dear creative friends,
hello from my favorite month for building creative things: January of Capricorn season. every year around this time, I get a surge of energy to do earthy things: nest, redo my website, and nurture concrete business projects. I noticed that my annual cycles usually repeat like this:
- Scorpio season - a somewhat dramatic death & rebirth, significant and mysterious internal shifts
- Sagittarius season - breathe, rest, and digest my year. watch harry potter, read books, play games.
- Capricorn season - super business brain and creative energy, turned on 150%!
this month's guide.notes is Capricorn themed, in that it's mostly about the process of bringing ideas down to earth - starting with creating digital vessels to help them grow:
recently
I built a little hut for "house on the webs"!
I'm sheepish that this site took me 8+ months of procrastination before I did it (very meta) but I finally pushed it out in a few days.
I followed my own rules of iteration to build simplest version 1.0. I plan on doing an "evolution ritual" on it every month, like upgrading pokemon cards (I'll share the progress). this is the before. here's the after:
23% off the January website course
in case you need a little extra incentive for birthing/rebirthing your site, I'm offering a New Year's gift of 23% off to the first 3 students who sign up for the next website sprint, which runs January 30 - February 8th. to everyone afterwards, a gift of 10% off. the regular course fee is $600.
you can use the code ongoingness at checkout. explore here.
you'll get:
- 7 days of content + 3 days of rest
- two 1:1, hour-long guidance sessions
- daily written feedback on your work
- accountability, structure, support
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guides
1 | why build a house on the webs? your website as a world
why think of your website as a living digital house, rather than a digitized resume or portfolio? I'll explain how a website serves as your most powerful resource to:
- express yourself and show your creative work
- share your offerings and gifts with others
- build an income stream to nourish your life.
2 | how to distill your vision into a one page site
my minimalist process, or quick-start elixir for planning a one-page website. in this guide, I share processes:
- how to distill your vision & purpose
- how to structure your content on a page
- how to get unstuck and free yourself from paralysis
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notes
1 | on lonely work, and how working alone = great!!
when I first quit my job, I realized that the thing that I missed the least was... coworkers. commuting to the office. talking to other people. meetings. I meet other creatives who talk about their craving for collaboration, and I realize how I'm not one of them. instead, I have stand-up meetings with myself, everyday, in my head -- and while this borders on feeling schizophrenic, meaning I might get stuck in thought-loops, or fall into obsessive holes with no one to shovel me out -- at the end of the day, I truly love working alone.
these days, I'm at the very beginning stages of working on a new course called, "lonely work: a field guide," distilling 7 years of what I've learned from working alone (the long and hard way) into a concise form to share with you: covering rituals, systems, energy, and flow. it's very in-the-works, but I'll keep you posted as it evolves.
2 | your most elemental to-do list
this month, while I'm working on 5 different ventures at once, I've been distilling my gazillion to-dos down into an elemental form, like solving for primary colors, or basic shapes. here's what I came up with, thus far:
- create art + ideas/knowledge into forms I'm proud of
- connect with people 1:1
- organize & channel informational systems
- nurture beautiful digital spaces
- daydream, process, digest, envision
what if, instead of trying to do everything -- you learn how to do a few elemental things, and simply repeat variations of them, again and again?
3 | artists could be rich, too
I'd like to make it my mission, in my lifetime, to help everyday artists become rich. I want to break the conception that artists must be poor, because art is a luxury (or at best, a hobby); is impractical, and thus, without value for daily life.
if there's any age where it's possible, it's this age; the information (and post-information) age -- where the internet is a universe of consciousness soup, connecting our subjectivities to each other. it's not about selling art as a capitalist product - but embracing it as an essential process: to making life itself more worth seeing, feeling, and experiencing.
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invitations
send me a question
write me a question about the inner-creative-digital life, and I'll write back a reply. here's a past letter responding to: how do you stay motivated?
support & subscribe to my artist program
I recently restarted my artist subscription program for behind-the-scenes process, art gifts, and intimate, 1:1 creative guidance, plus 15% off creative courses. you can join starting at $5/month.
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that's all for now. today I'm hungry to read business books and start learning about Gene Keys. this weekend, I'll repot all my plants, and plan a double birthday party.
I'm wishing you a January filled with spaciousness,
kening