Connecting the (pale blue) dots

You can thank another Medium automated email for this one.

I felt really good about having just started, somewhat spontaneously — but more importantly, finishing — my first blog post in several years recently.

Collecting thoughts, and asteroids | by Stuart Buchanan | Sep, 2023 | Medium

But, uh oh, not long after comes the dreaded realisation that now I need to keep this up.

(If I may insert a total aside here — I’d like to acknowledge a friend of mine who passed away many years ago, but who was a total stickler for avoiding italicised full stops. Every single time I end a sentence in italics, I cannot help but think of my friend, and ensure I haven’t accidentally italicised the full stop. Memories of loved ones live on in all sorts of ways — my friend Jade lives on in correct text formatting.)

I’m shaking off the cobwebs of the writerly bits of my brain, and I certainly haven’t found a new routine for that yet. I do have a chunk of time off from my main job at the moment, and a hundred different ideas of how to fill it with projects of my own.

Overall, I feel good about how this time has been spent so far, and I know there’s no point in feeling guilty about not doing enough of other things. Baby steps.

One way I know to trick myself into being more consistent with new habits is to have some kind of external motivation. I’ve just done this with reading — a friend and I spent the last six months working our way through The Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee, an epic urban crime family fantasy trilogy (highly recommended, by the way). Little deadlines and regular check-ins really helped me to complete the books in good time.

And now, I want to do the same with journalism.

In my next post, I will probably start talking more explicitly about my explorations of the Scottish space sector and what I’ve found out about it so far. I also want to cover the other discoveries I’ve been making on the natural environment side of things, specifically focused on woodland habitat. There are links there, not just because of the way these topics have both captured my interest, but in other practical ways, too.

These are the dots I’ve been looking to join. I’ll be connecting my desire to write again, about topics I find fascinating, in a journalistic way. I’ve also found an outlet, or at least some external motivation, to help me write and publish with more consistency. I will start small, but I believe that this kind of framework is enough to get me motivated, and into a good routine. So, watch this, er, space.