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To be a successful creator, you don’t need to wait for inspiration to strike. You don’t need to wait for the muse or to wait for an original idea. You don’t need “hacks” or to follow the teachings of the latest productivity guru. To be the kind of writer, photographer, musician, artist, or creator who builds a body of work, you only need one thing: a creative project. A creative project is an idea, a proposal to engage in some hypothetical and unrealized creative undertaking....

Drifters, Potosí’s altitude had gotten the best of me. I retreated to Cochabamba, where I’d spend a few days recovering. The air in Cochabamba was still thin for my standards, but arriving felt like I had been giving an oxygen mask coming from Potosí. My headache and confusion seemingly evaporated as I walked under the blue skies of Bolivia’s City of Eternal Spring. I made it to the city’s main square....

I am starting to “work with the garage door open.” Robin Sloan coined the phrase in an article discussing/dreaming up new ways of working, networking, publishing, creating, and connecting online. These “new ways of relating” are less reliant on the social networks we’ve become accustomed to over the last decade or two. About working with the garage door open, Sloan wrote: This isn’t a time for “products”, or product launches. It’s not a time to toil in secret for a year and then reveal what you’d made with a shiny landing page....

Friends, I need your help! The Hill of the Skull will go live on Kickstarter from September 25 until October 26. (Join the book launch livestream via YouTube on Oct 1, 2023). I need help spreading the word! Do you know any podcasts I should reach out to for interviews? Any newsletters, blogs, websites, journalists, or media outlets I should pitch and reach out to? Is there anything you can do to help me on this front?...

Drifters, What do you first notice when you look at Van Gogh’s Starry Night? Do you see the yellow stars burning in the blue sky? The sleepy village? The cypress tree dominating the foreground of the canvas? The rolling mountainscape? For me, it is the wind, that swirling force of life blowing above the village and through the twinkling darkness. I never really understood the context of the wind in Van Gogh’s painting until I stepped out of a train station not far from St....