Writing Slowly Posts - 2023 Edition

Here are all the main posts of 2023 (I haven’t listed the shorter ones or the photos). Enjoy!

There’s also a list of [the posts of 2024](https://writing slowly com/the-posts-of-2024/) and the posts of 2025.

And don’t forget to check out my book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters.
To get the latest posts straight to your in-box, subscribe to the weekly Writing Slowly email newsletter.

Dec 11, 2023: The value of feedback depends on how you use it I had a school friend who worked on Saturdays at the local op shop…

Dec 3, 2023: Raising babies? Here’s how to survive - I mean, enjoy it. It’s quite a challenge to raise a baby while also having a life. Here are some thoughts from my own experience.

Dec 1, 2023: Conducting myself properly. They made me conduct the school orchestra. I had no idea what to do.

Dec 1, 2023: The real story of Napoleon?. Going beyond Ridley Scott’s movie version.

Nov 30, 2023: Why I’m writing faster. Everyone has their reasons but I write so I can think.

Nov 28, 2023: Publish first, write later. Some thoughts about Cesar Aira, a literary hero of mine.

Nov 26, 2023: Choose your own race and finish it. The idea of writing slowly appeals to me because it comes from Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise.

Nov 14, 2023: A history of thinking on paper. It’s hard to describe how exciting it was to receive in the mail this morning: The Notebook by Roland Allen!

Nov 14, 2023: Finished reading: Movement by Thalia Verkade 📚This is for everyone who’d like to get around their home town better.

Nov 7, 2023: In eight different ways, to have a friend is to be one. Reflections on the eight different kinds of friends you need.

Nov 7, 2023: How to make the most of surprising yourself by using your collection of linked notes.

Nov 5, 2023: Learning to make notes like Leonardo Leonardo wrote on loose sheets of paper and The Codex Arundel, a notebook of Leonardo Da Vinci, is not what it first appears.

Nov 5, 2023: Discovering the music of Kyle Shepherd as part of the Sydney Opera House 50th Birthday celebrations.

Oct 30, 2023: Can you keep all your notes in email? A suggestion to use email as a kind of append-only note storage system. Maybe.

Oct 17, 2023: If we’re not just making content, what are we making? My struggle with Wordpress has highlighted a distaste for the term ‘content’.

Sep 18, 2023: Is domain-hosting a viable social media business model? What BlueSky and micro.blog have in common.

Sep 9, 2023: A note on the craft of note-writing. An article from Brazil caught my eye, on note-writing as an intellectual craft.

Sep 7, 2023: If you live your life in chunks, what size should they be? Life tends to be lived in chunks. Hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years. But if so what’s the ideal kind of chunk?

Sep 6, 2023: Yes, Esperanto is idealistic - not that there’s anything wrong with that. The child who learns Esperanto learns about a world without borders, where every country is home.

Sep 2, 2023: How many books are you reading? I was slightly shocked by the results of an online poll.

Aug 27, 2023: How to connect your notes to make them more effective. Because a linked note is a happy note.

Aug 26, 2023: What is the real work of Serendipity? Currently reading: The Real Work by Adam Gopnik.

Aug 23, 2023: TiddlyWiki is a really useful writing tool I use Tiddlywiki as a heavily customised Zettelkasten (an ‘index box’ of notes).

Aug 15, 2023: “RSS rules, man!” - Baldur on Martin Field’s Really Specific Stories podcast. 🎙️💬

Aug 12, 2023: Ted Nelson’s Evolutionary List File. The computing pioneer had an innovative idea for a new kind of file system. New, at least, in 1965.

Aug 11, 2023: A Network of notes is a rhizome not a tree and the Zettelkasten approach to making notes and writing is not the same as creating a standard outline.

Aug 9, 2023: Finished reading: Your Name is not Anxious by Stephanie Dowrick. Urgent, practical, and affirming. Both profound and profoundly helpful.

Aug 9, 2023: “Walking in and of itself is a way to cultivate precisely all the qualities of person-hood that seem missing from much public discourse — attention, …

Aug 8, 2023: Is there a literature of teeth? Do you find teeth comical? Do you find it hard to take them seriously?

Jul 28, 2023: The dream is diversity. “We co-create with one another and with nature, but by the very creativity of the Universe and us in it, we cannot know what we will co-create."

Jul 25, 2023: The mastery of knowledge is an illusion and the writing task always eludes us.

Jul 24, 2023: Walter Benjamin on the obsolete book: “Already today, as the current scientific mode of production teaches, the book is already an obsolete mediation between two different card files…"

Jul 22, 2023: Hermann Burger - Serious about a Zettelkasten? The Swiss writer Hermann Burger (1942–1989) wrote the draft of a novel in which two card files get hopelessly mixed up. He didn’t publish it.

Jul 2, 2023: Thoughts are nest-eggs - Thoreau on writing. In October 1837 the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson prompted the twenty-year-old Henry David Thoreau to start writing a journal. What happened next will really shock you.

Jun 25, 2023: I have elephants. A chapter of Sarah Bakewell’s book Humanly Possible considers the life and times of Renaissance scholar Petrarch, who wrote about the joy an elephant can bring. Don’t try this at home, he also implied.

Jun 7, 2023: Gaslit by machinery that calls itself a person. “I’m Bard, your creative and helpful collaborator. I have limitations and won’t always get it right"

Jun 3, 2023: How to be interested in everything. Thomas Edison claimed he was interested in everything. Here’s how it went.

Jun 3, 2023: To build something big, start with small fragments - that’s how everything big gets built.

Jun 2, 2023: Let’s have another new logo. Matti is unimpressed that the notetaking app Obsidian has a new logo.

May 27, 2023: The lost index cards of Harold Innis. Yet another writer who used index cards to construct an extensive body of work from smaller pieces.

May 24, 2023: Jules Verne could have told us AI is not a real person. In a castle of mysterious voices, have the dead come back to life?

May 21, 2023: I read the top ten Zettelkasten posts on Hacker News so you can do something more wholesome with your day.

May 19, 2023: More than ever, embracing your humanity is the way forward. Resisting the panic about how the computers are making us look bad.

May 10, 2023: Aby Warburg’s Zettelkasten and the search for interconnection. A German art historian coined a phrase for his obsession: Verknüpfungszwang - the compulsion to find connections.

May 5, 2023: Was Dracula foiled by a gang of obsessive note-takers? The story pits aspirational note-taking against monstrous, blood-sucking evil; but which of these elemental forces wins out in the end?

May 1, 2023: 30 years of the World Wide Web. An incredible journey!

Apr 25, 2023: “The question: what are you making with your notes?” An important question, and a great article from @annahavron

Apr 24, 2023: “Everyone needs their own thinking space.” But it’s never Chad’s Garage.

Apr 19, 2023: “Do you know exactly what you want?” I do, and my word of the year is “focus”.

Apr 6, 2023: The Writer’s Journey began as a memo, so what else could begin as a memo too?

Apr 4, 2023: 💬 “In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act”. A magic spell that protects the user against advertising of all kinds.

Apr 2, 2023: Personal publishing is still the future. The online writing gurus say it’s pointless starting your own blog. Here’s what they miss.

Apr 1, 2023: “We think best when we bring opposites together”.

Feb 22, 2023: Can AI give me ham off a knee? Last night I lay awake thinking about how AI-automated writing is about to change our entire language. As you do.

Feb 22, 2023: When someone believes they have no expertise, that doesn’t mean they have nothing useful to say. We often learn best from those who are just one step ahead.

Feb 22, 2023: Free books! A search on Amazon Kindle produces loads of free academic book titles, many of which are high quality and really interesting.

Feb 21, 2023: Despite AI, the Internet is still personal. Blogging is great and it will never die. That’s why I keep coming back to it and you do too.

Feb 18, 2023: Finished reading Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au. This was a quite mezmerising read.

Feb 9, 2023: The coming ellipsis eclipse Eclipse of the ellipsis: should you be worried? Yes, very worried.

Feb 5, 2023: Why I’m writing slowly. There’s an emerging movement in favour of ‘slow productivity’.

Feb 5, 2023: The thing about advice is that people do what they want with it, as the poet Rilke found.

Jan 30, 2023: Can sentimental writing ever be as exact as reality? Finished reading: The Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita.

Jan 27, 2023: Big changes at writingslowly.com. It’s a new year, so it must be time for new web connections!

Jan 26, 2023: The past is as urgent as ever Finished reading: The War of the Poor by Eric Vuillard.

Jan 25, 2023: What I learned from Austin Kleon about sharing what you know. Learning and sharing, sharing and learning. It’s a virtuous circle.

Jan 16, 2023: Without democracy, no true creativity. Finished reading: Against Creativity by Oli Mould, a critique of everything symbolised by Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class …

The September Photo Challenge

Oct 1, 2023: 📷🎉 Celebrating the completion of the September 2023 micro.blog photoblog challenge. 30 days of posting photos.

Oct 1, 2023: 📷 Day 30: treasure #mbsept The final day of the photoblog challenge, and a treasured memory of my son’s seventh birthday.

Sep 29, 2023: 📷Day 29: Contrast #mbsept The Glowworm Tunnel in the Wolgan Valley, NSW. I couldn’t see the glow worms, then realised I was still wearing my sun glasses.

Sep 28, 2023: 📷 Day 28: workout (@rom) #mbsept It might just work out, but it’ll certainly be a workout.

Sep 27, 2023: 📷 Day 27: embrace (Matt, aka @mroutley) #mbsept This pub gets a big tick! (It’s obviously the only pub in Bodalla).

Sep 26, 2023: 📷 Day 26: beverage (@Annie) #mbsept Art at The National Gallery of Victoria: 100 glasses (1991-92).

Sep 25, 2023: 📷 Day 25: flare (Matthew, aka @matt17r) #mbsept Sydney’s Darling Harbour may feel like an over-developed tourist trap, but I must admit, …

Sep 24, 2023: 📷 Day 24: belt (George, aka @allaboutgeorge) #mbsept When we visited CERES in Melbourne, we also walked past this velodrome.

Sep 23, 2023: 📷 Day 23: a day in the life #mbsept Deeply into our residency in Portland NSW. Please come to the open rehearsal on 1 October.

Sep 22, 2023: 📷 Day 22: road (Dan, aka @jomalo) #mbsept Hairpin bends at Kamay National Park, Sydney

Sep 21, 2023: 📷Day 21: fall #mbsept Coat-hanger season might be my favourite time of year.

Sep 20, 2023: 📷Day 20: disruption #mbsept Sometimes you have to protest to stop the disruption.

Sep 19, 2023: 📷 Day 19: edge #mbsept Clear edges at Adelaide’s Himeji Garden.

Sep 18, 2023: 📷 Day 18: fabric #mbsept Fab 1970s wallpaper at The Foundations, Portland NSW.

Sep 17, 2023: 📷 Day 17: “intense” #mbsept

Sep 16, 2023: 📷 Day 16: oof! #mbsept

Sep 15, 2023: 📷 Day 15: red #mbsept The bottlebrush trees at the front of our house are just coming into bloom.

Sep 14, 2023: 📷 Day 14| statue #mbsept Food for thought.

Sep 13, 2023: 📷 Day 13| glowing #mbsept Sydney Airport at dusk.

Sep 12, 2023: 📷 Day 12 | panic #mbsept

Sep 11, 2023: 📷 Day 11 | retrospect #mbsept

Sep 10, 2023: 📷 Day 10 | cycle #mbsept I’d like to put an end to these signs. Bike paths should go on forever! 🚲

Sep 9, 2023: 📷 Day 9 | language #mbsept There are more than 150 of these signs in Wales.

Sep 9, 2023: 📷 Day 8 | yonder #mbsept A sign in the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Sep 7, 2023: 📷 Day 7 | panorama #mbsept Can’t believe it’s been a week already. Good memories of this beach in Wales.

Sep 6, 2023: 📷Day 6 | Well #mbsept 🏡

Sep 5, 2023: Micro.blog photo challenge day 5 | forest read more). 📷 #mbsept

Sep 5, 2023: 📷 🏡A couple of weeks ago we visited CERES urban farm, with its community garden, cafe, bike workshop, nursery, bookstore, playground, market, chooks …

Sep 4, 2023: 📷 Day 4 | orange #mbsept

Sep 3, 2023: 📸 Day 3 | Precious Three days into the Micro.blog photo challenge already! Time spent simply relaxing in the back garden is precious. #mbsept

Sep 2, 2023: 📸 Day 2 | Buildup The Micro.blog photo challenge continues! There was a lot of buildup to the blue moon supermoon earlier this week.

Sep 1, 2023: 📸 Day 1 | Abstract The Micro.blog photo challenge begins! Most of the paintings in our house are abstract. This is part of a tryptych.

Aug 31, 2023: Looking forward to the micro.blog photoblogging challenge, starting soon at a blog near you. 📷

The March Photo Challenge

Mar 31, 2023: 📷 Micro.blog March photo challenge, day 31: “practice “. Keeping the instruments out and ready to play makes it much more likely that I’ll get some practice.

Mar 30, 2023: 📷 Micro.blog March photo challenge, day 30: “mirror” Penultimate day of the photo challenge!

Mar 29, 2023: 📷 Micro.blog March photo challenge, day 29: “slice” One of our local bakeries does a quite decent seeded whole meal Viennese style loaf.

Mar 28, 2023: 📷🚲Micro.blog March photo challenge, day 28: “prompt” I like to keep this