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  • day by day by day

    I can’t write enough about incrementalism.

    The classic proverb asks: how do you eat an elephant?

    One bite at a time.

    I have been writing and creating and writing and making and writing and posting. If I went back in time a year to when I set out on this little writing life adventure and looked out upon the quantity of work that I have banked in the intervening year, I know I would be completely overwhelmed.

    Think of what you can accomplish just doing a little bit each day or even each week.

    If you record ten seconds of video every day for a year, by the end of the year you will have over an hour of footage.

    If you open a document and write one paragraph of one hundred words per day every day for a year you will have a document over thirty six thousand words long.

    If you post one thing online a day every day for a year, you will have over three hundred and sixty posts at the end.

    Incrementalism. One bite at a time.

  • clicks and clutch

    About a month ago I upgraded my keyboard.

    Big deal, you’re thinking. A keyboard is a keyboard is a keyboard.

    Turns out on my little research adventure into finding a more comfortable way to type thousands of words per day I stumbled upon and through a secret gateway into the world of mechanical keyboard subculture.

    For me, investing in a great keyboard is like a chef investing in a sharp knife, an artist seeking out a quality brush, or a carpenter ensuring she can cleanly cut through wood with a quality saw.

    For a big chunk of mechanical keyboard subculture, a great keyboard not only feels great under your fingers, but makes clickity clackity sounds when you type, has an infinite variety of configurable keys and switches, and dances with light and colour on your desk.

    I really just bought it for the typing part, but it’s interesting to know that such subcultures exist and they have pushed through simple practicality and made us a world where high quality versions of basic tools exist and yet are still in reach of simple craftsfolk and work-a-day folks who can make use of them.

  • critical mass

    After a year of pecking away at this thing I’ve learned to think of as a “writing life” I’ve found that I’ve kinda reached a critical mass of projects.

    True. Part of me thought I would have created something worthy of publication by now, but rather that has not been the case. For example, I have a written 80% of a novel. I have penned about thirty scripts for yet-unrecorded podcast episodes. I have typed out a couple of completed short stories that need editing and the bones of at least a dozen more that need focus. My word processor files are now filled with so many personal essays on such a wide range of topics and in such a broad state of completion that I can barely keep track save for just to open one that looks interesting and polish, tweak, add, or prune.

    And. It would be fair to say that I have typed a quarter of a million words in the last year. Sure, I’ve not but published a whole number percentage of those but they exist and they are not without value. Hardly.

    In fact, as I stated, I’m at something of a critical mass. I have such a broad number of great little projects in progress that on any given day I can wake up and type a few hundred words here or few hundred words there and make progress on any one of those projects. Like, if I’m so inclined I can write another chapter in my novel, scope out a few more pages of that comic script I’ve been working on, or edit one of my essays for just a hint more of clarity.

    None of this is wasted effort. It’s all incrementally building and growing and progressing.

    It all just adds bit by bit, drip by drab, onto the whole of my collected efforts.

    And while I may sometimes feel a little discouraged by the lack of publication-readiness of most of it, I am deeply encouraged that so much of it is slowly and steadily moving with momemtum towards that publish-ready state at some point in the future. Maybe even the near future.

  • dabbling

    I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the idea of dabbling.

    There is value in the trying.

    What is failure, after all?

    By my reckoing failure doesn’t necessarily need to be a binary outcome.  

    I mean, just because you’re not a raging success at something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying, does it?  You can fail a little bit and succeed a little bit and maybe at the end of the day you learned a little bit about a new thing, a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the universe.

    Me? I try a lot of things and I’m not necessarily a raging success at any of them.

    So I use the word “failed” in a pretty casual way that isn’t neccessarily meant as a negative. It tried it. I learned something. I moved on. And maybe, yeah, I still dabble in that thing, or own the equipment, or even just think about it from time to time. It was a flop in terms of changing the way I live my day to day life, but now some time later, after the dust has cleared from the effort, it’s all worth reflecting on and definitely not a waste of time or effort for the attempt.

    Oh, sure. There is also value in persistence. There is value in deep learning on a topic, value in practicing for years at one thing and becoming the absolute best at it, honing a craft for those apocryphal ten thousand hours so that you stop being a dabbler or an amature, and instead become something we vaguly define as an expert. And yeah, expertise is valuable. 

    But then maybe some of us are destined to go broad, to not become experts in a singlular field, but rather experts in the universe, prolific tryers of anything once, twice, or until we get bored and try something else.

  • multimodal worlds

    Written word. Spoken audio. Graphic novellas.

    It’s an interesting concept in fashioning a micro-universe in which to set a collection of fictional stories to reach into a multi-modal mentality and try to create different pieces in different formats all within the same world.

    If you know me then it has been no real secret that I’ve spent the last six to eight months writing a paranormal science fiction novel set in a fictionalized city but based on an amalgamation of a few real places I know and love.

    If you know me then you also know that sometimes I get stuck and veer off on personal side projects while I’m supposed to working on other personal side projects.

    Yet sometimes—often—this is just because I have a bit of writers block. And what I’ve learned about writers block is that nothing breaks through the block better than just writing. If that sounds counterintutive, then take a deep breath and think about what it means to be a professional at anything. When you need to get stuff done, you can’t just stop and feel sorry for yourself. Instead, you need to buckle down and keep at it. The same is true for personal projects.

    “But I’m blocked!” You say.

    Well, have I got a solution for you: multimodal world building.

    Can’t quite squeeze out the next chapter of a novel? Work on a short story set in the same universe, telling a quirky tale about the people who work at the restaurant your characters visited a few chapters back.

    Struggling to figure out the plot twist that has you tangled in knots? Draw a cartoon about a minor character from your novel who pops his head into one brief scene as a mention, but has a huge influential backstory to explore.

    Hung up on some funky character development in chapter thirty seven? Write a script for an audio drama centred around the prequel events of your novel and then maybe even record some of it.

    I mean, sure, you’re not putting words into your novel, but the machine keeps working and the words keep flowing and that is sure a heck of a lot better than letting that keyboard gather dust, right?

  • writing pages

    With mid-year approaching, those of us who tie resolve to new habit are on high alert for roadsigns for self-improvement.

    I spotted a popular brand of faux-leather notebook selling their 18-month daily journal-slash-planners whose imprinted dating scheme conveniently begins in a little over three weeks on July 1.

    I stayed my hand with effort as I reached for my wallet.

    I love paper. I love bound notebooks. I love the art of scribbling my thoughts onto pages. I love to journal and sketch and bullet and itemize my life.

    What kept my credit card at bay was the recall of the dozens of partially filled notebooks already sitting on my shelf waiting for those past resolutions to write daily or sketch towards themes or etch my reality with ink upon paper.

    Journaling is deeply meditative. It’s like mental yoga. Words spill upon the paper and in writing pages and pages and pages thoughts are churned through our mental gears and manifest as echoes of any variety of ideas, trauma, genius or fictional fabrication.

    I do need to write more. I need to write more pages on the paper I already own and in the digital spaces I already manage.

    I probably do not need another journal.

  • increments

    I was mowing my lawn yesterday and I couldn’t help but notice how great my yard is doing this year. It’s thriving.

    Sure, there are still a few patchy places in the grass where the dog focuses her efforts. And sure, a couple of the trees could use some pruning, and sure, I’ll have a dozen new dandelions to pull later today… but for the most part, it’s a banner year for our little suburban garden lot.

    And the difference, I instantly realized, is incrementalism.

    Usually, when I’m a lot busier of a guy, I reserve yard work for the weekends or my rare days off. I try to get as much done as I can on a Saturday afternoon. Then inevitably, I tire myself out, miss a few things, or just opt to sit in a lawn chair and admire any marginal progress I’ve made.

    But this year, with a few more spare hours on my hands and between writing stints or while literally waiting for the watercolour paint to dry, I’ve been poking at it. Incrementally.

    Thirty minutes here pulling weeds. Fifteen over there trimming the shrubs. Another bit of time to rake or prune or edge or any of a hundred little tasks.

    And it has all added up. The yard, as I wrote above, is having a banner year even though it seems like I’ve put considerably less effort into it. Fewer long days of hard work, but lots of little blocks of effort, all of it adding up to real, visible progress.

    I’m sure I don’t need to explain the analogy here.

  • audio drama

    In 2001, having recently finished university and found my first “real job” I packed up and moved to the west coast of Canada to a city called Vancouver.

    I had no car. I had few friends. I had a lot of free time. And I had the hulking desktop computer that had seen me through my school work.  

    So I wrote a blog. It was a new toy, a new platform, and no expectations. A way to communicate to the world, to my friends back in Alberta, and to chronicle this life I was living.

    I’ve posted millions of words online since I penned the first journal entry into the early blogosphere back in 2001, scattered across countless platforms and dozens of websites with various lifespans.  I have wrung the dish cloth of the printed word so throughly that is sometimes seems not but a drop is left in it to squeeze out.

    Of course, there always is more to write. More to type. More to post.  These words are the very example of that, but I write like I breath these days, it’s just what I do every single day.

    The spark of creativity that I once felt in creating new and exciting websites has become just another buzz in the background of my creative life, rarely the end result and often more of a necessary foundation to the rest of it.

    Enter audio.

    I have been a consumer of audio for decades, from music to audiobooks to podcasts to soundtracks. I listen therefore I am.

    Yet, I have had so little experience recording, producing and sharing audio that on a graph comparing my written word output to my audio file output, the latter would likely not even register as anything more than an approximation error.

    In 2024 I decided to remedy that.

    I bought a digital audio field recorder, a tool with which I can step away from the keyboard and focus on the sounds of the world and my own spoken voice.  I bought a podcasting microphone. And I have come up with multiple plans for multiple podcasts.

    Like everyone I cringe at the sound of my own voice coming through my headphones as I’m editing, but after hours and hours of recording, retakes, production, mixing, and generally just playing around I sort of feel the same way I felt back in 2001: like a guy with a new toy, a new platform and no expectations.  A new way to communicate and chronicle about this creative life I’m living.

    And who knows, maybe in ten or twenty years, recording audio will be just as much a part of my daily routine as writing.  You can check out my podcasting at squwetchy.art/podcasts

  • public spaces

    Last summer we took a three week vacation to Europe. 

    We went to London, Paris, Rome and a lot of places in between. 

    It had been nearly a quarter of a century since I’d last been there. So long ago that my camera still used film (and I’d only taken five rolls with me at that.)

    Not only did I take a lot more photos on this latest trip, but I also brought along a more artistic accessory: a sketchbook. And very much like a photographer stopping to capture the scenes of the people and architecture, history and beauty around me, I routinely stopped to sit and sketch a scene with ink onto the little folio notebook I’d brought along for that purpose.

    It was simultaneously the most authentic and most frightening work I’d ever done.

    Picture it.

    I’m sitting on the ground against a wall of a building in Picadilly Circus, pen in hand, trying to stay out of the way of the hundreds of people rushing to and fro in all directions, madly casting my eye from page to scene and back and forth and back again, all the while my pen is rushing across the page, scribbling as fast as I could move it.  Everyone looked. People pointed. People stopped to take a photo of me, silly middle-aged Canadian propped up on the stone sidewalk inking out the scene.

    It repeated itself in Paris.  There I was on the lawn of the Eiffel Tower, thousands of tourists wandering across the parched July grass, eating and drinking and looking down at the silly Canadian sitting there with his notebook and his pen working the intricate and detailed shapes of the very familiar outline of the tower there a couple hundred feet away in the afternoon sun.

    And again in Rome. I pulled my notebook and pen from my satchel while we spent one hot morning touring around the Palantine Hill, the famous Roman ruins of the age of Caesar, crumbling columns and weather-worn arches, and meandering cobblestone paths dating back literal thousands of years and forming an archeological site the size of a medium-sized town. The colluseum, yes, that one, was somewhere to my back and I had turned my attention to a vista of shapes and ruins and freestanding pillars with so much life bursting from their long dead tales that the ink flowed from my pen and onto the page almost without thought. And all around me tour groups walked and wandered and lingered and looked and even, yes, snapped photos of the kooky Canadian sitting on a stone ledge sketching.

    Every one of those sketches now lives in a sketchbook on my shelf, but every single one of them emerged from an authentic moment of public exposure that culminated in a piece of art with more weight and memory imbued into it than anything I could ever draw with more time and precision back in my home studio.

    I don’t know if it was performance pressure or the time crunch of my family wanting to press on with the sightseeing or maybe just the heat of the sun on my head, but each of those sketches means more to me than any photo or video I took on that trip.

    Each sprung from a moment of inspiration. Each emerged from a second of forethought and virtually no planning. Each was nothing more than an opportunity met with the preparedness of an open mind and a ready pen. Each flowed from authenticity.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity this month as I try to wrap my head around what it means to capture an opportunity, an idea, a sound, an image, or anything creative. What does it mean to be open to inspiration and how does that translate into something more real on the page or the screen?  I think anyone who has ever wandered with a ready pen and sketchbook through a crowded European city might have a good shot at understanding just what I mean, too.

  • sick days

    I had lofty goals for 2024 and one in particular got vibe-checked by my wife early on. “I’m gonna try to write every day, all year.” I had told her. Her response was simply that, “there’s gonna be days when that doesn’t happen. Don’t overcommit.”

    Sure enough, the last week of January found me waking up in the wee hours of the morning one day with gravel in my throat. Not literally, of course, but you know the feeling. And it would turn out that I had a case of low-grade bronchitis or some other kind of respiratory infection that would all too quickly turn me from a creative, writing machine into a couch potato napping though a binge watch of old sitcoms and occasionally playing some video games to pass the time between coughing fits.

    I couldn’t do much.

    I definitely couldn’t go running. I could barely go for a walk with the dog, to be honest. For about four solid days it was all I could do to hobble down to the kitchen to put the kettle on for some tea.

    I also couldn’t write.

    I don’t mean that in the physical way, either. That is, I probably couldn’t have sat for long stretches at the keyboard and type anyways, but also I literally could not write. The part of my brain used for stringing words together into coherent sentences was off on leave, exploring a fog-covered mountain and otherwise simply out of the office. My brain had taken a few sick days.

    I went four days without writing more than a few words—sitting down to type and then quickly realizing that my mind was not there participating.

    And to be honest, I was upset.

    There went my writing streak. There went my 2024 goal. I was not even through January and I’d already botched it up by being sick. 

    As it turns out keeping myself healthy was actually important to accomplishing the things I wanted to do.

    I was mad. Yeah. Of course I was mad. 

    But recall, as I say that, that my brain wasn’t working all too well either.

    The Friday morning of that unproductive week my brain punched back into work, right back to its usual creative and philosophical self and immediately had a few choice words to share, both in print and just inside my own head.

    “Go easy on yourself. There’s gonna be days when creativity doesn’t happen. Don’t overcommit.” It told me, and though I couldn’t help but notice my brain was plagerizing the wisdom of my wife, I had to admit that it was right.

    There’s gonna be days. And you’ve got to be ready to forgive yourself and move on. You’ve got to be able to let yourself heal, recover, rest, or simply chill.  You are not a machine. You are a person. Even a guy without a real job needs a sick day (or four) once in a while, too, and that’s just fine.