Catching Up

It occurred to me that if I write a post right now, it will go out in time for Sunday Photo Journal. It’s almost 2am on Sat…well, I guess it’s Sunday morning. I was going to say Saturday night, which is how I’m thinking of it right now, but I guess that’s not technically accurate. But Saturday night is how I’m experiencing it. Sunday morning will be when I wake up tomorrow and have coffee and regret staying up so late.

I haven’t written in a long time partially because I’ve been completely overwhelmed with work, but also because I think I lost the thread a little bit. I’ve felt conflicted about what I write here, what I have automated to send out via mailchimp (which is how the newsletter works, by the way), and what I write on Substack, which I consider my ‘serious thoughts’ kind of newsletter. And I do want something different from both (or all three?) of them.

Right now, I have a blog on my website. You might be reading this here, on nsdoyle.com. More likely, you got this as a email, because I don’t know how many people are actually coming to my website to read stuff. Not many, I’m certainly. Maybe someone who’s exploring the site for the first time comes to the journal, and they land here if it’s the most recent post - which I want to be intentional to make sure it isn’t.

Anyway, so that brings up to me - how do I write? Do I write to a potential website visitor, or do I write to you, a subscriber of my newsletter, who enjoys getting an email from me with some pretty new photos to look at? It’s more fun to write to you, and get a response, and hear back from you, so I feel like that’s what I’d rather do.

Then, there’s the other thing I want out of my website - a repository of every place I’ve ever photographed, an online, searchable index of my imagery so I can quickly pull something up, in a beautiful presentation, to show to someone while I’m having a conversation. I find myself out in the world all the time talking about this place or thing I visited, and I’d photographed it, but pulling up those photos either takes too long to dig through my apple photos app, or it’s in dropbox, which is just a file management system that isn’t the most lovely to interact with.

Or, I could have my own place I’ve built, where the images exist in the way I want. And I’ve long wanted that to be here. But, I don't just want it to be a dump of images, I want to curate it in some way, and show off just the ‘best’ work, whatever that means, and I also want to write something to go along with it, because it feels lazy not to. And then, when I think about posting some images, I get caught up in my mind about all the work that would go into that endeavor and… I decided to do something else. Something that would, very arguably, have less of a positive impact on my life than writing or sharing my imagery.

Speaking of, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time lately watching Youtube, tv shows, movies, and even just recently I started playing Skyrim again. And earlier this evening as I was playing, I was looking at this beautiful night scene and listening to the ambient sound of crickets, and then it struck me, this brilliant idea:

I could just go outside.

So I immediately got up from my computer and walked into the backyard to sit on the swing and enjoy this incredible summer night. 75º, warm and comfortable, immersed in the sound of the nocturnal chorus (there’s a word for it! Did you know!? I just looked that up to write this line.), and it was a beautiful and wonderful experience.

I might have included some cannabis, which is a topic I have been really reticent to talk about publicly, but I really enjoy the positive effects of it, and I’d rather be honest about who I am out in the world than hiding away, because what kind of life it is it to constantly be withdrawing and hiding away you truth? What kind of joy does that experience bring to your being? You know the answer - none. Anyway, we’ll dig more into that another time. Oh, Runtz Muffin #2 from Seed & Strain, Crafty+.

So, let’s get back to the here and now - the Sunday Photo Journal. At first, I made it as a summary of posts I’d shared during the week, with the hope that it might lead to some web traffic of people coming to check out the images on my website - and now that I think about it, I might still want it to be that, because I don’t much care for the way the images are shown on the emails - and there will frequently be too many.

And inbox buster, if you will.

There’s also the mechanism for that - the way it’s set up, if I write an excerpt for the blog post, then it shows up in the email as the header image + the excerpt. If I don’t write an excerpt, it shares the entire post. That’s fine for when I’ve only written one post that week, not so much if I’ve shared five.

How often do I share five posts a week? Sometimes, when I’m going on a binge of backfilling images I want present here, as I mentioned. I could spread it out, but sometimes I want to get multiple places up for one reason or another.

So, that brings me up to another idea I had - does it need to be every Sunday? What if I just sent out new posts whenever I want to share something new? Is five emails a week too many? Part of me thinks - well yeah, it probably is, but then again, I’ve been reading a book about email marketing, aptly titled “Just F*king Send it”, that advocates heavily for : sent many, many, many more emails, and send better emails.

A line in there really resonated: people signed up because they want to hear from you.

So what are you doing if you’re too scared to send them something? They’re here, you, you’re here, because you want to be, because you’re thrilled to be - and what am I doing over here staying silent, when you’re looking forward to this? And then part of me thinks - how could you be looking forward to this? How could you care about what I’ve been up to, what I photographed, what I have to say?

But that’s just the curse of every artist - we think our work isn’t good enough for anyone to care about. I suspect the most successful artists don’t deal with this as much, or found a way to shut it down and shut it up, and to just put the work out there anyway, and let the people who are going to love it love it, because they will, they’re out there.

And by out there, I guess right here. Right now. In you.

So thanks so much for being here. I’m not going to promise I’ll be posting all the time going forward, but I do think I’d be a lot happier with my life if I did more of this and less scrolling and watching, so we’ll just see how it goes, capiche?

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I also tend to think that these things are really long, because they take me a while to write, but I remember once looking on substack and the thing that estimates how long it takes to read, and seeing some super long thing I wrote was only about 15 minutes, and I realized that maybe it’s not some huge ask for someone to read a thing I wrote, especially if that person likes to read, like Regina, who can read like 4x faster than me, someone who likes to soak in every word, drift off, daydream.

Alright, anyway, it’s 2:30am and I’m about ready to go to bed, because most nights when I stay up super late lead to mornings where the kids are up at 4am for some crazy reason, so I gotta be responsible here and try to get a slightly better than sub-optimal amount of sleep.

But still, I’m glad I came here to write. And I’m glad you’re here reading. What and absolute fucking honor it is to have you here, in the age of fractured attention.

Oh, I wanted to talk about what to expect going forward: Who knows? Welcome to Mr. Bones Wild Ride.

Hit reply and tell me how I’m doing.

See ya!