Weeknotes
(July 2025)
I wrote a little Alfred Script to 1. Create a markdown file with the template of my weeknotes 2. Put it in the appropriate dropbox folder 3. Open up iA Writer with this file loaded in.
So I can just Cmd+Space “weeknotes” and start writing.
Screenshot 2025-07-19 at 12.44.51 PM.png
The whole process from start to publish takes about 2 hours every week. That’s a lot of effort! But for now, it seems important so I will keep doing it.
(Feb 2025)
I use the nudge of the weeknote to also update my read/watched/listened to status on Goodreads/imdb/letterboxed etc. I also use the opportunity to send new books to my kindle, schedule plans for the upcoming weeks, etc.
(Nov 2025)
The point of the week note is to catch my friends up on my life. So,
- People generally talk about work, life, health, so I try and remember them when I write about it
- I always open my calendar app when I’m writing (especially the life update) because it’s a good proxy for what I did over the last week.
- I open up my rss feed reader’s history section, and sometimes my browser’s history section to pick out things for my “around the web section”
Blog posts
1. The outline method
- Start with an outline
- add skin to the skeleton
Some examples: the (unpublished as of July 2025) “opinions on software estimation” post
As I’m adding skin, sometimes I realise that maybe this should be broken up into a series of posts (ex: Stop snorting narrative was born out of a very long rant I had about my journey with cognitive independence.
2. The dump feelings method
- Start with a rant
- Edit for coherence, acceptability, truth
Reference: https://tracydurnell.com/2023/09/27/how-i-approach-crafting-a-blog-post/
Some examples: [that unpublished post I have about winding up DDD]
Fiction writing
Some tools have really helped: - the thing that deletes the whole item if you stop typing for more than 5 seconds - Adding placeholders for things you want to happen, so you preserve the flow but skip to the thing you really want to write/say
Poetry
Rap
(July 2025)
There’s two different things going on with rap. There’s a story you want to tell, and there’s the way you are going to present that story. These two things exist in all forms of writing, but, well, in rap the form matters more than in the other stuff.
This time, I started with knowing vaguely what I wanted to say. I think someone started me off with a beat, which was very important. It got me thinking that I wanted to tell a story of nostalgia and teenage awkwardness set in the 1980s.
So I came up with a vague story and two verses of it. Then, towards the end of the day we had the game changer.
Prabhanshu pulled out a melody he had made a few weeks ago and... wow, it really came together. I ended up figuring out a chorus and a pre chorus, and on Sunday we added two verses and a rap bridge.
(From https://tanvibhakta.mataroa.blog/blog/week-of-jul-24th-2025md/)
To add those two verses, we did what I think was novel. We listened to the beat and sort of came up with a flow, and then write utter gibberish to fit that flow. It didn’t make any sense! But it was a record of how the flow could go if it wanted to do so. Then, having confirmed that something sounded good, we played with the rhymes, the story, etc.
The other thing I did that helped lots was steal. The beat was dreamy and Raveena-like, and I couldn’t figure out a flow over it that didn’t just sound like someone was saying a verse. I know Chance the Rapper does similar kind of music, so I listened to a bunch of his songs until I found something with a similar time signature... then I just rapped his verse over my beat to see if that flow would work. And it did! That was a good starting point for me.
The idea is that rap is just metered poetry, right? Of course not, that’s a horrible oversimplification. But we have to start somewhere. So if rap is just metered poetry, I need to write some poetry to a meter and then see if I can put a beat around it.
So I took the beat from the bridge of Sapphire, found that it’s 96bpm via a bpm counter website, memorised the beat signature (is that a phrase?) and wrote some poetry that matches that beat. It rhymes at the end, with some slant rhymes in between, and it’s really sad and dark.
Then I wrote a response to that verse that sounds like Saweetie and is so playful. That one sounds better recorded than read out.
(From https://tanvibhakta.mataroa.blog/blog/week-of-july-16th-2025/)
Second attempt (April 2025)
I picked a song that was stuck in my head (It was introduction by Faris Shafi, don’t ask), picked a paragraph that I liked, and tried to copy the flow. This song is trilingual. I’m not sure why, but the lines that came to me were in Konkani, not English. It was one verse of pretty shit struggle rap, but I was quite proud of it.
Very first attempt (April 2025)
We played a beat (a slick, clipping thing) on a loop, and tried to come up with a few lines that would go with it. After like twenty minutes, I barely had two lines that were usable. I had a few more rhyming pairs that I thought sounded cool? That’s it.
This was a humbling experience. I was fairly confident that I could do something with this because I had had most of the writing exercises we did until that point come... straightforwardly, if not easily, to me.
Pages on this website
- Start with a need (for example, something I’ve had to tell people repeatedly)
- Attempt to make it exhaustive
Examples: /work, /care
Digital Gardens
If I want to collect and publish an ongoing note series on something somewhere, I’ll probably start a digital garden.
Things I wish I had started digital gardens for: - Driving - Tango - Drumming
This post started out as a prompt from IndieWebClub #6