It’s 11:05pm. I’m freshly showered and I just got in bed. My 11mo son is fast asleep in his cot nearby. I have a decision to make: I could either go to sleep, or I could try to write something. If I sleep, that’s a win, I’ll wake up fresh tomorrow. If I try to write something, and succeed (hit publish), that’s a bigger win, I’ll go to sleep even more fitfully and wake up feeling satisfied. But if I try to write something and fail, that feels like a loss. The more hours I spend writing something without publishing anything, the bigger of a loss that feels like. Which doesn’t feel right to me. Because I do know, intellectually at least, that writing is a process, and it’s good for me to have written, even if I don’t necessarily hit publish. But I do think I ought to cap the ‘damage’ in terms of hours spent. So… let’s say that I’ll end my writing session at 12:45am, and be satisfied with whatever happens.

✱

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to get more out of my time when my son is napping on me. I enjoy those moments and I wouldn’t want to be rid of them before he does, so I’m willing to endure some hours-spent-not-working. Sometimes I spend that time playing video games– most recently I’ve been replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition (meh), completed my first playthrough of Disco Elysium (pretty great), and playing through the DLC of The Witcher 3 (very good). Sometimes I spend it watching TV, typically YouTube, though lately I’ve also been watching Invincible on Amazon Prime Video. Some of that stuff feels like it might percolate into my writing. I’ve also started to try to do some writing on my phone. Yesterday or the day before, I decided to take a glance at my Instagram account. I’m not much of an Instagram user, I mainly log in to look at my friends’ Stories. I’m not sure when precisely I signed up for an IG account, but my oldest post on it that isn’t archived is from December 2013. It’s a picture of my cat looking out the window.

It’s interesting to scroll through a decade of photos to get a sense of who I was in those years. I think I’ll devote most of the rest of this substack post to just live-react to those old photos.

I wish I could remember which youtube video it was I watched– something about screenplays, I think– which quoted someone as saying, a good scene always has at least 2 things going on simultaneously. Or it always achieves at least 2 goals. It might tell you something about a character, or a relationship between two characters, and it’ll also simultaneously move the plot forward. It might tell you something about the setting, and also set up something for later on. That sort of thing. When I glance through my photos, I notice that my favorite posts often accomplish that.

• Pictures of my cats
• Trains, commutes, infrastructure, building
• Date nights with my wife
• Bad design of public spaces– poor ATM placement causing queues that block traffic,
• signage, street art, interesting advertisements (‘supernormal stimuli’)
• poignant photos of strangers from a respectful distance – I did a Medium post about these in 2017 — a man crossing an empty street, a couple
• I did a series of photos once from a bus window