A few weeks ago, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write here. You can read the post I ended on, but it was a pretty anticlimactic conclusion. If I’m being honest, I just felt like I was getting nowhere useful and decided to move on. The wonderful thing about thinking, writing and waiting? Your brain keeps working it out.
Today, the fully-formed thought entered my mind that I should use this blog to journal the work that I really want to do. I’ll get to that (the work I want to do) in a minute, but I want to spend a while on the journal part first. It’s worth noting that this idea did come up in the earlier posts, but it hadn’t grabbed me in the same way it has now.
When the idea entered my mind, I was cleaning the kitchen after dinner (which, coincidentally, is when many of my best ideas come to me). As soon as it did, I ran to my office and grabbed The Making of Prince of Persia, the journal that the game’s maker Jordan Mechner wrote, published in beautiful hardback by Stripe Press.
I needed to finish cleaning the kitchen, so I quickly searched for Jordan’s name in my podcast app and found an interview on the Design Better podcast. A few minutes in, one of the hosts mentioned Brian Eno’s book A Year with Swollen Appendices, a journal and appendix of essays talking about his work, collaborations and ideas.
I finished cleaning, made a cup of tea, ordered Brian’s book from City Lights book store and… started writing this post, so—as usual—I’m figuring out what I want to write as I’m writing it. I always think that lists feel like the most honest form of half-finished thoughts, so let’s write a list with some rough thoughts and see where we land.
- The “work I really want to do” is tell the stories of beautiful places, starting with Northern California and specifically with Point Reyes (and even more specifically with Point Reyes Lighthouse).
- I want to tell those stories with field recordings, audio stories, writing, poetry, photography, video, and maybe eventually books. Sounds like I need to figure some stuff out? Yeah, that’s the point.
- I figure stuff out through writing. That’s what I love most about writing. It helps me figure stuff out. It creates forward momentum. It allows me to look at myself in a way that I otherwise can’t.
- I thought I wanted to be an author, but what I really want is to be a writer. Maybe there’s no difference to you, but for me it’s this: to be a writer I just need to write. There’s no baggage attached to it.
- Morning pages changed me. Journaling about my life changed my life. It helps with projects like this, too, but I don’t want my morning pages to just be about projects. Morning pages are for everything.
- So, this daily blog could be a journal of the work that I want to do. Like Mechner’s journal it can help me figure the work out. Like Eno’s journal it can lead to related essays and experiments.
- It can also be meta: a journal about the journal. What do I want this journal to look like? Which tools could make it easier to capture what I want to capture? What—if anything—gets in the way?
- On “things I want to capture”: I might want to include images, video, audio and other things that I don’t usually capture in these posts. I want it to be a high fidelity journal of the real work.
That’s… pretty much it? More thinking to do, but that’s exactly what this journal is for. I might keep the old posts around or I might tuck them away. This site might look different soon, live elsewhere, use a different stack, or whatever. I’m here to write work into existence, and to share the work that I create. That’s what this daily blog is for.