Starting a regular writing and publishing habit

The more comfortable I get being an ‘online creator’, the more I appreciate the different stages of production that each bit of ‘content’ represents (I don’t like the word, but I’m not sure there is a better one yet).

I have a few channels for my writing now, and each one has a different vibe to it.

There are the two newsletters, where there are either c. 670 people or c. 1025 people¹, depending on the newsletter. These people get the newsletters in their inbox, which feels like a bit of an intrusion and so I’m grateful to them for letting me in. This context also makes me write in a certain kind of way. While I’ve managed to strike quite a conversational and exploratory tone — which I like and my subscribers seem to appreciate — I still find myself wanting more of a ‘workshop’ feel.

I also have Twitter, which is great for rapid fire ideas with very little thought behind them, just to see what lands. It’s fun, and it is possible to go deep there, but it doesn’t lend itself to considered prose.

And I have the ‘essays’ section of this website (I’m not sure what I think of “essays” — I might change it to blog or articles, essays feels a bit much)². These are, in theory, highly polished pieces that are towards the end of my creative process, artefacts that try to capture and articulate the best of my thinking on a given topic. This is and should be a high bar.

As someone who aims to be a world class writer, I want to establish a consistent daily writing practice, where at the end of each session I have something that could in theory be shared, even if short and not completely thought through. These are the little things that will eventually become big things.

I could just do this in a private notebook, but there is something sensationally valuable about writing something with the intention of hitting publish and knowing that it could be read (hello). Having a place to put these things also encourages actually writing the things.

This is that place.

Hello world.

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Oh, today I made and published a YouTube video. I’ve been getting stuck in thinking I need to make polished things, but I don’t, actually. The long game I need to play for now is to get my Alexander Technique course in a good place, so YouTube needs to be low effort for a while.