This Is Me
An age ago, long before I would have reason to wonder whether my creative work might someday make any money, I was challenged by an art teacher to try something new—maybe fewer ninjas and robots, she suggested, perhaps a little…
Bad At Things
When I go too long without experiencing the gut-punch of failure, I know I’m doing something wrong. Feeling like I’m good at things feels good. It’s nice to ease into a flow state, produce work I’m proud of, and know…
The Magic of Consistency
I write every day. Words flow from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard to my screen, tallying somewhere in the 1-5k range, depending on what I’m working on. That’s a fair number of words! Not all of them…
Nudgers
There’s an argument to be made that we should all be creating for AI. Doing so, it’s been posited, is the best way to ensure our work, our thoughts, our history and experiences are well documented by the archivists of the future.…
Fall Cleaning
For many people, the dawn of Spring triggers a desire to clear out the closets and tidy up the home; to get everything nice for the arrival of better weather. Fall is my Spring, because I have an abundance of…
Focus Focus Focus
At the most macro scale, focusing on where we are in life and where we’d like to go next can help us make calendar-level decisions. Thinking at this scale can also help us make choices about what habits and rituals…
Light a Candle, Paint the Walls
We can worry about rot and horribleness and still tend a beautiful garden. I try to remember this when I feel myself drifting into a helpless “what’s the point, everything sucks” mindset. There are a lot of things in the…
The Actual Thing
Any suitably aspirational goal will require we complete a bunch of steps before we can cross them off our list, and the stair-step nature of these paths can cause us to lose sight of the actual thing we hope to…
Creative Agency
When I was a child, I would often envision an incredibly rich, detailed image (usually something related to monsters or robots or superheroes), but I would be incapable of translating that envisioning to graphite and paper. That inability to draw…
Horizon Scanning
There’s a term of art, “horizon scanning,” that initially emerged from the world of futures studies, but which has since been adopted by tech-oriented businesspeople, politicians, and even folks working in legal fields who hope to stay ahead of the…