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Writing Slowly

My name’s Richard. I live in Sydney, on the traditional land of Bidjigal people of the Eora nation. Here I write about writing and reading (and what I do when I'm not writing or reading). I'm writing slowly but may at some point speed up. Connect with me on micro.blog or at Mastodon @aus.social@writingslowly. On Reddit, I'm @atomicnotes.

Status

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    I’m excited to be heading to Japan for some research. But just realised I’ve spent more time learning Japanese history than the Japanese language. Oops.

    #shuhari #JapanTravel #writingslowly #amwriting

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    Thinking about Joanna Macy today. In memoriam. I was very influenced by her insistence on both the necessary grief and the vital hope.

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    Well the book arrived this morning. Now I really am publishing slowly!

    A collage displays a book titled "Destinations & Detours" in various views, including its cover, spine, open pages, and several copies packed in a box.
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    Conducting myself properly

    A vintage cartoon from Punch magazine, showing a conductor busking by conducting an orchestra of broken instruments with no musicians to play them.

    They made me the student leader of the school orchestra. One day the music teacher was sick and he asked me to conduct. I had no idea what to do, except what I’d seen him doing. So I waved my arms around.

    Today I’m fragmented, overwhelmed by what there is still to complete, and also by all there is to start. Somewhere in the middle, there I am, lost between starting and finishing. Flailing.

    Yet even no method is still a method. Says the poet Christian Wiman1:

    💬 “The truth is our only savior is failure.”

    And look at those stats! This is my 200th post here this year. Writing slowly? No, not me.

    1. Christian Wiman, “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians” from Once in the West (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2014). ↩︎

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    Updating a Wordpress site this weekend felt like a chore. I really wanted to enjoy it, but the writing interface, with its content blocks, seemed to block the flow. Why is it like this? Feels like the priority is machine convenience, not the human experience. Opinions, anyone?

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    The only problem with 📷🎉 completing the September 2023 micro.blog photoblog challenge - 30 days of posting photos - is that by the end I kind of felt like I needed a short rest. But with normal service now resuming, I’m writing slowly again!

    A cat lies curled up asleep
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    📷 🏡A couple of weeks ago we visited CERES urban farm, with its community garden, cafe, bike workshop, nursery, bookstore, playground, market, chooks and, yes, a food forest. Worth a visit if you’re ever in Melbourne.

    #gardening #permaculture

    Vegetable beds at CERES community gardens, Melbourne.
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    Feels like Summer here in Sydney, even though it’s the penultimate day of Winter. 26C by lunchtime, followed by an afternoon thunderstorm.

    Painting of Redfern Station in the rain, by Arthur Streeton, 1893. Public Domain. In the foreground, a wide, rain-drenched road reflects the cloudy sky.
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    The early morning cloud was lifting over Spectacle Island 📷

    Spectacle Island with a band of cloud on its side.
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    Yesterday I polished the look of the Writing Slowly website by switching to Matt Langford’s Tiny theme, and adding some font and colour-scheme customisation of my own. So long as you’re not alergic to CSS, Micro.blog makes this very easy to do. Anyway, dear reader, I hope you like it. #WebDesign #Indieweb #PersonalSites #Blog

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