January 2023 in writing
In January I focused on outlining, using my Github activity to track daily progress.
Obsidian vault My wiki is now over 95k words, across 205 markdown files and 47 characters at various stages of development, accumulated over the past ~8 calendar years. (Most of those years I was not focused on writing, and I’ve trashed more ideas than I’ve kept.)
I’ve migrated it all to Obsidian. I’m hoping the Obsidian backlinks will help me keep track of characters, side plots, clues, and ideas: if I follow this arc does it make sense?
reading again
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King
“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx
One metric for how stressed I am, generally from work, is what I’m able to read, understand, enjoy. When I’m reading complex novels I’m generally at a very low (for me) level of stress.
Linux Mint
On a whim I installed Linux Mint onto my 2014 Macbook Air 11".
I had resisted using linux as my desktop OS for many many years: my last was a Fedora desktop back in 2008. My last non-work linux desktop was Slackware back in 1996. In part I stayed on MacOS to use commercial photo and music software that wasn’t supported on linux. And in part this was from all of the imaging and twiddly machine maintenance I had to deal with for work.
New Beginnings
New year. New career.
December felt like I was in limbo, a bit. I wanted to set up my business so I needed to revamp my site and create a placeholder portfolio. I wanted to avoid using my work laptop for anything new for Reasons, knowing I would need to wipe it eventually anyway. And the whole Lastpass breach convinced me to migrate to Bitwarden while I rotated all 600+ passwords.
Site redesign
Twitter’s implosion has highlighted the importance of a space independent of any centralized platform’s availability… I have set up a mastodon account but it’s clear that Mastodon is ephemeral, not a long-term archive for writing or photos. And since I’m working on a new portfolio/business site already, I decided to overhaul escapewindow.com.
I’ve been using GitHub pages for hosting. For content I migrated from jekyll to hugo, primarily so I don’t have to deal with ruby gems anymore.