Progress Update: On Living a Life of Art

Progress Update: On Living a Life of Art

Since returning from my recent travels, I have been steadily at work compiling the Creative Lifestyle essays into book-length manuscripts. What has become clear through that process is that the material wants to live as a trilogy. At this point, it looks like three books will hold the main body of essays in a way that feels coherent, readable, and true to the long arc of the work.

For this post, I needed an image, so I took a brief detour into nineteenth-century book covers, purely for curiosity and play, and arrived at the image you see above. It is not meant as a serious proposal for the final design. I honestly have no idea yet what the actual cover for the first book will look like. But the working title shown there reflects where things are currently landing, and it was enjoyable to imagine the project wearing an older suit of clothes, if only for a moment.

What feels most encouraging right now is that the structural organization is finished. The essays are no longer a loose constellation. They are grouped, sequenced, and paced in a way that makes sense as a sustained reading experience. The next phase is a full read-through, listening carefully to how the books sound as books rather than as individual essays, and making small adjustments to tighten the flow and clarify the transitions.

After that comes the real work. Sentence-by-sentence editing. This is the slow, unglamorous, necessary part. It is where clarity replaces approximation and where the tone settles into something consistent and dependable. I am looking forward to that stage, even knowing it takes a lot of time and attention. It is the point where the books stop being ideas about a creative life and start becoming usable studio companions for one.

I am genuinely excited about where this is headed. Thank you, as always, for walking alongside the project and for giving it a place to unfold in public, in real time.