Continued from an earlier post: Travel Journal (Part One)

Of course you keep a journal when you travel.

You step off a plane or emerge from the car after a long drive and you’ve put yourself into a whole new world. It’s a cliché but travel really does expand the mind… and a journal is like back up storage.

I write constantly. I write every single day. There isn’t a day I don’t open up a computer, put my fingers over a keyboard and just start typing something. It would be easy for me to be overly judgemental about this and wag my finger at people who don’t write stuff down when they set off on adventure… and I’m not saying you MUST do it. I’m really saying you SHOULD try it. 

Journalling while travelling is more than just muddling around with a pen and paper when you could be sitting on the beach with a book or a drink (or maybe both) in your hand. Writing things down isn’t extra work you need to do back at the hotel when you could be sleeping or catching up on your social media feeds. Keeping notes about your adventure doesn’t need to be complex or rigid or even grammatically correct. 

I do believe it enhances the experience, though.

Assuming the experience is something you care to remember, a journal is a memory capsule for experience. We go about our lives every single day and don’t realize how much we overlook and forget. When everything is familiar at home your brain doesn’t need to remember anything but the handful of differences it encounters. But travelling? Everything is new. Everything is fresh. You step off the cruise ship into a brand new world and every set piece is novel. You blunder off the tour bus and you are met with a world you’ve likely never seen and may never see again. You pay the taxi driver and step out of the cab into a landscape that is filled with things your brain needs to work full time to keep up to understand, let alone remember. 

And it seems like for those short term few days it will all stick, that you’ll never forget this moment… but you will. It may get filed away in your brain somewhere, but recalling that memory weeks or years later? Good luck.

…unless you take a few minutes each day—waiting for your coffee order, taking a break at the hotel, or just resting in a park for a spell—to write something down.  Journal. Try it.

Productivity is a tricky thing to get right, and making a piece of software to “force it” seems a bit contrived. I went through a half dozen iterations of the idea and ultimately I honed in on a gamified world that thrived when I logged creative practice.

Writing, drawing, taking pictures, and playing music are logged in small bursts and all of it feeds a little virtual neon city that has enough complexity that it reacts in subtle and curious ways.

But I find that having a strange gamified abstraction of my creative journey at my fingertips has resulted in me reacting in subtle and curious ways, too.

An example: I’ve been meaning to improve my urban sketch crowd drawing.

You know what I mean, right? You sit down to draw some simple, loose urban sketch in a fast-paced moment. You’re scribbling lines and shapes and adding depth and complexity to the architecture and just as you think you’ve got the scene… you look at it one more time only to realize that you’ve drawn around all the people. You’ve left them all out. Urban spaces are cluttered with humans, after all.  So you try and add a few later but—hey—you’re good at drawing buildings not tiny little blobs that look like tourists.  I should try to get better at that, you think.

I wanted to get better at drawing crowds when I’m out in the world drawing urban scenes.

I could have probably approached this a hundred ways, but inside this little productivity city that I built something random happened: I was offered a job. I mean, that’s normal—that’s what the system does. It prompts you to practice your skills by randomly dropping jobs. What was weird was that the first job it picked for me after I added my disciplines into the system was “figure drawing.”

So I did some figure drawing, and I logged it.

And then I did some more. 

And then I decided to add a “project” to draw one thousand little figures before the end of the year. Suddenly, I find myself sitting in front of the television sketching little people over and over and over for long stretches—getting better and better at drawing crowds of urban sketchy people.

Productivity is subtle, and I don’t know yet if this counts as productivity. But it feels like an interesting thing to wander a virtual world and see what is around the next corner, particularly if it’s leading me somewhere I want to go.

I’d love to pry that phone out the Kid’s hands some day, lock it in a box, and tell her that she’s got it mixed up. She razzed me the other day because I was vibe coding. She literally shouted in my face that I shouldn’t be using AI. “Dad! That stuff is evil.”

I shook my head and kept my cool and told her that security checking my web code through Claude for hacking vulnerabilities was not the same as generating slop in a chatbot. Both AI, sure, but different realms.

And besides, I thought later as I was out for a walk alone (exercising the dog and daydreaming up my next article) you have your face plugged into a phone screen ninety-five percent of the day. Creativity is not going to bubble magically through that device and make you a better human, is it?

Grumpy old man could shake his fist in the air and shout “oh, the kids these days…” but it’s not just the kids, is it?

When was the last time you left your phone in a different room—and the outside the bathroom door is not good enough of an answer, though that’s getting rarer and rarer too if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by.

Boredom is the heart of my personal creativity.

Boredom—when I turn off the screen, leave out the headphones, walk without conversation, run without headphones, sit without a television, lay in the grass without a book or a game—that’s when the good stuff flows.

We’re all increasingly distracted by entertainment and technology is a garden of distraction.

What hope does boredom have in the face of unlimited options to consume our minds. What hope does human creativity have at the loss of true boredom.

This is a cross post from Of Poets & Processors.

Branched · Part One Continued in Travel Journal (Part Two)

Of course you keep a journal when you travel.

Okay, maybe I’m leaping to a conclusion about you and your interest in methodically logging adventure into a sheath of paper, but heck even my spouse who only writes business documents every other day of the year pulls out pen and paper back in the hotel room each night.

It’s taken me most of my life to settle into a format that I like, but I have written travel journals for as long as I can remember.

I have gone the old fashioned route, a crisp clean lined notebook full of rambling recollections of the adventure-filled days.

I have dabbled in sketchbook travel journalling, penning a simple bit of art, watercolour or ink drawings surrounded by notes and labels and bite-sized anecdotes.

I once took a novel on long vacation and wrote travel memories in the margins.

To this day I almost always bring along a keyboard and type posts into a personal blog with photos, and yes, I fully count this as a travel journal.

And lately I’ve taken to a form of travel-adapted bullet journalling where I record point form collections of experiences, travel modes, food notes and little hand-drawn maps.

But why do it? Well, I think it’s a key part of the experience: Writing can be many things—therapeutic, expressive, creative, and communicative to name a few—but travel writing can help us process a new place and remember when our brains can’t quite keep up with the adventure.

Hold onto your hat.

When I travel, it’s race day.

No, not for running. (At least not always.)

See, for every race a runner runs there are often months of training. If I’m running a half marathon in August, then in April we’re starting hills, planning weekly increases in distance and working out a strategy for all the other bits that go into a successful showing.

Race day is the last day of a very long era of practice, honing, patience, suffering, and growing.

When I travel, it’s race day for my hobbies: my art, my photography, and often my writing.

I’ve just spent months out in the neighbourhood pointing my camera at interesting suburban things, colourful patches of trees, and posed pictures of my dog. I’ve hunkered down with a sketchbook and inked endless mundane nearby objects, strolling people, and familiar landscapes. I’ve sat in the field and written essays, penned journals, and compiled updates for social media.

All of that is practice.

And then I step off a plane, camera strapped over a shoulder, pen and paper ready, and a blank journal stuffed into my backpack—ready to perform. Ready to take the best photos I know how. Ready to sketch things I’ve never seen before. Ready to scribble notes about experiences and impressions into pages for later perusal.

Race day is the last day of a very long era of practice, honing, patience, suffering, and growing, even if that is about running… or art and hobbies and habits.

Continued from an earlier post: Hard Change (Part Two)

Change is hard.

I left my government job over three years ago and I still sputter out excuses when I cross paths with someone who questions the narrative. No one can understand why. No one can make sense of decoupling from a career out of free will.

An interaction usually goes something like this:

Oh, hey—how are you? What are you up to these days—still with… We worked together or we knew each other professionally and the only thing we had in common was our ties to that job.

No. I’ve been gone for years now. You?

No. I’m with… they say some name of some company I’m unlikely to remember later… what are you doing then?

Here, I should interject and say—Woohoo! I’ve realized a dream. I spend my days writing and making and exploring. I wrote a novel and I’m writing short stories nearly every day and I’m posting prolifically on a couple of websites. I get involved in the community. I spend time with my family. The ladies who sell me tea the cafe know me by name. I’m splendidly happy with my lot—how is corporate life going?

I don’t.

Oh, you know—I do some contract work here and there. It’s not a lie. I do. Trying to start my own little business and it’s slow going.

That sounds amazing. Does it really?

I make a bit more small talk and it never goes back to anything of substance. No one cares—in the best ways and the worst, no one cares that you leapt from the moving train of your career and are wandering in the wilderness trying to find meaning. And that’s fine. No one needs to care.

But then that’s the problem: Change is hard, and too often I find myself making excuses for why my change has been so fuzzy rather than just admitting that change is amazing, too.

This is an updated version of an earlier piece called Productivity Obsession (v1) originally published on January 28, 2026.

I will admit that I have a bit of an obsession with the notion of tracking personal productivity.

I have tried apps, journals, lists, calendars, logs, books, spreadsheets, databases and more.

In October I coded a new app to take another swing at the “productivity tool” challenge.

Past attempts have been simple task tracking apps with checklists and goals.

This latest attempt has been a behemoth of curiosity and complexity: it posits an imagined futuristic city inhabited by a creative underground market where skills are traded and jobs are posted. The more creative work one logs in the system the more the city grows and the more interesting things are unlocked.

My proudest achievement is that the imagined city has a radio station that plays lo-fi tunes in the background while I work, encouraging me to have the app open on my computer for easy logging.

It’s immensely cool and I’m having so much fun exploring the little novelty, but…

Does any of it actually work to make me more productive?

I’d like to sit here and write the virtues of all these tools in leading to a more productive creative life, but at the end of the day what probably works best is just simple accountability to self. All of these little gimmicks, checklists, logs and databases no matter their format, are meant to bolster that accountability, but if one doesn’t have accountability to start with then no amount of filling pages, sorting lists, or checking boxes is going to change what ends up on the pages that actually matter at the end of the day.

Continued from an earlier post: Short Stories (Part One)

I dug in.

I figured that challenging myself to write one short story per month would be exactly that: a challenge. And two months and two stories in, I’m finding it to be a comfortable one.

A few years ago when I set out to write a novel in my newfound state of semi-retirement-slash-unemployment, I spent a couple months world building.  I had a grain of an idea but wanting to focus on a proper character-driven novel in a quasi-science fiction setting, I had long decided I couldn’t just sit down and start writing. No pantsing that. 

World building can be a whole discipline in itself. One can get too easily lost in fleshing out elaborate imaginary places for your beloved characters to find themselves existing.

I locked in, though. I built an alternate reality at the edge of my own, fabricated a make-believe city mashed together out of the two places in the world where I spend most of my time, gave it a new name and mixed in a paranormal science-fiction vibe. 

—then I wrote the better part of three novels there.

It is within the world of that same city where I have been penning my short stories.

Short story is a curious art form and so much different than writing a novel, and having a world that is pre-built in my own mind—and previously experienced through a fiction writers eyes in three previous novels—has been immensely helpful. Two or three people encounter something strange and unusual in the mundane day-to-day of life there, and it makes for ready fodder to build an interesting tale.

I’ve penned two stories so far, have my third queued up, and am getting my head around an editing plan for each. I’ve wrapped this challenge in many things: habit and public accountability, sure, but making it part of my larger project, too. 

Writing shorter works becomes an act that not only further fleshes out my world for future novels but becomes artifacts in their own right. 

As this post goes live, this collection has over two hundred entries about creativity and the creative journey. Some are pretty vapid, some others are so introspectively deep I honestly don’t know how I found the words.

I think I can take a guess, though: flow and presence. Perseverance. And the rhythm of a project that goes on and on and on for, in this case, the better part of a year of near-daily writing.

It’s been a long road so far and, as I pen the last formal explanation of my long list of chapters in this collection, it strikes me that I’ve probably found more from the effort of making it, writing, promoting it, and refining it over the last ten months as I suspect any other person will ever extract from it for themselves.

That is the final lesson, I guess: that when everything else falls away and you just find the moments when creativity and inspiration and motivation collide… well, interesting things do happen. The effort of just trying is worth it. There is a fluidity of thought that emerges from a mind that gets into a pattern of creativity, sets out on an adventure to make something big and impossible, and does the work.

There are nearly thirty chapters in this collection and they bounce across the spectrum of creative philosophizing, dabbling in the nuance of self to the perception of others past the complexity of commercial value and span the years of our lives as creators of things. I’ve dabbled in trying to explain each of them, and now we come to the last of it: what happens when we just find peace in what we are doing and let that be enough?

This may be the last in a long list of explanatory posts but under the category of Potency & Peace I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

I call the plugin “Forkposter” and it does a complex task for a very simple idea: versions.

I borrowed the notion from code, which as a software development guy is a topic that comes up even in the commercial naming of products. Such and such version three point one or Phone OS Eleventeen. 

I have started doing something similar with essays I write here: and it all starts from the assumption that ideas change and grow.

Forkposter allows me to “branch” an essay, which is to say turn it into a “part one” and then write parts two, three, four… etc. It also allows me to “fork” an essay, which keeps version one in the feed but then publishes a new, updated and revised version (I make the revisions, obviously, rewriting and expanding on the original) while that original stays in the feed and points aggressively at the updated copy.

You’ve probably started seeing little “branch” and “version” badges on some of my posts, because I actually found I very much like this idea of iterating on old posts and old ideas (now that the project is nearly a year old there are a lot of those) and fleshing out things as I’ve thought about it more and written more on tangential topics.

Iteration is not always about step-by-step growing outward, but sometimes it is just as much about retracing heavier lines over the things you want to get right and make stand out.

That kind of transparency isn’t for everyone, but I think it suits a writing project like this, demonstrating in real time that none of this is written in stone, and rethinking, revising, and revisiting is not just a good idea but it can be one that’s baked into the machine, too.