On Writing in 2023
My usual morning routine in 2022: iced coffee + morning walk.
Since I actively started blogging a few years ago, 2022 is the year I blogged the least. It’s due to a confluence of reasons. To change, I’m starting a new experiment to get back into regular writing that’s also about navigating social media in 2023. I’m starting a weekly newsletter called “Scenes with Simon” that’s primarily a space for sharing links and commentary.
Reasons for slowing on my writing:
1) I’m not at the frontier anymore.
2) I’m a student in new domains.
3) New stage of life.
4) Social media is changing. What/where is publishing/writing anyway?
A part of the crowd:
For years, writing about new ideas in crypto + NFTs, I felt that I was at a frontier, confident in sharing new things. I was learning, but so was everyone else. We were exploring, but so was everyone else. I shared ideas and in one example, I had over 30+ people give me feedback. What a joy! The scene was small, the ideas fresh, and the world was there to be discovered, built, and explored.
But, as the industry grew and people built on our foundations that we cleared, I struggled to keep up. It’s become too big and the crowd has somewhat run ahead of me. I’m still fascinated by it and will continue to build in web3/NFT/crypto, but some of my time has diverted to detours and that meant that my attention and motivation has shifted away from fully forming and writing about new ideas.
I feel like a student again (even in crypto), but now everyone feels like a master in a domain that’s now just a part of what I’ve become. That being said, I still enjoy writing and sharing ideas and one way to get out of that rut is to lower the barrier to entry to writing (about everything). I can have incomplete ideas and share what I’m learning, even if it is retreading familiar ground. I want to write and share what I’m excited about, even if I’m a student. But, maybe that doesn’t look like the blogging I’ve always done.
New domains:
There are two primary domains that have piqued my interest in recent years: storytelling + urbanism. I’m writing a lot more fiction and thinking about storytelling. I’m learning. A lot. Things like:
Getting 5 star and 2 star reviews on my debut novel.
Publishing my and other people’s stories (at Untitled Frontier).
Hiring editors, artists, voice narrators.
Reading about writing, about writers, watching YouTube videos, talking to inspiring filmmakers, the works.
There’s so many stories I want to tell and I’m going to keep doing it. I can easily see this being a multi-decade journey of having fun, exploring, and falling into worlds and characters I’ve yet to travel to and meet. But, I haven’t written a lot on storytelling, because I’m still learning. The recent post on Andor + Hats is just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t know how to write about storytelling, yet. But that’s okay, because I’m still learning.
Urbanism and the city is so incredibly interesting and fascinating to me. After picking up a walking habit in the pandemic, everything in the neighbourhood and cities around me are endlessly interesting. I’ve always enjoyed cities and have been lucky to see a lot of the world during my 20s. But, now, I’ve slowly taken a deeper interest in the details of the city. So, again, I’m still learning, from watching YouTube channels like City Beautiful & B1M to reading cornerstone works like Jane Jacobs’ “Death and Life of Great American Cities”. I have some things to write around this (bigger stories), but, it’s a work-in-progress.
I hope to share more about this and write more about urbanism and storytelling (alongside NFTs + Crypto).
New Stage of Life:
After a whirlwind 20s travelling, coding, and speaking all over the world, I’ve found myself engaged to a wonderful partner and looking to the next phase of my life. Slowing down is a part of that. I’ve had to reconcile that one of the happiest times of my life in recent years was during the lockdowns. It was slow and I was lucky to not have to worry. It’s unknowingly, what I needed. It’s also why I took up walking in earnest. To take life a bit slower, more deliberate. I exercise more frequently, eat healthier, and say no to more things. I recognise that if kids are on the horizon, it will change even more and so I want to be even more deliberate about my time. To slow down and spend it where it matters for me atm: with my partner, friends, family, and nature. This comes to me about the final point: social media.
Social Media in 2023:
I owe a lot to social media. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t have that ability to share, interact, and engage with so many interesting people: Twitter being the primary channel. But, I also spend a lot of time on it. Hours per day. It’s the closest thing to an addiction. I love the dopamine spike that comes from understanding the world, systems, and learning new things from interesting people. I love it. But, I also know that a lot of it is unnecessary. It also constantly riles you up, increasing stress and anxiety. Knowing something new a day later, is okay. For a writer, I’m embarrased to only read two or three books a year. Twitter is entertainment and I need diversity into slower, more methodical and deliberate information consumption.
With Elon Musk taking over Twitter and (again) realising that you don’t own your distribution platform, and the general sourness around it, I want to move away. Chart a new path where it feels more like gardening my writing and reading (compared to the deluge of Twitter).
But, rebuilding a network on a new, closed social network, only for it to potentially go away again, sucks. So, given all of the above, I’m going to try something for 2023 and see where it takes me: I’m starting a weekly newsletter containing links + commentary of all the things I’m interested in.
Scenes with Simon. The first one goes out on Sunday the 15th.
https://sceneswithsimon.substack.com/
A Weekly Newsletter:
This will hopefully help me in the following ways:
1) Write more, deliberately, even if you are just learning. Share interests more broadly.
2) Take it slower. Share once a week, not every day. Share mostly through the newsletter, not through social media.
3) Own your distribution.
What happens to my old newsletter? I’ll still keep it and exclusively keep it for its primary purpose: sharing when I publish new blogs + fiction. Admittedly, it’s been hard to increasingly ignore Substack as a writing platform. I originally defected due to them platforming anti-trans and anti-vax writers. I could afford to exit at the time. But, given their network effects and the desire to build my own distribution from it, I want to give it another go. Since I know how to set up Ghost and use it into the future, that option will always be there in case I want to switch away (yay, email!). I view Twitter the same way and hope to channel distribution away from it, both in writing and reading.
