Personal essays
Bird by Bird
Getting started
A year ago I was headed to California and had a spare morning that lined up with a running class that was being offered.
Maggie rolled her eyes and said, “just start running.”
Of course she’s right, but that’s not how I do things.
When I wanted to learn to draw I researched the paper and pencils I would need.
Pencils?
Sure - you need different kinds of pencils for soft and hard lines.
But you don’t.
Certainly not when you get started and mostly not even when you’re pretty good.
I’ve seen someone draw an amazing sketch on a napkin using a regular ink pen and I sat watching someone bring a beautiful scene to life in a spiral notebook using a yellow, number-two pencil.
They got started and then they kept going.
Blogs and Newsletters
At least monthly a friend or someone I vaguely know will post something about starting a blog.
If they’re a programmer, they will often spend a lot of time writing the software that drives the website. They’ll fuss with the font, work on the navigation, and struggle with the branding.
They won’t be writing and publishing posts.
I have that tendency as well.
And that’s why it was a shock when four years ago, a month into the COVID shutdown, that I would write a weekly newsletter.
My financial advisor had suggested I publish a monthly newsletter to let people know what I was working on and point them at books and courses they could buy from me.
He was right then. He’s still right now. It’s just not my way. I almost never market things in my newsletter - even though he’s right.
I’ve been giving talks at conferences for forty years and it’s only this year that I even mention a book they can buy from me on the topic I’m speaking on. I do it in a single slide, almost apologetically at the end.
So anyway, four years ago I decided to write a weekly newsletter that featured an essay about whatever was on my mind.
I’d try it for a year.
At the end of the year I paused to consider.
I didn’t pause too long or I would have likely stopped.
And so last week was the end of four years of weekly posts. I wrote and sent last week’s from Berlin. The week before I wrote and sent from Amsterdam.
Week after week.
Yesterday I asked Maggie for her link of the week. She’s provided me with one week after week for four years.
And with that simple request I realized that I’d signed up for another year of writing this newsletter.
I appreciate you reading it. I’m not sure I’d keep writing if you didn’t.
I appreciate when you reply and let me know that something resonated with you.
Every week I sit down to discover how I feel about something.
I learn something about myself week after week.
The Podcast
A year into the newsletter I had the idea that I would record the essay from the previous year’s newsletter and release it as a podcast.
I hosted one of the early podcasts. While working for O’Reilly (the tech publisher not the awful former Fox News host), I created a podcast called “Distributing the Future.” It was a great playground for me to learn about podcasting.
This time I had a different goal.
I thought I would experiment with reading essays for my podcast to see if I could create an audio edition of “Dear Elena”, the first 100 posts to a blog I created after my youngest daughter died.
I wasn’t ready for that project, but maybe the podcast would be a good experiment.
The anniversary of the newsletter passed and I didn’t start the podcast.
I could have started it any time, but I Arlo Guthrie’d.
I know that’s not a word, but there’s a part in Arlo Guthrie’s song Alice’s Restaurant where he invites the audience to sing along but has to wait until the chorus comes around again on the guitar.
So I did other projects and continued to write my newsletter week by week and then the second anniversary came around and I missed it again.
Then a year ago, on the third anniversary of the newsletter, I launched the podcast.
I could have waited until I worked out the format and the technology chain and where I was going to host it - but I just started.
I used music in the background of the first few episodes as I was sure that I should score the essays like they did on the really good NPR podcasts.
It took a lot of time and didn’t add much. In fact, it was a bit distracting.
The other thing I needed to figure out how to do was how to handle the asides I tend to include in my writing.
“What asides,” you ask.
Those asides.
And so I stole a device from Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz that I’d used before and used a second voice which I processed as if it was coming through a bad telephone line to represent my inner voice.
I mainly read the essays as they were, but sometimes had to add an update or provide some context because the essay was three years old.
I always edit my podcasts heavily. If I don’t like the way I’m reading a particular word or sentence, I pause and pick up the recording there and edit it together. The podcast pieces are short. The recordings are often twice as long.
I didn’t know if anyone would listen. I don’t check stats for any of my projects. That’s not what drives me.
Revisiting what had been on my mind three years early was fascinating for me. Usually, they are everyday topics from politics to productivity.
The past two episodes that ran while I was in Amsterdam and Berlin were quite tough for me to record.
Two weeks ago was a piece called And Ever about me proposing to Kim. Last week was 15, a post that was reprinted from “Dear Elena” on the 15th anniversary of Elena’s death.
That finished my first year of recording the podcast. I think I will continue for a second year. They release each Friday.
I still don’t know if I’ll record the audio version of “Dear Elena”.
For now I put it off week by week.
Video
I have a problem.
I mostly write and teach for a living.
That means if I want to teach twice as many people, I have to work twice as many hours.
More than a dozen years ago I thought about producing video courses. That way no matter how many people took the course, I would be spending a fixed amount of time.
I fell down a deep hole where I fussed about how I wanted the videos to look and how I would produce them. I’ve never liked the way I look on camera so the videos would be my voice and text and images on the screen.
I know the research says videos do better when people can see you - but I also do a huge amount of editing so it would be too jumpy if I was on camera.
I produced samples and ran it by friends and after years and years of talking about it had nothing to show.
Then during the pandemic shut down some of the conferences asked that we provide videos instead of presenting remotely live.
I was forced to produce and release something.
So a year ago, at the same time I decided to release a weekly podcast, I also decided to release a weekly video.
A video is a huge amount of work. The actual production isn’t so bad, but the preparation of code and material took a fair amount of time.
I released one each week for about ten months and then reduced the frequency to every other week.
I have to say, I’m on the fence with this one. It’s a lot of work. I’m not sure whether or not to continue and I’m not sure whether or not I should try to produce and sell a video course.
My first video was a short talk on why I present code the way I do.
The most recent one is a link to a talk I gave at AppDevCon six months after Kim died. It was a very raw talk - you may have seen the smoother one I gave after my dad died. It’s called It’s about time.
So that’s my scorecard. Four years of weekly newsletters, one year of weekly podcasts, and a year of videos that has slowed from weekly to bi-weekly.
What will I do next?
I’m not sure - but I think about it week by week.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 209. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe