Just finished John McPhee’s, Draft No. 4. I could pithily summarise it as … Practice a lot of things. Work at finding your thing. Practice you thing (lots! deeply! a fuckton.) Work within established rules. Bend the rules to fit your thing. Break the rules once you know your thing deeply! McPhee writes about the craft of writing. But the advice could apply broadly to any creative endeavour. ...
This post was first sent to my newsletter on March 19th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) I blame Mahe for this post. Hey, Jason! Can you please write an article on how to build a website like yours, where I can post my blogs? Check out her blogs, here and here. This one is squarely aimed at all the young ones, who are convinced that they need to be writing. (Maybe, it was me who convinced you, in the first place.) You are young (or like me, forever young) and broke (also like me). You need a place for your thoughts to call home. You need a place to write, and grow and focus more on what you want to say about life and what you study or what you work at, or the portfolio/showcase of thoughts you will slowly build. ...
*Image, courtesy [Tom Gauld][tgt]* This post was first sent to my newsletter on February 1st, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) Welcome to the first, “serious” newsletter of 2021. This was supposed to be my year end post, but life, as usual got in the way. Now that I’ve jammed both the blogs together, most of the personal stuff is going to stay focussed on stuff about books and reading and writing and a few photos thrown in once in a while for good measure. Seems like that is what I was doing most of last year, anyway. ...
I have been telling the young ones, that reading the things they consider important, needs to be engaged. Engaged with the words. Engaged with the flow. With the author. Her ideas. The way she makes her case. Or tells her story. To wrestle with what is being said, or left unsaid. To build a mental model with the ideas being presented. To write it all down. To wrestle with the work and draw your own conclusions. (which might not necessarily be what the author intends). ...
My email program, was somehow hacked into last week, and close to 3000 spam mails were sent out in the course of a few minutes. While I was able to serendipitously catch it as soon as it happened, I apologise if you were the recepient of unsavoury stuff from my email address. I am now in the process of rebuilding everything. letter at janusworx dot com is the new home from where these letters will be sent from. Please add this address to your contacts, so that I do not end up in your spam :) ...
Ryan Holiday, writes about a question, he purports will change your reading life. And this was somehow surprising to me, because as a bookworm, I have been slipping this question (or a variant of it) into casual conversations with folks all my life. If I need my reading queue to be always full, I need to always be closing :) And since it has helped me so much, it’s only fair, I share it with you :) ...