A Mistake I Made

Back in the spring of 2021, I published a Twitter thread about some research I’d done on 7-figure newsletter companies.

I had been lucky to get unprecidented access to leaders in that industry, and over the course of about six months, I’d boiled down the business model in a way no one had really shared up to that point.

Newsletters were very popular, and the tweet spread fast.

A friend at the time recommended that I publish another thread. And another, and another. One a day for the next 30 days or so, in order to ride the wave, build my Twitter following, and establish my name as a go-to resource in the field.

It would have been easy enough. I had 500+ pages of edited insights, plus hundreds more in interview transcripts, P&Ls, and more.

In about twenty minutes, I wrote an outline of what the publication schedule would look like.

The first few days went well, I was stacking followers like never before. But then two things happened:

  1. I hit a day where I didn’t feel like writing, and
  2. I worried, “What if I run out of things to say?”

That was two years ago, and in a lot of ways, my career went on pause that day.

I’ve continued to work (a lot). And learn. And publish in other places.

But my personal audience-growth (especially on that topic) mostly stalled, and I still haven’t worked my way through that original list of 30 threads. And now I think that was a mistake.

Giving in to number one is always a mistake. Any pro knows that.

But number two was more complex.

Because in a weird way, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was worried about running out of things to say. So I didn’t say anything. And the effect was the same, except now, my research isn’t out in the world working for me like it could. And I’m also sort of stuck, because I can’t possibly move on to anything new until I get this out in the world.

Don’t feel too bad for me. The last two years have been fun.

But the lesson is an important one: It is both selfish and self-destructive to hold back your ideas just to make them last longer.

If I were giving advice to my younger self, I’d say, “Do the opposite.”

Share a little more than you think you can sustain.

Not only will that help strengthen your creativity muscle. But staying out at the leading edge of your content ideas will help ensure that you can continue to evolve and reinvent yourself as the situation demands. Whether that’s because the industry changed, or because you find something you’re more interested in.

This game, of audience building and idea-sharing for money – it’s all about movement. You need to stay moving. Stay curious. Stay publishing.

As in life, stagnance is death.

Do You Want To Make Cake?… Or Progress?

I have a health problem: It’s called SPHS — Spontaneous Procrastinative Hunger Syndrome.

It’s very serious.

Basically, whenever I have a lot on my to-do list, and I’m not quite sure what to tackle next, I get hungry.

Not for just anything.

Usually, I get hungry for something that I don’t have in the fridge. Something that would require a trip to the store, and (if the to-do list is particularly complex) cooking.

Often, it’s a multi-pan affair. Something going on the stovetop, while something else heats in the oven, with several mixing bowls, measuring cups, knives, and cutting boards to match, all of which need cleaning before I can get back to my to-do list (obviously).

The problem for people who suffer from SPHS is that the food never quite hits the spot (because you weren’t hungry in the first place). Instead, you spend a bunch of time only to find yourself standing there two or three hours later, tired(er), to-do list still undone, and that much less time left in the day.

Doesn’t matter. The disease persists.

Today, the craving was cake.

I don’t even like cake. But as I was working I had a turkey cooking down into stock on the stove, and something about the smell reminded me of the first hint of a cake that’s been in the oven for a few minutes.

The SPHS stirred.

My better brain objected. It might have even prevailed. But then my other disease, SPCS, kicked in.

If you haven’t heard of it, SPCS is short for Spontaneous Procrastinative Chore Syndrome. Basically, that’s a condition where you think of little chores you can do that feel useful but actually just distract you from the thing you’re supposed to be working on.

It’s not fatal (though it can be for your career).

Anyways, I have both of these. And the sum result was that this afternoon, I was craving cake, trying to resist a trip to the supermarket, when I suddenly remembered the supermarket is next to the hardware store, and the hardware store sells fireplace logs, and I’m kind of low on fireplace logs, so if I go to get cake stuff, I can get fireplace logs too, and then it’s not a distraction but a very useful trip.

Plus I end up with cake at the end.

I won’t bury the lead here: I’m not eating cake right now.

I made my way to the hardware store, perused the aisles for fireplace logs, all the while thinking about what kind of cake I should make, and what would be involved in that. Cracking the eggs, mixing batter, filling pans (oh, I need pans).

And as I did, a voice appeared in my head.

“You’re going to do all that,” it said, “just to make yourself feel better about this to-do list which is out of control?”

I paused as the thought occurred to me.

“Would you rather make cake? Or progress?”

Go Re-Write Your Tagline Now

Agora does an estimated $1B per year in income across a range of one-off and subscription info products.

Evaldo Albuquerque is one of their best copywriters. His sales letters have driven ~$120m+ in business.

He wrote this great book on the framework he uses to write killer copy.

In it, he says that the foundation is built on one specific thing:

The single most important thing you can do when you write a sales letter is to make the reader believe that:

This new opportunity is the key to their desire and it’s only available through my new mechanism.

As soon as I read that, I was struck by how many newsletters and info-products miss the mark when we try to hook subscribers.

Because doing this means you need to get clear on two things:

  • What’s genuinely unique about your newsletter?
  • And what is it that your readers truly desire?

How many of us can say we’ve really done this?

Substack is the first thing that comes to mind. Because all the landing pages are roughly the same by design, the only thing that could possibly set a newsletter apart is the title/description.

Here are the landing pages of 3 random Substacks:

Notice anything?

All of these focus mostly on what the writing is about. Not what the prospective reader desires, or what makes the newsletter different from anything they’ve ever seen before (even in similar genres).

That’s not a knock on these writers. As the screenshots show, several of these have thousands of paying subscribers. So something is working.

But I’m left wondering how much bigger the audiences could be if more of us tried Albuquerque’s method.

I say “us” because even huge newsletters are not immune to this. Check this out. Here are the landing pages for a handful of the most popular free tech/business newsletters.

Yikes.

Okay, so the first thing we should say is that there might be a reason these are all practically identical:

They work!

These are all big publications with audiences ranging from ~100k to 4m+. They’ve all got smart teams split-testing their home pages, and optimizing for what performs.

So we’ll give ’em that.

It’s also worth pointing out that when a reader lands on one of these pages, they’re typically not simultaneously looking at all the others. So in that moment, the hook might truly seem unique and enticing.

But you have to admit that when you stack ’em up next to each other, it’s a little…

Can we do better?

If we look at this through Albuquerque’s model, it seems like we’ve all (as an industry) decided that the only thing readers want is to “get smarter,” and they want to do it in 5 minutes or less.

Obviously, readers’ desires go far deeper than that.

Ads come closer to capturing this. Because they have to. An ad is competing way harder for your attention out there in the wild. So the hooks on high-performing ads are worth looking at.

For example, readers don’t just want to be smarter. They want to be perceived as smarter by people they respect.

They also want to be on the inside…

But really, I think most of us could afford to think a lot more about this.

What is it your readers actually desire? What’s truly different about your newsletter that represents a “new opportunity” for them to get the thing they want? Why is it that they can only get it with you?

Answering these won’t just help you land more readers. It’ll improve your newsletter (or book… podcast… course… whatever!) content.

Story Is About The Gap Between Expectation and Reality

The first two pages of White Fang are more captivating and thought-provoking than anything I read on Twitter all day.

How is it that one or two pages from a story-teller, long-dead, can change you more profoundly than an endless scroll of the most profound thoughts of today’s most profound thinkers?

I’ve been obsessed with this question recently.

I sat down to record a video for work a few days ago. I was telling the story of a small company in Europe who started the world’s first carbon footprint credit card.

It was so hard.

I stumbled. I got side-tracked. Even the editors couldn’t save it. A total failure of storytelling.

The funny thing is, I used to be a great story-teller. It was like wood-working, or machining. I could feel a story’s angles and edges, knew how it fit together, sense the audience’s anticipation.

It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, and I remember the feeling of holding a group’s attention, wrapped, around a campfire or over drinks at a party.

I remember getting boring too.

All of a sudden, telling a story felt like treading water in a snow-suit. I pawed at the surface, trying harder and harder to keep my head up. Slipping further down into the darkness, flailing and thrashing, until finally all that was left was calm water as far as the eye could see.

I wish I could remember exactly what happened, that way I could change it back. I don’t know for sure, but I have a guess…

When I was 23, after a quarter-century of adventures, I suddenly found myself struggling with a case of soul-crushing anxiety. To survive, I learned to give up my expectations. Let go of my ideas about right and wrong. Embrace the messiness of life.

There’s a problem though…

At its core, story-telling is about exposing the gap between expectation and reality. If there’s no difference between what happened, and what the audience expects would happen, then there is no story.

For a story-teller, giving up expectations is like trimming the whiskers on a cat. All of a sudden, the world seems just a little out-of-reach. And that’s enough to ruin a great story.

So this blog is about exploring the craft of storytelling, and maybe, about learning to open myself back up to expectations after nearly a decade spent surviving.

The $300 Coffee: Understanding the Value of Money

When was the last time you tipped $54 on a $5 coffee? If you’re 30 years old, the answer is probably more recently than you’d suspect.

Any time you buy something, you’re trading away money that could have been invested. If invested, that money would have grown over the next ten, twenty, even thirty or more years. So a dollar today is usually worth quite a bit more down the line.

This is known as the Future Value of Money and it’s an important tool in making financial decisions. If you understand what $1 or $100 today could be worth in the future, you can (supposedly) make better decisions on how to spend (or not spend) your cash.

To understand the Future Value of your money, you only need to know three basic things: how much money you have, what interest rate it could be earning, and how long it could be earning interest (how long you could leave it invested).

The calculation is very simple, and looks like this:

FV = Future Value
PV = Present Value (how much money you have right now)
i = Interest Rate
n = Number of Time Periods (years you could leave the money invested)

FV = PV(1 + i)^n

So if you have $1 today, and you have the option to invest it at a 5% return for 5 years, the math would look like this:

FV = 1 (1 + .o5)^5

 FV = 1 (1.05)^5

 FV = 1 \times 1.27

Future Value = $1.27

This means that if you invest that money, rather than spend it, in five years you could have $1.27. Put another way, if you spend that dollar today, you are choosing not to make a $0.27 five years from now.

Now, the promise of twenty-seven cents five years in the future may not seem like a compelling reason to save that dollar. But where this math starts to get very interesting is when you think about retirement.

Retirement planning changes two very important variables in this equation: the interest rate (i), and the number of compounding cycles (n).

Interest rates on quality long term investments are generally higher than 5%. Because the time-span is also much longer, the money has more time to grow. If you want to get a whole new take on the value of the money you’re spending today, consider this:

Many estimates say that, on average, over the last 40 years, a strong, safe index fund can earn you about 10% per year before inflation. Sometimes it’s higher. Sometimes it’s lower. Sometimes the market falls and you take a short-term hit. But over the long haul, the trend has been about a 10% return.

If you are 30 years old, then you have 42 years (minimum) to leave your money invested. After that point, various laws regarding retirement accounts begin to complicate things. But for the time-being, lets say your money can grow for 42 years, until you’re 72. The math, therefor looks like this:

 FV = PV (1 + .1 )^4^2

 FV = 1 (1.1)^4^2

 FV = 1 \times 54.76

Future Value = 54.76

This means that every dollar you have today could, if invested, be worth more than $54 when it came time to retire.

Even that by itself doesn’t seem so compelling, so bad is our ability to grasp the consequences of the long-term. But think about it like this: Each time you spend a dollar today, rather than investing it, you’re not just spending a dollar. You’re spending $1, and taking an additional $53.76 away from your future self.

That coffee you bought this morning for $4.33? If you had invested the money, it would have been $237.11 when you hit retirement. If you add a $1 tip, it would have been $291.87.

That drink at the bar last night for $10.65? That would have been $581.55 when you turned 72.

Dinner for $47.19? You just took away $2,584.12 from little old future you.

Am I trying to tell you to avoid spending? To pinch every penny and never tip?

Of course not.

But it is a fascinating way to think about the money you have today. Even if you don’t feel wealthy, looking at your money through the lens of its Future Value shows you that you wield significant buying power, as long as you’re patient enough to let your money grow.

More than that, Future Value acts as a gut-check for compulsive spending, or purchases you’re unsure about.

Let’s say there’s a conference you think you want to attend, but the ticket costs $500.

One way to make the decision easier would be to look at the Future Value of that $500 (which is $27,380 using our math above) and ask whether you feel the conference is worth that much.

If it is, great! You just made your decision easier. Go buy the ticket and get on with your life. If it isn’t, that’s fine. Skip the conference, and put the money towards something more worthwhile.

Even a dinner with friends takes on a whole new shape when you understand the money you’re spending. Even a cheap meal, say $50 in the average US city, has a Future Value of more than $2,500. In a very real way, you’re spending thousands of dollars for that experience. Savor it.

Understanding the Future Value of your money probably won’t end your coffee habit. Nor should it. If you enjoy coffee, then go buy coffee. You can’t live your entire life deferring things to your 72-year-old self.

But what if this knowledge leads you to buy one less coffee per month?

Well, if your coffee’s $5 (and we all know that’s conservative these days), buying one less coffee per month would give you $60 per year to invest. That may not seem like a terribly imposing sum. But through the power of compounding interest, if you were to invest that $60 each year for the next 42 years, it would grow to $32,258.

That is the power of compounding annuities, and that is a story for another time.

The Locked Door: Krakauer, Seneca, and the Challenge of Coming Home

Deep in the heart of the Swiss Alps, overlooking the Oberland villages of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen, there lives a giant. Six-thousand vertical feet of imposing black rock and ice, edged by glaciers, and buffeted by winds that are said to drive people beyond the brink of insanity. This is the Eiger and its north face is the stuff of legend.

It rises straight up for more than a mile; up, up out of the surrounding landscape, reaching out to scoop the clouds from the sky and hold them in its arms like a child’s stuffed toy. Dozens of the world’s greatest climbers have died in those arms, earning the North Face the nickname of “mordwand” — murder wall.

In the side of the mountain, looking quite out of place thousands of feet above the valley floor, there is a small wooden door. This unlikely hatchway, which is never locked, is known as the stollenloch and leads off the menacing face into a train tunnel, offering deliverance to stranded climbers.

In the opening pages of his book, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men And Mountains, Jon Krakauer mentions the door, saying that it reminded him a little too much of:

“…a scene from a recurring dream I’ve been having for years in which I’m fighting for my life in a storm on some endless climb when I come upon a door set into the mountainside. The doorway leads into a warm room with a fireplace and tables of steaming food and a comfortable bed. Usually, in this dream, the door is locked.”

Something about this passage grabbed my imagination and wouldn’t let go. For who of us has not felt at some time like we were stumbling through the very same stormy climb, with happiness and warmth on the other side of a door we can’t seem to open?

In my life it has often manifested as a restlessness. Behind the door is a place called “home”. A settled life with a loving partner and people who know my name at the local coffee shop. It seems nice. I think to myself that I’d like to go there. And yet, for whatever reason, the door is locked, and I’ve misplaced the key, and somehow continuing to climb seems easier than knocking.

I’ve written before about why people choose to venture. But what about the challenge of going home? What about the challenge of staying home? When that particular door seems locked, journeying can quickly turn into drifting and a darkness gathers — a darkness like that of Krakauer’s unending climb.

In his interview with adventurer and extreme endurance athlete Ross Edgley, Joe Rogan once said:

“There’s something about a lot of these endurance people… I always consider [them] like dark… They’re running from some darkness. You know what I mean?”

This was shortly after Edgley finished The Great British Swim. For one-hundred and fifty-seven days he swam day and night, in six-hour shifts, through thousands of miles of cold, dark, jellyfish-infested waters all the way around Great Britain. He used neither fins nor snorkel, his wetsuit chafed the back of his neck into a deep, raw gash that regularly re-opened in the salt water, and constant exposure led to continual exhaustion and such unpleasantries as “salt tongue”, a condition in which one’s tongue literally begins to disintegrate.

For five months he endured this. He has also endured such harrowing feats as pulling a car the length of a marathon, completing a triathlon whilst carrying a hundred-pound log, climbing up and down a rope for a total of 8488 meters (the height of Everest), running thirty marathons in thirty consecutive days, and many others.

“You seem so normal,” Rogan said. “That’s what’s so confusing to me.”

Indeed, aside from the fact that he’s built like a Greek statue’s idea of what a Greek statue should look like, Edgley does seem exceedingly normal. He is warm, hospitable, cheery, and uplifting with an easy smile and the natural movements of a lifelong athlete. One of the mottos of the Great British Swim was “swim with a smile,” and he commonly sites research about how even forcing a grin can release biochemicals that aid in muscle recovery and boost immune function (both critical under such trying conditions).

And yet when he met with Charlie Pitcher, a fellow adventurer who rowed alone across the Atlantic in 2013 setting a new world record, Edgley didn’t ask about endurance or mental toughness. Instead, he asked Pitcher for advice on how to transition back into the civilized world. Proof that, even for those who swim with a smile, the door back to everyday life can sometimes be difficult to open.

“Do you think it is unusual,” Edgley asked Rogan, “or do you think that we now think it’s unusual because society has got real comfortable?”

It’s a good question. Anyone who’s tossed their life into a backpack and stepped out onto the road has had similar misgivings about society. We take to the road, we think, to get away from here and to find more of what we’re looking for out there.

This is not new though. For as long as there have been societies, there have been men and women who wandered away from them in hope of finding something more. Seneca spoke of this two-thousand years ago, warning about something that sounds uncannily like the darkness that Rogan mentioned.

“All that dashing about turns out to be quite futile,” he wrote in a letter, going on to say:

“And if you want to know why all this running away cannot help you, the answer is simply this: you are running away in your own company.”

Socrates put it similarly nearly five-hundred years earlier when he said:

“How can you wonder your travels do you no good when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.”

If the ancients are right (and let’s face it, they often are) then perhaps the door we face is not locked at all. Perhaps it is us on both sides of the door, at once trying to pry it open, and simultaneously pulling with all our might to try and hold it closed.

It is this struggle against ourselves which makes it seem as though the door is locked, and for as long as it continues, we are trapped, like Krakauer in the stormy endless climb.

The key to opening it, according to Seneca, is not found out in the world, but rather by turning inward. “You have to lay aside the load on your spirit,” he says. “Until you do that nowhere will satisfy you.”

The good news is that, if we can figure out how to do that, the future (both on the road and at home) looks pretty damn bright.

“…every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may be banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be like, a hospitable home. Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there… the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.”

-Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

I can’t tell you how to lay aside this load. It’s something I’m far from figuring out myself. But maybe it’s enough to remember that way up on the Eiger’s murderous north face, amongst rockslides and avalanches and maddening foehn winds, the most unlikely door in the world, the stollenloch, always swings free.

Mark Twain and the Value of Journals

“If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to keep a journal a year.”

-Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

For anyone who has ever been frustrated by their inability to keep a journal, or, after keeping a journal, by the surprising gaps and useless information one finds upon revisiting those pages a few months or years later; For anyone who has ever known this frustration, we have Mark Twain.

When we think of Twain, most of us think immediately of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. But during his lifetime, The Innocents Abroad sold more copies than any of his other books. A humorous account of his travels through Europe and the Holy Land, it is one of the bestselling travel books of all time.

Among the many observations he made during the trip, one that will likely resonate with writers of all kinds is that of the difficulty of keeping a journal…

“At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest.

But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.”

-Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Starting a journal is easy. Finishing it is the hard part. What’s more, all the value of the thing is pretty much bound up in the finishing of it. As Twain wryly points out to a young shipmate in his book…

“Yes, a journal that is incomplete isn’t of much use, but a journal properly kept is worth a thousand dollars — when you’ve got it done.”

The same can be said about writing projects in general. They are easy to start, hard to finish, and not really worth anything until you’ve got them done. So the question naturally becomes How do you go about finishing a journal? What is the “right” way to do it?

As with so many things, the answer seems to be “It depends.”

Twain himself tended to keep a single notebook in which he wrote everything from fictional sketches, to shopping lists, to accounts of his travels far and wide. During a single month-long voyage from San Francisco to New York, he filled an entire notebook with his thoughts and observations (the seventh of forty-nine surviving notebooks which scholars still study and transcribe to this day).

Hemingway, on the other hand, spent more than a month shooting big game in Africa (the trip which eventually became The Green Hills of Africa) and wrote nothing but a few jotted notes and a tally of animals seen scribbled on the end-papers of a bird-book he was reading during the trip. His wife, Pauline, kept a faithful account (which is itself worth a read, and can be found along with Hemingway’s own notes inside the Hemingway Library edition of The Green Hills of Africa) which he used while writing Green Hills.

Perhaps your style lies somewhere in between. Perhaps it’s different entirely.

In the end, it seems that great writing can come from just about any kind of journal, so long as the journal is complete from the writer’s perspective and the style of journaling jives with the mind doing the writing.

Hemingway’s Kudu and Quitting Your Day Job

Always as a writer there is the question of whether to keep your day job. Successful writers for generations have been telling aspiring writers to keep their jobs and do their writing on the side. Aspiring writers, myself included, have spent generations ignoring this wisdom.

And then there is Hemingway, who found a sneaky way to give new advice on this, then buried it in the pages of an unlikely source: his 1935 safari tale, The Green Hills of Africa. In it, he says…

Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a long period of time, being outwitted, outmaneuvered, and failing at the end of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that, sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time limit by which you must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see one.

It is not the way hunting should be… The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as there is you and colors and canvas, and the way to write as long as you can live and there is pencil or paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way. But here we were, now, caught by time, by the season, and by the running out of our money so that what should have been as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing.

-Ernest Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa

It’s tempting to believe that your day job is what’s keeping you from your writing. That quitting it would offer the long open stretches of time you crave to be creative. Depending on your means, it may.

But when you leave a job behind, you turn over an hour-glass. The grains of sand counting down the days before your work needs to begin paying for itself.

It’s impossible to say for certain whether any particular writer should or should not have a day job, or whether they do or don’t stand a chance of making it. But we can comfortably say that no writer should ever do their work in less time than it ought to take.

Most of the time, when we talk about quitting our day jobs in order to pursue writing full-time, the question at hand is “How quickly can I make money at this?”

But another question, the one Hemingway offers, is “How long should this project take, and can I still afford to give it that if I walk away from my paycheck?”

On the Difficulty of Writing

The most difficult thing about writing is writing something that’s true. I think that if you can write something that’s true, it will always be good, even if it’s not enjoyable. The truth is not always enjoyable. But reading a truth that you recognize has a certain redeeming quality so that even if the story is unpleasant it sticks, because you see your own experience reflected back at you.

Writing the truth is hard because it forces you to be vulnerable, and also requires that you don’t believe your own bullshit. The bullshit I speak of is not comprised of overt lies. Rather, it is the collection of little half-truths we tell ourselves in order to get through each day. I’m not that lonely. There’s still time. The spinach is tasty.

These half-truths are needed to keep from going crazy in a world where the good guys don’t always win, and bad things happen to all sorts of people, and the rules are different depending on how many zeroes there are on your bank balance. They help you to put two feet on the floor each morning, shave, and wear pants when you might prefer to grow your mane long, flip the table, and donkey-kick the guy who’s texting when he should be paying attention to the traffic light.

The half-truths help you to live a civilized life. Hell, they may even help you live a good life, help you hang on long enough to cut yourself a better slice of the pie. But they will not help you to write.

That is why writing is so hard. Because the mindset needed to write honestly is fundamentally different from the one needed to be a card-carrying member of the civilized world. So writers tend to be recluses, the good ones at least. And the better you’ve done at society’s game, the more difficult it is to recognize truths and put them on the page.

That doesn’t mean your writing has to be unpleasant. There is a beauty to truth. When Hemingway writes about winters in Schruns, about skiing in the high mountain country, and about the hillside farms and the warm farm houses with their great stoves and huge wood piles in the snow, it is beauty itself; words of a true admirer, written by someone who knows.

Hemingway’s truth will not be the same as Neil Gaiman’s truth. For Gaiman, the world is full of ghosts and gargoyles, witches and warlocks. Magic exists, and it finds its way onto every page. Hemingway finds magic in an elk hunt at sunrise, but stays well away (certainly outside shooting distance) of anything mystical.

If you don’t believe in dragons, you will not be able to write about them convincingly, no matter how attractive the market-size for fantasy thrillers. So you must know the true truth of the world, as well as the truth of the world as you see it, and you must avoid believing your own lies, and if you can do all that and clear a few hours a day to put words to paper, maybe then you can write something worth reading.

The Joy of Looking Up

But for my money, the best view on Earth – anywhere on Earth – is straight up. It’s easy to forget because the whole scene is often reduced to glittering lights sprinkled across a midnight blue dome. But to glance up at the stars is not so much to look at the night sky as it is to peer out into it. There is a vast depth to the scene which is often missed but which is far grander than even the grandest earthly vista.

On a clear day, you can see 130 miles from the top of Mt Washington in New Hampshire. The view from Everest can exceed two-hundred. The current record for line of sight stands at 334 miles, taken from a place in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan.

But look up on any night from anywhere and the very closest twinkling light is somewhat further still. So far, in fact, that the distance is not measured in feet or miles but in time – the time it takes the fastest known thing to traverse the space. A lightyear works out to about six trillion miles and Alpha Centauri, the closest star visible in the night sky, is a little over four light years away.

It’s little use talking about the distance, for it is so far as to be virtually ungraspable in any practical way. You could try though. Imagine, if you will, being able to climb to the roof of your apartment building in New York, and looking out over the edge, you were able to see, far off and impossibly small, the faintest shimmer of Paris’ lights in the distance. That would be a view of about four-thousand miles. Alpha Centauri is roughly six-billion times further on.

It is, in short, a long long way.

And that is just the closest one. Polaris, the North Star, is nearly a hundred times further still. Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, the three stars that make up Orion’s Belt, are each well over twelve-hundred lightyears away. If you’re working out the mileage on your calculator, you may well find that it’s more zeros than the device can comfortably display, but the distance is around seven quadrillion miles.

To look up into the night sky, even with the naked eye, is to look out across the most magnificent sweeping vista that mankind has ever known.

And we have always known it. Even today, as the blinding speed of development seems to have approached that of light itself, the stars above us have remained largely unchanged for the last four-thousand years.

These are the stars that Caesar saw. Socrates and Homer too. When they pushed the very last piece into place at Stonehenge, they would have toasted the occasion beneath a sky very much like the one you’ll see tonight.

In a world of division — left, right, black, white, Abraham, Jesus, or Mohammed — it is at least some comfort to know that when all three pondered the meaning of a life well-lived, they did so beneath the very same stars that shine now.

It was Emerson who said that if the stars came out just one night in a thousand years, “all mankind would believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.

Instead, they are ours every night.

Except in the cities, of course, where the glare of a million headlights and streetlights and billboards has chased all but the brightest celestial bodies from the sky, and the only constellations to be found are the ones made of lit-up office windows. There a person can go a whole lifetime and never know what the night sky is supposed to look like.

I remember the first time I saw it. I had flown to Colorado and caught a ride to a dusty camp on the outskirts of a town called Cañon City. Back then, there were only two reasons to go to Cañon City – either you were going whitewater rafting, or you were going to jail. In a town of less than twenty-thousand, there were thirteen penitentiaries. It was even home to the Museum of Colorado Prisons, lest the people’s dedication to the science of confinement be called into question.

I had cast my lot with the water, having signed up to learn to guide on the nearby Arkansaas River. It was my first time camping in the wide open spaces of the American west.

There are many places in this country that claim to be home to fickle forecasts, and I’ve had locals from Seattle to San Antonio tell me “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait a few minutes.” But only there, on the high-plains desert of one of the world’s great mountain chains, have I found the expression to be true.

Sun and heat, then rain, then snow, then heat again, all in the same afternoon. We would watch the weather coming over the distant back range, swept along by the relentless wind which pressed my tent flat to the ground and sent many others cartwheeling along the desert floor.

In the evenings, the darkness seemed to suck the warmth from every corner of the world and that first night, even wrapped in my sleeping bag, I was frozen through.

I climbed from my bag to try and stomp some heat back into my limbs and stepping from my tent I was met with a view so spectacular as to make me forget everything else. An onyx black sky reaching from horizon to horizon, filled from edge to edge with the most magnificent display of glittering lights. They seemed to reach down from the heavens, at once close enough to touch and yet grand beyond belief, and snaking a course through the middle of it all, the great white river of the Milky Way.

I had not known the stars could ever shine that bright.

Later, when we’d seen the river take its first life of that deadly summer, I remember looking up at those stars and feeling small and safe. Safe in the feeling of being small. The stars have long been a reminder of our place in the grand scheme of things. Seems a shame to trade that for the billboards.

No matter. A sense of place is among the first things to return when you decide to crane your neck and look upward. Not just a sense for your place in the cosmos, but more literally a sense of where you are.

It’s a novel thing the first time you get the lay of the land by looking at the sky. The world no longer feels quite so big. To glance at the stars and say for certain that this way is west or that it is about 2AM is enough to make you feel master of the universe. It’s as though the entire hemisphere, at a stroke, has become your neighborhood, and while you may not know exactly what lies over the next hill, you feel certain that you could find your way out of the desert given enough time and a backpack full of snacks.

Of course, one need not go to the desert to see the night sky through new eyes. For it is not really the sky that changes, but the eyes themselves, the way of looking. All that is required is curiosity. To look once more with the eyes of your younger self, and to wonder about what it is you’re really seeing – that is all that’s needed.

I like the winters for this. I’ve heard it said before that you can either curse the blustery snows of winter or you can decide to learn to ski. I’d say the same goes for winter’s long nights. I used to dread them. But these days, I enjoy the chance to grab my copy of Regas’ 100 Things, slip out into the crisp night air, and spend a little extra time looking up.

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