Ten years ago this week I launched this blog, though it would take a bit longer to earn its title. I posted to it more or less weekly for the next seven years, until I became a full-time writer for Google and had to slow down. Three years after that, and five months after I left Google, I find that my taste for regular and frequent Fogknife posts hasn’t fully returned. I don’t see this as a problem.

I have resumed writing for myself more than ever, but most of it goes into private journal entries now. For the past couple of years I have been using Nota to create and organize my notes to myself, both personal and professional. Nota replaced dear VoodooPad, which I used daily from 2004 through 2022. VoodooPad was a revolutionary application for its time, but its design remains fixed in the pre-mobile era, with its own file format that makes cross-device syncing unwieldy. Nota instead uses plain old textfiles as its data store, making your work much more portable—and letting me apply the same Markdown-based formatting techniques that I first got familiar with for Fogknife’s sake.

Nota also includes several lovely journaling features that have nudged me into creating, updating, and interlinking near-daily textfiles about my life, and my projects, and the ups and downs of the many interpersonal relationships I’m so fortunate to have. Sometime last year I started to treat these journal entries as daily newsletters to myself, complete with titled sections and top-of-page summaries. This suits me very well; I enjoy building labeled threads of thought like this, day-by-day, and being able to easily retrace my thought-steps around a single topic, flipbooking back and forth in time.

The idea for Venthuffer developed rapidly in these daily notes, for one thing, as did the structures of all of its episodes. I’ve also used these notes as a base camp to explore new directions in both professional and art-project writing—which I look forward to announcing in this public blog, when they’re ready to share.

All of which is to say that I’ve been writing, just not necessarily here in Fogknife. This is fine! The ongoing Venthuffer project is enormously important to me, and so the other writing projects, even the ones that are work-for-hire. I’m happy with the best writing I did Google—there’s a reason it headlines my portfolio—but the truth is that I didn’t get to write nearly as much as I wanted to while I was there. This ten-year mark sees me taking control of my writing career in new ways, and my energy is focused on making something personally meaningful and satisfying from it. Something more to my taste, even when someone’s paying me for it.

So: more to come. Happy New Year!