Intentional content creation
How my summer is going + thoughts on content creation, writing and reading.
I'm writing to you from my family's summer house in the archipelago of Stockholm. It's been a few unbearably hot and sunny days, but now it's back to a more normal Swedish summer. I've been here since the midsummer celebrations last Friday and my plan is to stay for a few more weeks and have a vacation of sorts. Spend time with my family - many of them celebrating their birthdays in July.
It's so beautiful here. I can see the ocean, feel the breeze, and hear the gulls, something I've longed for since, well, last summer when I was here. I'm partly grown up around these parts and so the archipelago feels like home to me.
Also, this is the birthplace of my YouTube channel. I started it almost exactly a year ago, and made my first video while staying in this very same house. Maybe I should celebrate the anniversary somehow? Haven't really thought about it...
It's been a couple of intense weeks. I re-painted the walls of my home studio a few weeks ago. It was just way too white in there. So now it's a light greyish beige instead:
Haven't been able to upload to YouTube for a while due to focusing on getting my new course out. And now it finally is! The first Watercolor Birds class - all about painting songbirds - is live on Skillshare. I'm planning a whole series about painting birds in watercolor: from small garden birds to corvids, to owls and birds of prey, to waterfowl, to exotic birds... There are so many birds to paint. And I can't wait to make courses about all of them. 😂
Every single time I've done this - published a class - it's nearly wrecked me. It always takes a LOT more time than I anticipate, even with my one year of experience making videos. Producing more intentional, substantial content - content that demands a lot of time, thought, and skill - is very difficult for an impatient person like me. And I don't think it's only me, I think many of us struggle more and more to summon the stamina to produce larger works of whatever art form we practice. I left social media partly for that reason, and started my youtube channel, which took a lot of adjustment. Posting to IG takes minutes. Writing a blog post, maybe a few hours. Creating a video - a week or two. And creating a course… takes months. It's a marathon.
But every time I've managed to do it, it's been well worth the effort. And I relish that feeling of accomplishment when I get to release a new project into the world. I like to think that it makes me just a little bit better at focusing, applying myself and delaying gratification.
I'm even playing with the idea of writing more. Not just writing video scripts but actually expressing my thoughts in a more polished, written format. I haven't really been able to do that since my burnout two years ago. I used to think I simply fell out of love with writing, but now I'm reconsidering. I do love writing. But writing demands deep focus, undisturbed time, and a kind of mental clarity that I find more illusive nowadays.
And even though I love being able to just spew out my throughts in a video and just roll with it, I also miss telling a more deliberate story, using more of my vocabulary, and digging a bit deeper for insights. I’m practicing by journaling more, and also by writing these letters to you. I might write more often from now on, we’ll see…
I can also feel my patience and attention span eroding from all of the video content I consume. (I watch waaaaaay too much YouTube. Occupational hazard I suppose.) As I talked about in my previous letter, I'm in the middle of a nervous system reset. Training my mind away from overconsumption of videos and short snippets of information and more towards long-form text content, like well-written articles and books.
It's hard, not gonna lie. The temptation of a quick hit of youtube stimulus is always there. But reading novels is the best way I've found to counteract some of that attention span decay.
This past month, I have taken to long evening reading sessions on the couch with some nice ambience in the background. Tailored to the theme of what I'm reading, of course.
I've awakened to the wonderfully plentiful world of background noise and themed playlists on YouTube. Breath of the Wild soundscapes. Medieval monastery music. 12 hours of soft rain with distant thunderstorms. Forest ambience with bird song and a babbling creek. Those kinds of videos. And there are MANY of them, one for each possible mood or occasion. I fully appreciate the art and craft that goes into making really good ambience videos, and some channels have really mastered it.
Here are some current favorites I'm enjoying reading to:
I hope summer is treating you well, wherever in the world you are. My plan is to rest here for another week or two, and be with my family. Then I'll return home and do my thing as usual, albeit in a slower, more leisurely pace. I call it being in "workation mode": mixing work and vacation in accordance with the weather, your energy levels, or whatever plans and activities come up. It's one of the best things about being self-employed. I'm usually too restless to be completely on vacation, so a little goes a long way.
Until next time, take care of yourself. 🖤
My latest things
New class: Watercolor Birds: Learn How To Paint Songbirds in Watercolor. If you’re already on Skillshare, you can find it there. And if you’re not yet a Skillshare member, you can try it out for a month, for free. Just use my link to sign up and you can get started with my class right away. 🥳
On my channel:
How to paint a bird (Watercolor Robin tutorial):
An honest day in the life of a youtube artist:
Some other great things
Reading:
I'm finally reading The Bird Way, by Jennifer Ackerman, which is every bit as fascinating as I expected.
And my guilty pleasure right now is the Court of Thorns of Roses fantasy series by Sarah J. Maas.
Watching:
Not watching a lot right now, but I am occasionally slowly working my way through Outlander, season 6. And me and my partner are loving season 3 of The Boys.
Listening:
Apart from the ambience videos: a lot of podcasts. The Conspirituality podcast is a recent find that I wish I'd discovered earlier. As a long-time yogi, and a rational but open-minded "spiritual" person, I've long been searching for good content creators that talk about these topics without resorting to fluffy nonsense, wild claims, or conspiracy theories. And this is one such outlet. Along with The Millennial's Guide to Saving the World, another favorite podcast of mine.
I'm also having an audiobook phase right now. Have recently listened to John Ajvide Lindqvist's latest novel, Verkligheten (“Reality”). He’s our most famous horror writer, and one of my literary heroes and role models.
Currently I'm listening to Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself. Been wanting to try out some of Abercrombie's novels for a while, and the narrator is really good.