I got some really nice news on Saturday that my post on Italy (Part 3) had been featured in Substack Reads this week. Since then I've also had some lovely comments from people and some new subscribers, so welcome to all of you and thanks to everyone else who's supported me so far as well.
You'll be pleased to know I celebrated by walking around the corner to our local bakery, where my wife and I bought ourselves several desserts too many which we ate later that evening, felt terrible afterwards and then went to bed early. It was a pretty wild Saturday night. We also both had colds so probably didn't do ourselves any favours. It was worth it though.
At our Airbnb, which we'll be leaving in a week, we have a little shared garden out the back with semi-wild tortoises roaming around. It's been fun visiting them most days during our time here and we've all gotten along really well. I went and informed them of the exciting news that I'd been featured. The bigger ones were happy for me. The baby tortoises, who we’ve affectionately nick-named Scoots and Baby Raymond, had trouble grasping it though. They couldn't quite understand the Substack platform, or how email works. Also, Baby Raymond's shell was looking very dirty again which is absolutely classic Baby Raymond.
A few years back I went and stayed on the island of Koh Lanta in Thailand for a month. I'd heard good things about the coworking space there and at that time I was trying to carve out a new career as an illustrator and animator, and so had wanted to surround myself with other people learning and building.
It was off-season and I paid for a month in a room at a basic hotel nearby. It was a bright lime green building and I was the only one staying there. It was run by a family that lived in a house next door which doubled as the reception office. Their pet monkey, which they’d rescued after its mother had died, did its best most days to try and remove the drawstring from my shorts, much to the amusement of the family.
Every day I would walk to the coworking space to do some work, and along my route I would pass a group of people building a boat. I would already have a light sweat on by the time I'd made my very short seven minute walk there, meanwhile the boat builders would be out in the sun all day laboring away.
During my month there, I got to see them slowly make progress. A little bit each day. Sometimes it didn't seem like much was happening but then some days, out of nowhere, it would look like so much more had been finished. It wasn't a linear process. Maybe they made mistakes, I'm not sure. Or maybe it was just that it didn't often appear like anything was changing day to day.
I didn't quite notice the synchronicity until later on; that I was doing something similar each day at the coworking space. Turning up each day trying to make progress which felt invisible at the time.
It paid off though. During my time there I managed to land a big advertising job. It was a huge win. The project involved illustrating and animating a bunch of insect characters for a client wanting to sell their line of girls seamless hipster underwear. A project that sounds even more ridiculous in the context of people building a boat in front of you every day.
When you're a boat builder and you finish your project, you have a boat. You can say to people 'Look at that boat. I built that. If I wanted to I could put that on the water and travel somewhere. Also, if I was stranded on an island (a different one to this), I would surely be ok because I have skills like being able to build a boat out of raw materials'. On the other hand, being able to help push sales along for girls hipster underwear in a whimsical way using an animated butterfly is, I imagine, a lot less practical if you're stranded on an island somewhere. The boat builders were supportive though, and I appreciated that.
'How are you getting on with the butterfly?' the builders would call out. 'Is it difficult trying to illustrate cartoon underwear on an insect that looks enough like the actual end product so that the client is willing to sign off on it?'
‘It is actually, thanks for asking. How's the boat going? Looks like you've done a lot of work, particularly on the left side'.
'It's actually called the starboard, but yes, we have. See you tomorrow'.
I see similarities with what I'm doing these days. I'm overseas again, building. Working on ideas with my writing and drawing. It's also nice to do it alongside lots of other generous and supportive Substack writers who are out here building their boats too.
The progress feels invisible most days. It's definitely not linear. But I love turning up each day and making that slow progress.
And so coming up you might see a mixture of things. Some travel stuff, observations, illustrated stories, drawings, cartoons and probably a lot of other weird ideas that may or may not work.
I'm not sure what I'm building yet, I'm just having fun and I think that's the best way. Except when you're building an actual boat, but I have no idea how to do that anyway.
Nonlinear. I love that. All very interesting and uplifting.
I really appreciate how this story is building and the back track to Thailand, which was fascinating