Woke up early today because Aneesah woke up early. Tried to prototype something on my phone with mixed success. A little AI muse that I could invoke to ask questions about my writing. Surprisingly good questions, a couple of them. Some unsurprisingly bad ones, too. Based on something Elizabeth Gilbert said in a talk once about “having” a genius.

Popped out for milk and came back with sardines and pastries. Came back with the milk too, fortunately, but it wouldn’t be unlike me to have forgotten it. Made a coffee, flat white, decaf. One of the most satisfying parts of the day, to the extent that I sometimes think about it the night before. A bit sad maybe? Who cares. Sardines on toast because I used to have it as a kid and remember liking it. I still like it, turns out.

Tried to read this journal aloud to practice narration and immediately realized it was the wrong thing. Started reading Dear London by Kerrin-Lee Nell instead. It’s a love letter to a place, after all, so what could be more fitting. Much better, but felt at times like it wasn’t written to be read, or at least not read by me. Time to write something of my own I think.

Listened to the sleep story written by Flossie Skelton (or Florence, internet seems undecided, but it’s Flossie on the author’s site and I suspect that they know best) a few more times. It hits my ear just right. The speech, the foley. Need to transcribe and annotate it, but I think if I try to read it aloud I’ll just be annoyed that I don’t have a beautiful Irish accent. How unfortunate, really, that each of us has the accent that we do.

Will start writing something though. I’ve always said that this project was a love letter to California, but it only dawned on me recently that I might write it like an actual letter. It might simply be a love letter to place, but starting with this place. Anyway, I like reading letters, especially the goofy ones; unserious, but not. I hope I’ll like writing them too.

Starting to get sick. Catching up to Aneesah who’s been sick for a couple days now. Enjoyed being the one in good health so I could take care of her a little. We’re taking care of each other now (the usual arrangement).

Listened to the same audio story maybe 10+ times yesterday, each time listening for something new—pacing, tone, levels of foley used to score specific scenes. Thought I’d get bored of it but I didn’t at all.

Trying to pare my project down to the next smallest step, and dismiss anything that feels like an excuse. Thought: record readings of this journal and mix until happy. That might feel like a really small step, but there’s more than enough to do: treating the recording space, figuring out how I want to speak, tidying the audio up, playing with levels etc.

I could go even smaller (and maybe I should): just practice reading out loud. Recording helps, but I have ears. The journal exists, I have my voice (for now). Nothing stopping me. No excuses. Read until it starts to sound right. Every reading is progress. One very tiny step on the journey.

I’m sure that reading this journal won’t be very interesting, but that should force me to write something that makes for a more compelling recording. I’ll annoy myself into doing the work (which is a horrible strategy that actually works—morning pages proved that to me).

It’s a holiday today. Just made coffee and wrote my morning pages whilst sitting on the couch. Sam Cook on the record player, Aneesah to my left reading a book under a blanket, Cacio stretched out to the right. I listened to Andrew Scott reading that sleep story again whilst making coffee. I’ll probably listen to it many more times today whilst doing chores.

You know that feeling when you just feel so privileged to have something in your ears? I do, and this story felt like a great privilege. The story itself (written by Flossie Skelton) is great, but I also love the way that Andrew reads it. Slightly informal, intimate, warm. It almost stops feeling like fiction, because it’s read with such heart. Truly, a sensory gift.

The work that I most enjoy is work that moves me somehow. That’s the kind of work I want to make. Work that causes a small shift in someone. In their heart or their mind or their perception of the world. Work that makes the world look a little different, even if barely perceptible. Even if only over a long time, with many reads or listens or whatever.

Anyway, mostly planning today and thinking about the tools that would help me to share the kind of things I want to share. I’ve resisted planning over the months, but I’ve come to realize that I need it more than I thought I did. I’ll listen to great work whilst I potter around, because exposing myself to great work helps me to make my work better.

Steering things in the direction of the work now. I’d hoped that keeping a journal would force me to first clarify what it is that I actually want to create, and then to make regular progress toward it. First day writing about the work properly and it’s already helped me to do that.

I need to write something longer about this, but the short version: I want to tell audio-centric stories about the Californian outdoors. It’s a love letter to this wonderful place, and to place in general. I’ll be writing, taking photographs, making short videos, and recording binaural audio, but it’s all in service of telling stories through audio, with heart.

The cool thing about having so much to learn is that I have almost no excuse to do nothing. There’s always something small to do. There are no real blockers. If I can’t get out to Point Reyes or it’s absolutely pissing it down, I probably can’t go and shoot great video of the coast, but that’s just one step of so many steps in the long creative journey.

I listened to Andrew Scott (of Fleabag etc.) read fictionalized love letters on the way to pick up a curry tonight, and it struck me that I could riff on something similar to help me learn more about mixing, scoring, microphone technique and so much more. There are zero dependencies, I’d just need to sit my ass down and actually do the work.

Taking any photos would make me a better photographer, which would serve me for this project. Writing any poetry would make me a better poet, which would serve me. Listening to the world would make me a better listener. Creative work isn’t linear, it’s messy and it’s beautiful and it’s about showing up, even on the days when it’s harder.

When I started putting some more shape around the work today, I felt that impulse that I think many people feel—to structure and sequence everything in a really neat way. It needs more structure than it has now, but I’m going to resist coming up with the perfect plan, because I just don’t believe in that. Take the detour, miss a turn, live a little.

Jordan Mechner didn’t know he’d be a beloved artist when he started writing the journal that he’d end up publishing. Brian Eno, on the other hand, already was when he started writing his. It made me think that I’d find fewer examples of “normal life stuff” in his journal from 1995—but it turns out that humans are, you know, human (most of the time).

I opened the book to a random page today, and the entry that caught my eye captured in so few words both the realities of being a human in the world and the hint of a mindset that helps you to... well... do the stuff that Brian Eno had done by then (and the things he’d do after).

Beautiful day after bad night. Anthea also ill. Irial can’t keep anything down. To chemist early for tummy things. Made drawings for Self-Storage pieces. Suddenly I have millions of ideas.

This is pretty meta, but I’m trying to get used to the idea that a journal entry doesn’t have to be like a typical “post” (by which I mostly mean longer, more literary). Some of my favorite entries in The Making of Prince of Persia are just a sentence or two capturing bits of life around the creative project. I’ve been reading more of it to get some inspiration—or I guess, permission? But from whom; for what? Brains are weird.

It’s funny, I thought that I’d write these sort of “filler” posts until I was ready to “start” the journal, but I post every day—it was already a sort of journal. Yesterday I made up some title for the post, but today it felt strange to do that, so I didn’t. I’m starting the journal, I guess.

One other sticking point for me (and I was like this with morning pages for a year) is that I just can’t imagine missing a post or not keeping it around forever, but I’m learning to let go of that too. I suspect that I’ll tuck many of the posts on this site away soon—available still, but not in the list to peruse. This blog is for me. It’s for thinking; for progress.

I’m aware that this post—and the past couple posts, and the next few, more than likely—are meta. I’m writing journal entries about writing a journal. If I can’t use the journal to learn about my practice and teach me things about myself though, it might not be much of a journal. I’ll try to take it less seriously. There are no rules (except those I impose).

I do want to steer the things I write here toward the creative project(s) that I want to pursue, but I’ll give myself a minute to get there. When I do, maybe I’ll opt for a clean start. There’s something symbolic about starting again, and something cathartic in letting go of a perfect streak. Who knows. I’m just trying to say that it’s fine to do that.

So, welcome to a few days of me sounding absolutely incoherent. I’m not sure that’s markedly different to anything else on this blog, but I feel some sort of lightness in it. There’s something comforting about writing about nothing in the plainest of language. It feels like blogging—real, old-school, bona fide blogging. Catch you in the next one.

I’m going to be turning this daily blog into (mostly) a journal. A maker’s journal. A tool to help me talk about the work I want to do, and to force me to actually do it. If you want to write about your work, it turns out you have to do the work. Some stuff to figure out first though.

One of the first things on my mind is which tools I’ll use. At the time of writing, my tech stack is super simple, because it doesn’t need to be anything more: trusty old Jekyll, hosted via GitHub pages. It doesn’t get much more simple—I just push markdown to the main branch and it’s live in minutes. I love it. Always have. But will it serve me?

The answer is probably “probably.” I’ve never included images in my posts here so far, but inevitably I’ll want to in a maker’s journal. I’ll probably want to include video occasionally, too. I’ll want to include audio (and I’m not sure how yet). I can do all of that with GitHub and GitHub pages (with LFS for the images and video) but it always feels a bit icky for some reason? I’m not sure why. It’s probably fine.

The other thing I’m thinking about, probably prematurely, is that I’d like some sort of newsletter functionality. The work I want to make I’ll eventually want to offer to people, and it would be useful to start (slowly) understanding who those folks might be. I don’t have any analytics, I don’t collect emails, I just put stuff out there and occasionally it comes back. Plenty of options here. Buttondown, Ghost, whatever.

Ghost is probably the front-runner, actually, but I’d need to let go of my obsession with markdown files. If I can’t let go, I’ll just keep things here, figure out the large file stuff, use something like Buttondown, and crack on with it. There’s always just something so tempting about the idea of the tool that does it all. They never do though, really.

In some ways this is the first journal entry, but it doesn’t really feel like it. I’m thinking of three tags: journal, essay and meta. There would be a journal post every day, but I might occasionally post something meta about the journal itself (like this) and will definitely spin out longer essays. Kind of like A Year with Swollen Appendices. kind of.

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.

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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?
8. 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.

This post is a part two. I won’t add much preamble, because you can read that in the part one—suffice to say that this is about the million moments in a day—almost any day, really—that I could write about.

1. Throughout the walk we talked about so many things: morning pages, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, meditation, artificial intelligence, design, writing, growing up, travel, relationships, family, internal family systems, This American life, Pico Iyer, the New Camaldoli Hermitage, solitude, storytelling, and more. I could write about any of those discussions. I could pull quotes out. There’s something about the act and art of conversation, about meeting someone on the same frequency, about energy-giving conversations.
2. We’d both brought cameras, but I don’t think either of us took any photographs. We were wrapped up, I think, in the non-stop conversation. I’d brought my recorder and binaural microphones and didn’t record a single thing. The place was the setting for a great conversation, and I think I existed in that conversation more-so than the place for those couple hours. There’s something here about tools that can influence you even if you don’t use them. About preparing, just in case. About being absorbed by discussion and ideas.
3. We walked by a few folks, and a few folks walked past us. Each time it happened, I thought about the snippet of conversation overheard in either direction, and thought about what we fill in ourselves when we overhear something. How did folks end up at the point in the conversation they’re at now? Where will they be ten minutes or two hours from now? What can I infer about them? There’s something about the countless conversations happening at any moment. About the strangers you almost meet, but not quite. About tiny moments that you might wonder about for minutes or for months.

Alright, that’s the first half of the day, so I’ll pause here again and come back tomorrow. I feel like I’m cheating a bit here, but it’s my daily blog, you know? Besides, lots to write about once I’m done.