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.

Continued from an earlier post: Undramatic Scapes (Part One)

I got some flack the other day from someone who (jokingly, mostly, I’m pretty sure—wink, wink) suggested I shouldn’t post so much on Instagram. This followed an afternoon walk of marathon posting where I took about fifty pictures of the colour splotches of the turning autumn leaves, a kind of abstraction in organic oranges, greens, reds, and browns—then proceeded to post at least a dozen of them one-at-a-time into my feed.

I shrugged.

If you don’t like it, don’t follow me, I joked back.

It was a momentary delve into the undramatically mundane.

There is nothing wrong with taking glorious photos of magnificent landscapes, but life isn’t all spectacle. Sometimes it’s the dull moments in between, and we’re far too used to only highlighting the best of the best, and forgetting to tap into the everyday. Sometimes we need to seek out the abstractions of colour and shape from normal things and stop getting tangled up in perfection.

There is beauty in undramatic scapes, or at least I think so: patterns in the autumn leaves, yes, but too footprints in snow or whorls in the clouds or shapes in the bark of a tree or the geometric curiosities of clashing architectural styles. The list is infinite.

If you aren’t looking at the normal things and seeing beauty, you are missing something in the everyday that can bring you immense joy and creative success.

Just shoot me, but I want to share some of that vibe.

Continued from an earlier post: Permission Trap (Part One)

We’re all frustrated with social media these days, and sometimes the only recourse seems to be to point at anyone even tangentially involved and yell “Stop!”

That friend who posts a little too much: STOP!

That coworker who is oversharing: STOP!

The relative who can’t seem to look at a comment box and walk away: STOP!

As someone who posts routinely I get my fair share of real life people questioning my participation: it’s not directly telling me I shouldn’t, but it is a subtle dig and a semi-revocation of permission.

Once, long ago, we all joined these networks and connected to each other in this giant circle of digital trust. I’ll connect to you, we said, but you need to be respectful of that.

Then the algorithms filled those feeds with advertising and slop and rage bait and memes, and we shrugged and said, well, I can’t yell at Zuckerberg or Musk or any of those assholes, so—

—so we started revoking permission from our friends. And we almost do it unconsciously: we scroll past the stuff from people we know just like it was part of the rest of the mess, not recalling that the photos and words and stories and messages from the people we connected to were the whole damn reason we downloaded the app to begin with. We ignore them, just the same.

The result is a great big gap where there was once celebration. There is a quiet rule that social media sucks, but a rule the neglects to differentiate between content from people we know and like, and content that is overwhelmingly corporate, influencer, or algorithmically generated.  

We lump it all together and shout STOP! But we keep loading the apps—to find only our friends heeded the request. All that is left is the slop. All that is left is the ads. All that is left is the manufactured reality that doesn’t care if you want it or not, and shrugs when you push back. 

We scolded the wrong creators.

Continued from an earlier post: Creative Positive (Part Two)

I continue to remind myself that, as a creative, refraining from posting positive things into social spaces not only is a kind of self-censorship but it leaves gaps that are quickly filled by negative things.

I was more active online in the weeks leading up to the unity referendum that happened here in Alberta, Canada in October.  It was not necessarily about joining into the fray and shouting partisan slogans or reposting dubious information.  I did my share to “get out the vote” and sent numerous reminders to friends and offers of free babysitting (which no one took me up on) but mostly I just posted non-political stuff.

I kept sending links to my running website.

I took dozens of autumn photos and shared them everywhere.

I fired up the frequency of my back posting from this and the other writing project I’m doing about algorithms and technology topics.

I shared positive thoughts and whimsical aphorisms about all sorts of things that popped into my head.

And I just tried to fill the space: not necessarily to interfere with the conversation, but because that’s my role. My job, unpaid and often thankless, is to clutter up your social media feed with the mundane. It is to drop art into your apps, pack your photo scrolling with pics from nature, and remind you that real life is bigger than political bullshit, that it continues even when the mouths of politicians stop aren’t flapping and hucksters of every stripe aren’t trying to needle a bit more power.

Rare moments, but they exist. They need to exist. They need to continue to exist.

Despite the evidence to contrary, life is bigger than all that.

Art. Thought. Story. Music. Colour. Trails. Sunsets. All of it must keep going no matter what. When they stop, when we stop being creative positive, then the negative wins and what is there left worth fighting for.

I’ve spent a lot of years seeking some kind of creative destination. In my head it has always been a place I was going and, blah blah blah we all know the real lesson in life is that the journey is often more important. It’s a cliché by this point, print it on a wooden board and hang it in your kitchen.

We’re a little less clear on what that journey looks like, and if you were to ask an average person what such a creative adventure might look like I suspect you would get an answer that was romantic and filled with joyous struggle and teetering on the edge of cinematic.

The creative journey is rarely that: it’s more often stumbling through an unmarked trail, sloshing through the muck, swatting mosquitoes and not just losing your map but realizing you were following the wrong one from the outset. It is rife with zero bars of cell coverage. It is forgetting the sunscreen and an umbrella and needing both. It is hearing the rustle of wild animals just out of sight and never quite knowing if it is a harmless squirrel or a hungry bear.

Creativity is flailing and failing over and over, and possibly never reaching a destination, but experiencing the adventure—and loving that you set out upon it. I am lost out here with you all and under the category of Fail & Flail I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.