I was ordering my tea and standing beside the cash register were a couple stacks of self-published books for sale, local poets mostly from what I could tell, who had hung out their work with a little sign and a price tag and basically said, hey, “I wrote this… and I live in your community.”

Maybe that’s my next step, but I will say that it inspired me to do something similar: set up a book stand on my website and offer these words for sale.

I know I’m going to come across like a bit of self-promotion here, but I think it’s more than that: I’ve been writing away in obscurity for literal decades while simultaneously fearing the big dangling blade of traditional publishing.

The internet, for all as much as it has sunk into a kind of slop warehouse of inane content, is still filled with more great indie content than I will ever be able to consume in my life. It’s much harder to find in 2026, but it’s there. I’m certain of it.

My effort at the cafe book drop then comes in the form of code: I whipped up some custom software to convert all these hundreds of posts into something that very much resembles an ebook—and then I dropped it into a page where people might see it there and buy a copy as they are passing through, as much as me saying, hey I wrote this… and I live in your internet community.

I know it takes guts to put words into something quasi-permanent and then ask someone to pay you for them. I know, because I have spent a long time not having such guts.

But maybe as I get older and give a few less fucks about the people distracted by fashion reels and shiny influencer slop, those guts are a bit easier to come by.

I came back from Japan last year with a dozen urban sketches in a notebook, and it has become one of my favourite souvenirs. And yet, invariably, when I show anyone their first question is always: how long do these take you?

Sketching isn’t a camera, obviously.

It’s not fast, and so saying that I can draw pretty fast is a relative expression of time investment. I can draw pretty fast, but that means I usually spend less than thirty minutes with my pen sketching out the details of a scene.

Again, it’s not a click and go. It’s find a place to sit, out of the way of the bustle, and then work through the scene, chewing out the shapes and shadows, poking in the details, and trying to get as much as I can before either I attract an audience or annoy my ever-patient wife.

Urban sketching is the opposite of urgency.

I may have enjoyed it in my youth, and maybe even been pretty good at such forms, but I think my patience would have been less available to the pages.  Sitting somewhere with no pressure to keep exploring the bigger place but instead soaking in the details of just one spot, one scene, one moment… that’s the persistence of maturity, I think.

There are a few hard realities of learning a new craft after a certain age. Heck, like almost anything there is a ticking clock for greatness. Me picking away at the piano at nearly fifty is almost certainly not going to open up a spot at The Juilliard School any more than my dabbling in urban sketching this late in life it going to give me the time and energy to pursue a scholarship at Emily Carr University.

The reality is that after certain doors in life, close most of the world will almost certainly regard your pursuits of artistic and creative skill as little more than a retirement hobby.

And maybe that’s fair.

…but it also isn’t.

Art, fiction, music, all of it is as much about translating life experience into something outside of our memories. Fine whiskeys are aged to make them better, so why not artists, too?

I am on the fringes of an age category transition myself, looking at much of middle age as something I’ve been through and starting to think about not just age, but the general idea of starting on a creative path as a late entrant.

I got into watercolour when I was older than my first instructor.

I took up the violin at forty.

I didn’t start seriously trying to play the piano until just a year ago.  

And something tells me that my flailing sense of urgency about aging might be a wee bit overblown. 

Under the category of Late & Ready I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

I remember that last night I had a great idea for an article, but this morning sitting here to write said article I can’t remember a thing about it.

Is that getting older, or just bad idea management overall?

I think we all probably encounter empty places where we thought we left our creative car keys the night before, and maybe such as it was in my youth I’m just more frustrated by this thinking organ in my skull that I feel like I should have more control over as I approach fifty.

Online analysts will tell you that technology has allowed us to offload our memories to external devices and this has made the tools in our brains dull and fragile. On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with leaning into a notebook to keep track of fleeting ideas when you don’t have time or inclination to open the laptop and immediately start working on them.

I admit it. I’m going to be fifty this year. Yikes.

(Not that you couldn’t tell from guy still writing a like this in twenty-twenty six, but  I ain’t a teenager anymore.)

I spend a good chunk of my mornings working on creative brain work, getting the important stuff off my plate, and being all professional. 

Then I eat a (usually) healthy lunch.

And by one-thirty. Ugh. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open.  If life allows, I’ll close the lid of the computer and close my eyes, too. 

I suppose it’s a universal truth of a sort, but if you can swing a nap to recharge your batteries in the middle of the day then do it. Don’t be ashamed. Don’t begrudge the sleepyheads. Don’t frown at someone who can use an extra half hour of rest. 

Sleep is not wasted time. It is how our brains rejuvenate. 

I always knew I’d get older some day. Heck, as they say, aging is a privilege and a monument to surviving this crazy universe.  And if I can experience it a little more clearly after a few extra winks then all the better, right?

That’s what musicians probably do, right? I assume so myself. Going to the music store makes me feel like how I used to feel going to the bookstore or the record store (way back when that was a thing) and I spent hours browsing through the stacked pages of a million potential adventures through grand ideas or creative expression.  Sheet music still seems to hold that grip on me.

I bought a book of sheet music that is probably too hard for me to play.

Precisely, it was a thick book of classical standards, two and a half centimetres of paper bound up with literally hundreds of works by Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and a couple dozen more mostly-famous composers. Intermediate piano music.

Don’t get me wrong.  I can read music. I’ve been playing some form of instrument for about forty-five years, most recently going on a music journey with the violin.  But having delved in a serious attempt to learn how to play the piano this past year I would still neatly categorize myself as a beginner. 

And now I have this sheath of music for intermediate players. It’s probably, almost certainly, too hard for me to play… right now.

Confidence is many things, often immeasurable things, but sometimes I need to remind myself that I must have a least a little bit of it: I invested in my future self this week and I bought a book of music that is aspirational, too difficult for me today, but some part of me must believe that tomorrow will be better, huh?

I was about to turn forty and feeling this deep void in my life with regards to making music. It was palpable. I would go to concerts and wish I would have learned an instrument, or stuck with the one I briefly played in grade school. I would see my kid going to her piano lessons and feel a pang of jealousy for her privilege that we were able to give her this opportunity to learn. So I bought a violin and signed up for lessons.

Ten years later I am pretty okay at the violin.

I play in a community orchestra, though, and I am surrounded by dozens of other musicians of varying ability, many of whom learned to play when they were younger. I can’t help but compare. And here’s the rub: sitting among a dozen other violinists each week at rehearsal has highlighted something to me. I call it the vibrato problem.

Vibrato is an important aspect of playing the violin. The finger presses down on the string to shorten the length so that the resultant note can be played. But watch a violinist and you will see that they don’t hold that finger steady: they wiggle it, subtly altering that string length like a sine wave as they are playing the note producing a gentle warbling of the tone. This is vibrato.

Vibrato is still something I struggle with after ten years of playing the violin.  My fifty year-old fingers never learned early and are fighting to this day to learn it still. Having a young plastic brain would probably soak this up and it would become second nature, but being an older learner has left me to consciously think about it for every note when there is already a dozen other things to think about while playing.

Extrapolate this to any other art form, any other skill. There is always a vibrato problem for older learners: and I’d like to believe that recognizing it is the first step in knowing how to overcome it.

It’s a farce of course. Comedy.

But the notion of the novice outsider is not.

I am definitely an outsider.

I am not a pro. I am largely self-taught (provided you don’t count the occasional class at the community centre.) And I far too often break the rules simply because I don’t actually know them yet.

Gatekeepers everywhere will pronounce, thus, that my efforts are null and void.

And yet others of a more nurturing nature will decide that we are all students and imperfect until the day we die, so all of us are outsiders until then.

Which is it?

Being an outsider hardly puts me in a position to suggest what that answer might be, but I would offer that notions of “revitalizing energy”, “fresh blood” and “new talent” are not cliche by accident. I think many people recognize that outsiders can break barriers and unclog stuck patterns, maybe even helping those entrenched on the inside, offering inspiration or change.

I’m not saying my noodling art will do that by some deliberate design or effort, but I think the possibility of such accidental insight means we shouldn’t simply dismiss outsiders either.

If you are a creative, and anything like me, you too often go online to see the unfiltered criticism of so many gatekeeping Shadowtrolls. Performative dismissal of the work of others has become something of a cottage industry online, an entire genre unto itself filled with dark aspirational influencers whose sole contribution is unfiltered judgement.

Criticism is essential to any art form, but open critique meant to foster the talents of a creator who has hung their work out for public adjudication is vastly different than tearing those same offerings to shreds while glorifying the corpse of someone else’s creative efforts. Shadowtrolls feast on the pain of the latter, giving no value to the community they critique and farming adulation from those who giggle at the imperfection of others.

Art is always imperfect. Even the rare examples that we hold up as so are also the source of flaws and must be subject to evaluation to particular tastes. 

Criticism is inescapable, and I am not here to simply say it shouldn’t exist.

Rather, as a creative who is among those offering our own imperfect samples to the world, that when met with the ravings of a Shadowtroll seeking to bar the path and slam the gate closed, we should do something besides hear and recoil at the critical rage. We should make our own evaluations of the source of those barriers and judgement, and discard such opinion with a ferocity met equal to the unworthy.

I’m not trying to be humble, but merely to tell you that despite being moderately okay at three instruments, being able to read music, and having a respectable recording studio hacked together in my basement office, I am really just dabbling in what most people would consider proper musical creativity.

And I’m okay with that.

I am trying to learn, strapped for access to resources and time and patience, at least the kind granted to a guy in his late forties who most people feel should either already be good at this kind of thing or should stop “acting like a kid” and do something more serious than compose jittery jams in his pyjamas. 

I used to recap an essay^[1] I once read about the font Comic Sans. You know it. It’s the most hated font in the design world, the free comic-book-ish font that came with Microsoft Windows long ago and shows up on “fun” corporate posters designed by people who don’t design for a living. I defended that font: people who use Comic Sans, I said remembering that essay, are thinking about design. They are arguably, well, just not great at it… yet.

They are no designers. 

But they are trying…the same way I am trying with music, art, and a dozen other creative pursuits. And rather than make fun of anything designed with Comic Sans, perhaps we should be thinking of it instead as a teaching opportunity. We should be thinking of it as made by someone who’s mind is open to the possibilities of creative expression.