Woke up and wrote morning pages, which is actually sort of rare lately. I’d fallen into a habit of writing them later and later, and had started to “try to get through them” when I wrote late at night. That brought me no joy whatsoever (almost resentment), so I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing them first thing. Felt great. Started the day off right.

Made a flat white and got stuck into work. I love starting day with a home-made coffee, but I’ve also been appreciating tea more lately. We ran out recently and went maybe 36 hours without a cup, and it felt strangely... terrible? Or maybe strangely nice when we picked some up. I say “we” but it was Aneesah—she missed it enough to drive to the store at 10pm.

After work, went for a relatively pathetic 1-mile run whilst my knee recovers. Probably overcautious, but I’ve had knee injuries in the past that lingered for weeks, and I’d rather skip that pain if I can. It’s always so tempting to jump right back into things and run through the pain, but I’ve (just about) learned my lesson (narrator: he will learn it again).

Now I’m sat here late at night setting up a Python environment so that I can start tokenizing a short story by Edith Wharton—the first step of many steps on the way to building a large language model from scratch. Once you’ve been programming for a few years, most programmings book tend to feel a bit painful for the first couple chapters.

I should enjoy this part, really, because I’ll quickly get into things that I’ve never touched before, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more math than I typically bother myself with. Lots of programming requires so little math. Machine learning will not be so kind to me. Oh well, at least I studied it... decades ago. I’m sure it won’t be diabolically painful.

Today was a day, so I’m giving myself a break. I used to do that with re-runs—where I’d comment on a post of old—but now that this is a public journal it doesn’t make much sense to me (and never felt like much of a day off anyway, to be honest). There’s something sort of freeing about writing this. Not just leaving it empty, but telling myself—and you, I suppose—that I’m taking the time and space for myself. I’ll catch you (me) tomorrow.

Slept in today. Needed it, clearly. Made coffee, ate pastries (again, how great are pastries). Chores. Walked the dog. Picked up snacks. Watched the Super Bowl for the first time. I mean, I didn’t, but we were invited by two of our (excellent) friends to watch the game, and we gladly accepted. We ate snacks and talked and had a great time. I watched a little (sort of).

It’s funny, it was a regular hang and yet for the past 3 years (since moving from the U.K. to the U.S.) it’s been the most rare kind of hang. Moving 3,000 miles twice within a couple of years means that it’s hard to build the sort of friendships where you have “regular” hangs. The kind where you’re at someone’s home, and you feel at home there.

When I started writing this daily blog, I started by saying that I wanted to build community. A few months later I said that I’d started to, but I was really talking about community built around (basically) work. That’s great, and I’m so thankful, but it wasn’t really the kind of community I was talking about. Not entirely, at least. Not primarily, even.

The kind of community I’d been missing was this kind. The kind that’s more difficult to describe, but that feels like it enriches your soul. The sort of friendships that are built upon the very idea of friendship, and aren’t based on (or dependent on) some specific, shared thing. The small things are the big things, it turns out. They probably always were.

The weird thing about journaling publicly is that it’s sort of like my private journal. It’s day by day. I change my mind. Contradict myself. The stuff that we often edit out of whatever we share publicly. Surely I want to be seen as someone who’s consistent, principled, organized? I had thought so, but why? I much prefer when I see that someone is fallible, flawed... mortal.

One of the reasons I turned this daily blog into a daily journal was to observe my life and creative projects more plainly. To see what it is that I had to write about at the end of a day and ask myself whether I wished that I could have written something different. To read it as if I was someone else and ask: does this inspire me? Does it warm my heart? Sooth my nerves?

Today I went for a run in the hills with a friend—a ritual that I’m coming to appreciate more and more—then bought pastries, made coffee and relaxed on the couch with Aneesah and Cacio. Once we were well and ready, we drove into San Francisco to go thrifting, ending at a wine bar with good vibes that allowed dogs inside (so all three of us enjoyed cheese).

That felt like a full day to me. Family, friends, nature, movement... cheese. My body felt strong, my heart was full, and I felt such gratitude for the people in my life. When I sat down to write about the other part though—the work, my creative projects—I suddenly felt (just a little bit) bad about myself. I hadn’t made progress on the thing that I’d planned to.

As you’ll know if you’ve been reading, that thing is writing, recording and scoring audio stories, often-but-not-always inspired by the great Californian outdoors. It’s something I feel passionate about, but I’m not very skilled in yet. It’s just something I feel drawn to; compelled to do. I couldn’t even tell you why, it’s just a feeling or sense of purpose.

Increasingly, it overlaps with my day job in some way. It’s about stories and humanity and lived experience. It’s a skill I’ll build and can write about. There are other things that I want to do that feel just as close though, and where I already have skills—designing fonts, making software, working with language models. Things that I also want to spend time on.

So the thought I’ll end on for now: I don’t need to add constraints that only serve to limit what I do and make me feel bad about what I don’t do. I have many creative interests and I want to explore all of them. When I write about the work here, that work can be anything. I just want to keep making every day, and sharing what I make. That makes for a full day too.

I spent so long trying to think of interesting things to write every day that I sit here now, at the end of a normal day, and wonder if I have anything at all to write about. It almost pains me a bit to write about a the most normal of days, so why don’t I lean into that and see how it actually feels.

Got up early for all hands at the day job. I actually sort of love them, unironically. We had one just before the holidays that made me feel so much pride and joy. So much that I ran into the living room after to tell my wife about it. That’s weird, right? But also true, and also great.

Took a (very) early lunch break to walk the dog with a friend (Jordan) and their dog (Murray). I love seeing how happy they are to see each other—Cacio in play pose, Murray running towards her with a big smile. We’re so lucky to have dogs in our lives. Cacio’s sleeping next to me right now.

A few hours of work, and then the pharmacy to pick up a prescription and some pain relief gel. Some lingering pain from crap running form a couple days back. After that, picked up an insanely large pizza, wolfed it down, pulled a blanket over me, and... well... started writing this.

Some days—weeks, longer—just disappear in a flash. That was today; this week. I don’t know where the hours went, but they went somewhere, and didn’t leave much room for creative projects. Shooting for a more balanced week next week, with a little head start over the weekend.

It’s funny, reading Brian Eno’s occasionally-very-mundane journal entries felt endearing and interesting, and reading my own feels... not like that. I didn’t even know very much about Brian Eno before reading his journal, so I’m not even sure that it’s because he’s Brian Eno.

Anyway, writing this journal is doing something to me that doesn’t feel good right now, but that I believe—really, I do—will feel good in the future. I think it will change me in some way, and I suspect for the better. A weird experiment to run in public. More weird than I’d anticipated.

Journaling about the journal today. I started journaling to capture bits of life and bits of work, for similar reasons: remember to live and remember to work; do both of them well. I’m going to start getting more concrete about each; both. Writing about life is easy (so long as I am alive) but work doesn’t just happen. I want to know when I haven’t done it.

I’m going to start creating an entry for each, grouped by day. I want to stare at the blinking cursor when I haven’t done the work and realize that I’d better do some work—any work—if I want it to stop just blinking back at me. If I really have nothing to write, I want to write nothing, and know that I wrote nothing. I want to query for the date and get null.

That’s what will happen today, and it hurts a bit, but that’s sort of the point. I won’t beat myself up too much, but I want to feel the little pang of.. something. Even if it’s simply to avoid embarrassment, I want to push the work along enough to write something, and without that something being bullshit. Is this about life? It’s all life, I guess, if not death.

I don’t want large language models to write for me, but I don’t mind them helping me to write. I was riffing on a tool for a while called Muse after watching an Elizabeth Gilbert talk where she spoke about the ancient idea of “having” a genius rather than “being” one. I wanted a little muse to just hang around whilst I wrote and help me out occasionally. Jog my memory or tell me a fact I might not have known, that sort of thing.

I sat down to write some more of my story this evening and started to wonder about a few things. What time does it typically start to get dark in London in September? What day is the market on again; would this sort of thing make sense? Where does the Overground head after London Fields, and what does that route look like in general? I didn’t want to stop my flow, I wanted to come back to it; to have it ready when I was ready.

This is where I think that large language models (or really, tools like ChatGPT and Claude) can be so helpful. Even more helpful if you can bring them into your writing tools (or indeed, find writing tools that already include them). Not in an invasive way, just in a “here when you need me” sort of way. These tools have got a bad name for themselves among many writers, but they can genuinely be good creative partners.

Anyway, back to writing and speaking it out loud. Sat here with a sore neck and painful knee. Poor form whilst running today and now paying the price. The neck pain I think is just “being old” or sleeping funny. I can’t turn my head left, so I’m feeling like Zoolander today, except that I can’t relate with being “really, really ridiculously good looking.” Anyway, back to work for a while, but not too long—more of life to tend to.

There’s a book called Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky that I barely remember anything from, but I constantly think about the one part that I do remember. It goes something like this: you can redefine your goal for the day at any moment to make it a good day.

When I woke up my big goal was to clear up an ambiguous project, but it turned out not to be on the cards. I’d facilitated a discussion in the morning that I kind of messed up too. Wasn’t feeling great about myself, and that sometimes lasts the day, doesn’t it?

Anyway, walking Cacio I realized that simply having a nice walk with the dog could be my definition of a day well spent. As we walked by the pet store she tried to drag me in as usual. Today, I let her, and she sniffed every shelf and toy and treat in that place. She picked out a snack. She got a treat from the clerk, who liked her smile. She was happy.

I cooked dinner (salmon, rice, side of pan-fried tomato and spinach), tidied a little, didn’t really get time to work on much else. We had a nice walk though, just the two of us. Lots of sniffing (her), staring at the sky (me) and fresh air in our lungs (both of us).

Hackney. London Fields. One of the benches lining the pedestrian path. A gaggle of friends walking back from an early dinner on Broadway Market; commuting home from Shoreditch. Summer, still light outside. The occasional cyclist gliding past on their custom-painted fixed-gear. The sound of the overground as a train heads toward Hackney Central.

That was the picture that came to mind so vividly when I started to imagine the scene in which the protagonist makes their first call to a number that they know will not ring. Sat there on one of those benches with their jacket pulled around them. Just watching for a minute. Noticing. Not looking at people who pass, maybe, but looking through them.

Writing is hard, but some bits are easy. Sometimes a scene arrives fully-formed in your mind, like it needs to get out of you. Like your only purpose is to let it pass through your mind and into your fingertips and onto the page. This scene was a bit like that. I’ve sat on those benches. I’ve ridden that bike. Been in that gaggle. Heard that train; ridden it.

Narrating your own work is hard, because who really likes the sound of their own voice? Maybe some people do, but most people don’t, I think. I tried to get out of my head by using different accents and dialects. It helped a bit, actually. I could almost feel like I was listening to someone else.

Starting to write now, and it reminded me of how hard it is to actually make things for yourself. It’s like walking through treacle; like I’m a severely underpowered large language model. Eking out a few words only to judge them immediately. I know the secret is to just write a lot of crap, so that’s what I’ll do. Still, writing is hard, but isn’t that the joy of it too?

When you’re writing something melancholic for spoken performance, you realize how getting quiet can counterintuitively make the moment feel even bigger. You notice the impact that pauses—the absence of speech—have on the story; on the spoken parts. I was listening to a members-only episode of This American Life recently where they talked about scoring, and how important words sound immediately after the music stops.

Anyway, it felt good to start, even if it was painful. It’s always slightly painful making things, I think. Making things for yourself especially. There’s this gap—the one that Ira Glass is famous for talking about—between your taste and your ability to execute it. I don’t think that gap ever closes fully, to be honest. It gets smaller though, if you persevere. Most creative work requires that you at least persevere, if nothing else.