End of May Updates
I’ve got a lot on my mind today but not a lot to show for it. Several blog ideas have been swirling around in my head but I haven’t been able to finish anything lately. Earlier this month I traveled to Puerto Rico (check out a special travel edition of my newsletter) and came back rested, relaxed and ready to work on some projects. Before Puerto Rico I read Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels and while in Puerto Rico I read Thompson’s The Rum Diary. These are two books I enjoyed immensely and wanted to blog about them but I’m finding it difficult to write anything of substance about them. Maybe I need to sit down with the books and take some notes or re-read them again. Also on the backburner are several uncompleted blog post ideas that are always stewing in my mind but I haven’t scheduled any time to work on them.
Last week, my Substack newsletter turned over it’s one-year anniversary. Over the past year, I’ve managed to share five bullets of interesting stuff every Friday morning with only a few weeks off for holidays and vacation. I’ve managed to attract at last 20 subscribers who enjoy reading. When I started the newsletter, I had no goals except to publish something every week just to prove to myself that I could and to see what Substack was all about. I modelled my newsletter after Austin Kleon, who writes ’10 things worth sharing’ every Friday.
In the beginning, collecting content to write about took effort and time as well as actually writing about the content in a short, easy-to-read format. Lately, I’m more adept at finding content and digesting it into short bulletted blurbs. Substack is a fun, and engaging platform with many talented, creative writers and I’ve been longing to share more work here - essays, reviews, and ultimately fiction.
I still find myself juggling multiple projects while feeling like I’m not really finishing anything of substance. I want to revamp my Substack and blog the content I really want to write, hopefully attractting more readers and growing the page. At the same time, I’m writing blogs on my website as well as fiction on the side.
When I got back from Puerto Rico, I wrote about everything that happened over the course of the previous week. In a few hours work over the weekend, I completed an essay about the trip. I did this for myself so I’m not sure if I will share any of it (there’s nothing too interesting). I wrote about all the little details and events which accumulated in my mind over the course of a five day trip to the Carribbean island. The act of sitting down and telling my story from start to finish felt really good.
Maybe the exercise here is, once again, to just do the work. Sit down, write, finish projects and worry about goals or the meaning behind it down the road.
