Slow, but not too slow
Excusing excuses, procrastinating from procrastination, or just dealing with what I'm dealt? Also, a press hostel dog, abandoned trails, and anti-perfectionism
PORTLAND, Ore., United States, August, 2024 — I published the previous installment of this newsletter when my new book was about to come out. It’s now been out for four months, yet I’ve written about it here far less frequently than I expected. I’ve written less about everything. These days, I write far less consistently than I intend (this shouldn’t be news to anyone following my writing, though the idea that anyone might be is a big hypothetical itself).
I can’t figure out precisely why my output has been so limited, but I can’t get my best intentions, my ideas, and my execution to intersect. It’s bringing me down. I suppose I could turn to the meandering, detour-ridden theme I’ve set for The Scenic Route for cover, but wouldn’t doing so just be making excuses for myself?
I continue to believe strongly in the “slow journalism” movement, a movement I’d embraced when I learned about it more than a decade ago, but this newsletter isn’t exactly journalism. Anyway, when I started The Scenic Route, I didn’t intend to plod along. Instead, I envisioned an outlet where I could comfortably digress and detour from my primary work to share the various hard-to-place tidbits and gems I frequently encounter in my professional and personal life.
It’s mystifying why, despite the flexibility I afford myself for this publication’s content, I struggle to regularly produce issues. It’s doubly confusing when I consider how much unfinished work litters my hard drive. A folder here contains a partially written thought. A file there features an image I was certain could anchor a thousand or two words. Another folder brims with scans of cool documents that sparked brainstorms and snippets of texts hastily dashed off in everyday life’s waiting rooms and lines. There’s plenty of material scattered throughout that I’ve added since the last edition of The Scenic Route published, to say nothing of the exponentially larger collection of false starts and horded treasures I’ve been gathering for years.
One would think I have plenty to work from, but here’s what really happens when I think I have a can’t-miss idea for my next newsletter. I sit down, open my laptop, pull up the file with the relevant idea, check where I left it last time I worked on it, write a bit, revise some of what I’d done earlier, realize I want to look up something I claim or link to some connected website, gather a few more ideas, then look up to realize *poof* the day’s almost over. Time to get the kid from preschool, or make dinner, or go to that random thing I’d planned weeks ago that sounded fun then but feels like a chore now.
Then, suddenly it’s four hours later. The kid’s probably just about asleep. I’m’ just finishing cleaning the kitchen and…maybe I can…no…no way…I’m done…. I can’t think. I can barely move. I can’t write.
Tomorrow.
I’ll get to it tomorrow.
Then it is tomorrow. I’m ready to begin again. I made it so far. That was a great idea. I’m so inspired. I Sit down. Open the laptop…
Oh no.
Shit.
I forgot I promised so-and-so I’d make a decision about that email they sent six weeks ago.
Damn.
I told my wife I’d call an electrician about that outlet that shocked me.
Oops.
I forgot to put money into that checking account. I have it. I just forgot to transfer it. Now our water bill payment bounced and our water’s about to be shut off.
Ugh.
No sooner do I begin my next day than I’m confronted by one of the approximately 134,018,904,003 mini-crises that seem to ever-more-frequently pepper my life. Honestly, it doesn’t take a crisis, large or small, to interrupt me. Calm can be just as detrimental. When life slows down I remember more pressing responsibilities. I think about existing clients. Immediate needs. Reality. All the things I need to fit within tightening chronological confines. Or I ease into a creative experiment I’ve had simmering for a while. What am I doing filling what’s left of this rare placid moment with a newsletter that publishes inconsistently, generates no revenue, and whose vision and strategy seems amorphous and fluid? Shouldn’t those dwindling moments of peace be better spent addressing and planning for the next wave of chaos?
So, off to the back burner goes The Scenic Route, if it even goes anywhere that specific. More likely it’s just stuffed aside somewhere in my brain. It will probably end up in a little neglected corner, perhaps some mental equivalent of the shelf in my basement craft room that’s all but buried with piles of unopened mail, artwork from my kid’s preschool sessions, who-knows-how-many half-completed ten-year-old to-do lists, and various pieces of semi-important equipment, like the printer, the wi-fi router, and the pair of safety glasses I used last weekend while cutting drywall after a water leak. This newsletter is a detour after all. It’s extraneous. Maybe even an indulgence. I don’t need to think about it, let alone work on it, right? Not now. Not with life being, you know, life.
I mean I’m writing this — or rather finally finishing this — after months of hemming and hawing, and as I recover from some inexplicable illness accelerated no doubt by a concoction of poor sleep, stress and exposure to the menagerie of pathogens that follow my preschooler everywhere he goes. It’s something of a marvel, because when I think of that preschooler growing up I sometimes hope he might say one day “hey, my dad did some cool stuff while I was in school,” but so far while he’s in school I just keep thinking “Why do I even have him in preschool if I feel like I’m just treading water professionally? Can’t I just hang out with him instead and cut the bullshit? I’d be more present with him if I wasn’t constantly thinking about what I should be doing to maximize my productivity and my income.”
So of course I set aside my latest little “hey, it’s the anniversary of this police crackdown in 1936 that I wrote about” or “whoa, remember being a kid and playing video games” digression. If I’m really on my game I might remember to put it in my “brainstorms and future post drafts” folder. That’s the same folder where I might tsart a workday taking an old idea out to edit, cut a paragraph from whatever draft of that piece I end up finding, paste it into my “cut text to use elsewhere” folder, but absolutely refuse to ditch entirely. Heavens no I can’t just throw it away! What if I need it someday? What if I write another piece one day where it fits just perfectly and I’ve forgotten it. No, of course I can’t erase it. So it lands in my folder of indecisiveness, adding to years worth of material strewn throughout my hard drive that I once thought didn’t quite fit but might one day be exactly the right words. Really. I swear. They’re really crucial to some future. I know it. I just know it. Maybe I’ll put the idea in my “stories to pitch” folder. Maybe someplace else with a new, even better procrastinatory name for all these cast off bits.
The destination may vary, but the result is consistent (the only thing in my output that seems so these days). The work languishes. There are many “to share” links and clippings that have been on my to-do list since far longer than the months-long gap between when I last published the Scenic Route and this edition. Other ideas reference news, events, and anniversaries that were contemporaneous when I’d originally planned to write about them, but have long since passed. Sure, I like the whooshing noise deadlines make as they go by just as much as Douglas Adams did, but I’m not as fond of the drone of everyday life passing by that I also hear.
Why does it matter anyway? Why would I blather about all this to anyone, let alone people who’ve actually bothered to hit that “Subscribe” button?
I’m not the only person who’s ever had to balance personal, professional, and familial obligations with completing high level work and pursuing creative goals. So why do mine deserve reading? And if others have apparently been able to strike this balance is the better question whether I am cut out for such a self-directed career? Maybe now’s finally the time I pack it in and find some 9-5 to fill the next three or four decades of my life. Where do I even turn for guidance, especially when any meaningful help would require money or time, and often both?
Should I even be this candid ? Should I admit that I’m struggling with writing consistently when this is a platform where I’m ultimately trying to promote my writing, my research, and my knack for curating old photos and ephemera? Who am I addressing here, anyhow? I think the audience that will eventually read this consists of some combination of friends, family, professional contacts, and strangers. Why should these readers care about my writing challenges? If one reason I developed this newsletter was to better connect with potential readers and clients, will telling them I’m dissatisfied with the frequency and consistency of my work help grow its audience or secure potential clients’ confidence?
I suspect not.
But dishonesty won’t help, either.
A point a decade in the making
Perhaps I’ve already answered myself. Perhaps I once felt much differently about consistency, the value of my time, and who my audience might or might not be. Perhaps that’s why as I’ve spent the bulk of this year wrestling with my productivity, or lack thereof, I keep remembering something I tweeted nearly fifteen years:
I tweeted this at the beginning of 2010, just as I made my final preparations to move to Portland from Los Angeles. Most of the other preparations were complete, but I still needed to plan the route I’d drive. Since my boxes were being shipped separately, I could be more flexible with my route. In hopes of seeing more of California and Oregon than I might on I-5 or even U.S. 101, both of which I’d traveled frequently, I decided to avoid any interstates, freeways, or other limited access highways throughout the trip.
I had a chance for even more flexibility when I began the trip that January amid low precipitation and moderate temperatures. The pleasant weather meant routes through California’s “Gold Country” or along the Sierra Nevada range that most winters might hav been too dangerous or slow-going were possibilities. I could even stop at Yosemite National Park, a place I’d never visited but had wanted to see my entire life.
Before leaving I’d planned to chronicle the trip on my blog, which I’d launched only a year earlier. Just as I had allowed for flexibility in my driving route, I kept my plans for how I’d write about it loose. I didn’t exactly know how I’d get from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest; I just knew I’d get up here one way or another. Similarly, I didn’t know what my writing about the trip would look like; I just knew I’d write something. I was open about all this flexibility and began the journey (and my reflections upon it) with a caveat for readers describing my intentions.
Aside from the tweet above, I recently reread this passage from a post I wrote on my blog just before I began the trip.
“What you read here, and this adventure itself, are products of imagination, not crowd-sourcing. Is there an audience for it? Who cares? Or rather, the audience is this one now, the one reading these words, whether the reading occurs today, two months from now or decades hence. This is simply an effort to describe one sliver of the world as filtered through my eyes, not by metrics and news budgets or obsessing over what I think my readers want to see. Though I definitely do not know, I think my readers, whoever and whenever they might be, want to see what they don't know they'll see, what they won't expect, just as on the road I hope to see what I don't know I'll see and what I don't expect.
“I am not a backpack journalist. I am not part of a media industry in upheaval, nor a media innovator. I am not a technophile, nor a Luddite. I will not constrain myself by trying to pinpoint ways to present my narrative or funding channels to tap. I am simply an observer willing to use whatever tools are handy to tell a story and to uncover those parts of the story that might matter, but might not easily be seen at the surface.”
I was so much more confident then, wasn’t I? More than fourteen years later, I wonder if I’m living up to this drive of mine. Can I even do so when so much else has changed about me, my work, and the world? Should I do so, when I have a family to support and thus need clearer, more secure, more consistent sources of income? For that matter, should I do so when there are so many important, pressing stories that need reporting even if writers like me are led by our hearts toward other subjects?
Whatever the answers, I do still hold strongly to my sense of curiosity, or rather, some of the underlying principles I identified in that post. Indeed, that post also reinforced the tweet quoted above. I’d written two days before my trip as I thought about the uncertain career trajectory that accompanied my move, a time when I frequently opined about the pointlessness of dissecting the “future of media” and technology’s impact on journalism.
Back then — right in the middle of the “Great Recession” and around the beginning of the 2010s — the subject of journalism and technology’s relationship seemed to me either ceaselessly fretted over or baselessly championed. I think this is still true today in this era of large language models and influencers. We continue to chase smoke rather than fire. I believed then and still believe now that what matters most is not the medium, but the message. What matters most is the story. Tools can be wonderful things, but they have no intrinsic value, nor are they intrinsically dangerous. Tools are meant to serve the work, not the other way around.
I'm not promoting willful ignorance or unresponsiveness when I advocate for "slow journalism." Instead, I argue that journalists and writers will find value not in chasing after audiences but by heading where the story is. Audiences will follow as long as the content's good enough. But if you let audiences lead coverage decisions they'll be gone by the time you approach them, no matter how much pomp and flash you’ve decorated your work with during desperate attempts to lure audiences back. That desperation just leaves your work lagging behind the public without any revenue tradeoffs.
Of course — and I’m about to over torture a metaphor — to catch the wind you must, trim your sails and adjust your course as the gusts shift. Yet you must also stop waiting for the absolute most opportune moment to set sail. You must simply leave port. So must I. Maybe it’s time for me to cast off and see what’s next.
A Danger Shared, Shared
Before I see what’s next, here’s a bit of an update on my new book, A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War. what’s happened over the last four months. As I mentioned, Blacksmith Books published my collection of Melville Jacoby’s photography, A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War, in North America in April. The book is GORGEOUS, if I do say so myself, and it revitalized my passion for Mel’s story and the world surrounding it. Since its publication I’ve had a lovely time talking about the book in a variety of venues and podcasts, including:
Inclusion on a terrific roundup of new photography books on China from China Books Review
A talk at the absolutely gorgeous Long Brothers Fine & Rare Books in Seattle
Discussing the book and Mel with Anne Marie Evans for RTHK3’s Hong Kong Heritage podcast
An excerpt from the book featured in the South China Morning Post
An author interview with Matteo Damiani of China Underground
Returning to
’s Weird History podcastDiscussing “History on the Page” on the Meditations podcast
I’d love to keep talking about the book and Mel, so if you know anyone who’d like to hear from me, host a virtual event, or invite me for a book talk, put them in touch with me.
This week’s Scenery
Dogtopia: A Nose for News
A frequent sighting at the Press Hostel in wartime Chungking where foreign correspondents like Melville Jacoby lived and worked, this dog, whose name I don’t know, belonged to Polish reporter Maya Rodevitch. He appears in many of Mel’s photos alongside Rodevich or on his own sniffing around the outside of the Press Hostel grounds. I bet somewhere in Mel’s letters there’s a bit more detail about the dog. I’m STILL learning new things from these letters regularly and I’ve had access to them for years.
This Week’s Detour
Fuck Perfectionism: In February, I read a post in Tim Denning’s Unfiltered Substack that seemed to speak directly to me. I clipped it then intending to share it as one of my “detours,” but I don’t think I knew when I did just how apt Tim’s warning that “perfectionism quietly murders most people’s dreams” would be not just to me but specifically this edition of the Scenic Route. In fact, I didn’t re-read the post until just now as I prepared to link it here.
“Once your mind believes failure is okay, everything gets easier. Once your mind believes failure is a must, then you transcend into a higher state of consciousness that’s hard to describe.” - Tim Denning, Unfiltered, Feb. 24, 2024
Right? Here’s Tim’s post:
Where are your passions stuck? How are you going to win the war in your head? Let me know!
P.S. You can order signed copies of A Danger Shared from my web site or you can buy unsigned new copies and support local bookstores via bookshop.org.