An Assortment of Randomness
“The more open you are about sharing your passions, the closer people will feel to your work. Artists aren’t magicians. There’s no penalty for revealing your secrets.” — Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist
“There’s no penalty for revealing your secrets,” but I do think art can be considered a kind of magic.
Writing as a trick of magic
The key for an artist, writer or magician is figuring out how to “break the rules convincingly.”
As a writer you can make anyone believe anything if you set up the proper context and explanation. As Tolkien said, you can write that the sun is green, but to make it real you must create a world in which a green sun is possible.
The day is a rainy/snowy/slushy kind of gloomy and I spent my morning writing and going through my zettelkasten. I’ve developed a bump on my finger from holding my pen so much and I had to put a band-aid around it. This might be the nerdiest kind of injury.
My standing desk frame arrived yesterday and it currently rests in a box that Poe has taken to using as a personal runway. Attempts to build my new desk will commence this weekend (hopefully), and K said that I should be the one to drill the holes. File that under: terrible no good very bad ideas.
Last night I watched a documentary on Netflix about the perils of consumerism (Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy) and I think everyone should watch it. I’m not sure what the answer to corporate greed is, but it’s good to be reminded of the ways in which we contribute to it.
Bluesky has now surpassed 21M users and continues to grow at a rate of about 1M users per day. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve actually enjoyed being a part of a social media platform. The LGBTQIA+ writing community there is thriving and it’s so exciting to see such a wide variety of novels out there in the world.
Last night before bed I read an article by Joan Westenberg called Rebel Optimism: How We Thrive in a Broken World that was full of great insights. If you need a dose of optimism, I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
The world is crumbling in real time—I’m not here to argue that point. We’ve got rising seas swallowing cities, political chaos run by arsonist clowns with their pants on fire trying to set everything else alight, inequality so vast it feels cosmic, wars driven by fragile egos and unpaid cultural debts, and a never-ending apocalyptic parade marching through our news feeds like a sick joke. Pessimism isn’t just fashionable; it feels logical. Despair seems like the only sane response.
But what if despair is the real con – a sticky, sugary trap that feeds off our paralysis? What if our fixation on everything falling apart is blinding us to cracks of light breaking through the rubble? To the opportunities quietly unfolding while we’re too busy scrolling through the next disaster? Despair is a heavy, immobilizing force. And in a world on fire, inaction is its most dangerous side effect.
