many thoughts about this game, thoughts I hope to write soon. This game hit me hard.

Once I finished it, I still wanted to play video games, so I started Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, another game I purchased a year or two ago and never played. I’ve been playing since yesterday, and I’m enjoying it! I love the Uncharted universe, and this game is hitting all the right spots.

Finding your people

Okay, I did do some reading. I read this post by Tom Critchlow on generating agency through blogging, and this part jumped out to me:

It’s common to think of blogging as “building an audience”, but this can sound negative, self-serving, sleazy and promotional. Instead we can think of blogging as “finding your people”, which sounds much more wholesome, generative and positive.

Finding your people. That sounds nice, doesn’t it? I’ve found some people through blogging, and having them in my life has made my life that much more fun. I think when I first started blogging, building an audience was something I cared about, but when the focus turned to that, I cared more about them and not on my writing, and that only made me hate blogging, so I quit. When I returned, I did not focus on building an audience, and because of that, I’ve enjoyed writing again.

I wonder if people can notice that. I really have no clue how many people are reading me because I don’t have analytics on my site, nor do I care to add them. The odd email here and there from a reader is more than enough for me.

Again, thank you for reading. I really appreciate it.

Chris Coyier quoting Dan Cederholm:

As soon as I typed the HTML for my first hyperlink, the power of it hit me. This is the DNA of the web, the fabric that connects all of the bits and pieces all over the globe. It sounds so primitive now, but when this was all new to me and I was discovering how it all worked and how simple it was to create links, it was magic.

It’s still magic! URLs are one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It took a lot for them to exist, and now that they do, they have literally advanced civilization. They are the ultimate unbeatable feature.

I couldn’t sleep last night (big surprise), and when I can’t sleep, I either watch TV or think. I watched this tutorial on how to create and organize a Capture One Catalog (yes, I like watching webinars sometimes), but that wasn’t enough to knock me out. So I lied in bed, and I thought—about my life, about my friends, about my writing, about things I’ve read.

About a week and a half ago, I read Tom Critchlow’s post titled Small b blogging. In it, he wrote:

And remember that you are your own audience! Small b blogging is writing things that you link back to and reference time and time again. Ideas that can evolve and grow as your thinking and audience grows.

As Venkatesh says in the calculus of grit - release work often, reference your own thinking & rework the same ideas again and again. That’s the small b blogging model.

Before I read this, I always believed that “small b blogging” was about linking to my ideas again and again, that none of my “ideas” or “essays” or “posts” existed in a vacuum. I’ve always considered my website as my second brain, and by linking to other things I’ve written, I’ve been able to reinforce these connections in my head, helping me remember things I’ve thought about and thus, helping me connect disparate ideas together and create new connections. It’s really fun when I think, “Wait… didn’t I mention something like this before?” And I search for it, and there, I did write about it before, so I link to it and move on, this new connection firmly created in my brain.

I don’t know how many people actually follow my links (my guess is not many), but that’s okay. I write mostly for myself. It’s like I’m holding a conversation with myself through time, and each time I link back to something from before, I’m crafting this web of ideas that only really makes sense in my head. Am I “literally advancing civilization” like Chris says? I doubt it, but I’m advancing myself, I think, and that’s pretty cool.

Small b blogging is cool.

I admit, National Blog Posting Month is kicking my ass.

Part of the issue is finding the time to write. Here’s a rough accounting of my daily routine:

• Wake up at 5am
• At my desk with a cup of coffee and writing in my notebook at around 5:20am
• Finish writing at around 6:20am-6:30am
• Study German and Japanese until 7am
• Leave for work at 7:10am
• Work from 7:10am to around 4:15pm
• Come home 15 minutes later, change into my workout clothes and start my workout at around 4:30pm
• Shower, make my post-workout shake, and relax by watching TV, starting at around 5:15pm and going until dinner
• Cook dinner and eat it, 6pm to 7pm
• Write???
• Go to bed at around 8:30pm to 9pm

It’s a bit after 7:30pm as I’m writing this now, and my eyes are heavy, I’m tired, and I want to go to bed. It doesn’t help that I didn’t sleep well last night. I’ve been having trouble sleeping all year, and I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to go to bed earlier and earlier so I can get as much sleep as I could. Frankly, I need 8-9 hours of sleep a night or I’m miserable. And I feel miserable tonight.

I’m trying to build this second writing habit, and quitting now isn’t going to help me. I. Must. Keep. Going.

Warren Ellis wrote about the zero draft last week. The zero draft

is the draft you will never show anyone. It’s the draft you know is wrong but which contains the bare bones and meat-scraps of the story you’re trying to write. Get to the end of the zero draft, wait a day, and then go back and make it readable to other humans and fix all the egregiously wrong stuff, and that’s your first draft. Zero drafts are always too short: they fill out in the process of revising into a first draft. Stop thinking about your first draft as a first draft, call it a zero draft, and you give yourself permission to just slap everything you’re thinking about on to the page, knowing you can fix it before you have to inflict the draft on some other poor bastard.

I like this a lot. This is my zero draft. All the posts I’ve written for NaBloPoMo thus far feel like zero drafts to me. Sitting down at 7pm to write something and posting it online an hour later doesn’t feel like it deserves to be more than just a zero draft. Am I being too hard on myself? Maybe.

Did I mention I’m tired?

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe I’m trying to bite off more than I can chew. I did give this project very little thought, after all. Writing is something I love, though, and I want to work on being a better writer. But when I have bills that need to be paid and a life that wants to be lived… it’s tough. It’s really tough.

In a lecture titled The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art Over Nations, John Ruskin had this to say about art:

Wherever art is practised for its own sake, and the delight of the workman is in what he does and produces, instead of in what he interprets or exhibits,—there art has an influence of the most fatal kind on brain and heart, and it issues, if long so pursued, in the destruction both of intellectual power and moral principle; whereas art devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe, is always helpful and beneficent to mankind, full of comfort, strength, and salvation.

I admit I’m not one who reads John Ruskin in my free time (though I have read a few of his books). This section was quoted in Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson Jr., a book I finished last month and loved. Around that time, I had been thinking about the role of writing in my life. To be more specific, I had been thinking about this tension I had between writing in my journal versus writing the novels and essays I considered to be more serious, and thus more worthy of my time. I hesitate to call it easy, but I can easily make myself sit at my desk with my pen and notebook and spend the next hour writing pages and pages about anything—about what’s in my head, what I’m feeling, what’s going on in my life. But once I intend to write my novel or work on an essay, I struggle. I struggle to make myself go to my desk, to open my notebook or my laptop, and simply write.

Why is this? Is it that one is something I do just to do—as John Ruskin says, practised for its own sake—and the other is destined for a bigger purpose, which is to be read by other people, to be judged by people like John Ruskin?

What is my best writing?, I remember asking myself. I used to think that writing something personal, something from the heart, will be considered “good.” That I might consider that my “best” writing. But then I started to question things. Personal doesn’t mean good, but something good can be personal, I wrote in my notes. Something honest doesn’t mean good, but something good can be honest. And on and on my thoughts went. Instead of getting to the bottom of it, I think I binged another TV show and went to bed.

And now I’m here.

I don’t know the answers, but what I do know is that I disagree with John Ruskin. Art practiced for its own sake is “helpful and beneficent to mankind,” even, or especially, if it’s just me. Journaling is something that has benefited me in ways I can’t measure, except in this one way: it has kept me alive. That is not hyperbole. I would not be here if it wasn’t for my writing. I do agree that “art devoted humbly and self-forgetfully to the clear statement and record of the facts of the universe” is important, but it’s not everything.

I’m going to end it here because I don’t know where to take this. That’s okay because this is just an attempt, something I can come back to later and revisit. After all, I’m not perfect.

“I’m much more a gardener than an architect,” concluded George RR Martin in an interview with the Guardian in 2011. What did he mean? He explained that there are two types of writers,

the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.

I’m definitely a gardener, but I’ve always wished I was an architect.

In school, I always struggled with writing essays because I was usually required to write an outline first, and I hated writing outlines. I didn’t know what I wanted to say; how am I supposed to write an outline for an argument I don’t have yet? I needed to write to know what I thought—to drop the seed in the hole and water it and see what grew from it. But I never allowed myself to explore this side of writing because I had deadlines to meet, and because I was an immature student, I always left all my assignments until the absolute last minute.

In this, I haven’t changed much.

It’s almost 8pm as I’m writing this. I mostly had an idea of what I wanted to write, but instead of spending time throughout the day writing, I procrastinated and only started writing a few hours before I usually go to bed. Sure, deadlines are one of the great motivators in life, but I’m not a young and naive teenager anymore—I don’t have the strength or the time to procrastinate. Nor do I want to anymore.

All my novels have languished for two reasons: I could never meet my own deadlines, and I spent too much time watering the soil instead of figuring out how many rooms the house is going to have. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve rewritten the same story because of the new “seed” I found and I just absolutely had to see what grew from it. Even this post has grown into something I didn’t quite plan or foresee. I had this John Ruskin quote I wanted to fit into this, but I think I’ll have to save it for another day.

I want to be an architect, even a bad architect, as Warren Ellis wrote back in June. “I’m bad at plans,” he wrote. “I try, but I always end up winging it.” And here, I can find both solace and a valuable lesson: as long as I’m out in the field scoring the soil with my trowel and planting the seeds and watering them, I’ll be okay. But an unplanted seed won’t grow, and an unwritten story will never be told.

Whether I plant seeds joyfully and see what grows from them or whether I pull out my drafting pencil and straight edge and get to drafting my house, as long as I’m writing, I’ll be fine.

This may be hard to believe, but I am not perfect.

I make mistakes. Like, all the time. One of the reasons why I’m still single in my 30s is because of the many mistakes I’ve made.

After I published yesterday’s post, I went to bed feeling like something was off. Was it the clunkiness in my writing? Yes, but that wasn’t it. My writing is always clunky. Was it how rushed I felt while writing it? Yes, but I always feel like that when working under a deadline. Was it my borderline inappropriate title? Yes, but it wasn’t quite that either.

It was all the above.

Another one of my many “rules” over the years has been to never update or revise anything I’ve published, except for the odd typo or to add a word I’ve needlessly omitted. I’ve never written this “rule” in some style guide or anything, but it was something I did and followed. Once my post is published, I felt like I was done with it, and it was time to move forward.

One of my goals with this project is to refine my craft and revamp my mindset, and part of that means clarifying these unwritten “rules” I hold in my head, to challenge and question them. And this is one of those “rules” I’m challenging.

I remember reading that Robin Sloan edited his posts all the time, and that has provided some comfort. Robin writes:

I remember when I blogged on Snarkmarket, years ago, I would change my posts ALL THE TIME. Not just typo fixes but make pretty substantial tweaks—clumsy language detected with the benefit of an hour’s reflection. Like oil paint; you can move it around for a long time. I loved it.

That quote comes from a post on the great Austin Kleon’s blog, a post where he writes that “blog posts can be edited, added to, improved upon.” Why is that important? Because “I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve.”

I want to evolve.

To evolve is to admit you’re not perfect, that you are capable of improvement, that your journey is ongoing and never-ending. To evolve is to live, and all I want is to live, mistakes and all.

Earlier today, I re-read yesterday’s post, and I spent some time revising some of it. I changed the title, I polished some of the clunkiness, and I clarified a few thoughts. I would normally be petrified of doing this, but part of my evolution is to do the scary things and hope my readers understand.

Like Austin writes, “to do the exploration that growth and change requires, one needs a forgiving medium… but what one really needs is forgiving readers.”

I will add that I also need to forgive myself for the many mistakes I’ve made and will make. After all, a life without mistakes is a life not lived at all, and again, all I want is to live.

One of the things I don’t feel comfortable with yet is writing about topics like I’m some sort of authority on it. I don’t feel like I’m much of an authority outside of my own life. I feel confident writing about my own feelings because their mine, and I write to explore them, to understand them. I like referring to these pieces as essays in the way that Michel de Montaigne used the word, as attempts to understand my thoughts and feelings.

These essays are mostly contained in my Journal. If you’ve read them, you’ll have seen how personal I can get with them. They’re personal because I don’t know how else to write. How can you try to understand your emotions without getting personal? Since I started blogging again in 2020, I’ve included one of my photos in each essay as a supplement to my writing, and even here, these photos are also attempts, attempts to explore my photography, to discover ways to improve this craft. These “rules” I’ve set for myself have helped me focus these essays, but they have also stopped me from writing more. Each essay must have a photo, I tell myself, and if they don’t, then I won’t write them and I won’t publish them. It feels silly writing that out like this, but it’s true.

My Notes, on the other hand, were supposed to be more free. They were supposed to be my playground, a place to try new things, to amuse myself with silly notes or one-off photos. But… I don’t know. I guess I grew scared that I might offend someone or post too much to annoy my audience. I wanted to be safe, and that desire to be safe meant I restrained myself from playing around like I wanted to. As I’m writing this, I feel sad about that. Like I wrote yesterday, this is my home. My home means my rules. I have every right to amuse myself, so that’s what I’m going to try and do.

During this attempt at blogging every day in November, I’m giving myself permission to try new things and to explore different areas of my craft. I want to have fun doing this, and by having fun, I hope to discover something new about myself. Because if you’re not having fun, then what’s the point?