Letter 1: Coffee and the future

Hey! I'm writing this on the balcony of a holiday apartment in Dolomites. I have an unbelievably good view of a mountain and cable cars gliding gracefully up and down. I wanted to take this opportunity to write a letter — perhaps the first of many? — to you as a paying subscriber to this newsletter.

I have been up to a few things lately that I haven't shared outside of my private social media accounts, some of which I think you might find interesting.

We still haven’t personified our campervan with a name, but it has been serving us very well. After my parental leave ended about 3 months ago, we have only used it a couple of times, but each time we did we drove for hundreds of kilometres with it to various parts of Germany. We love the space it gives us wherever we go that allows us to heat up milk for the toddler, take an urgent pee, nap with the toddler, and travel long distances knowing that we could pull over practically anywhere to camp in relative comfort for the night and carry on the journey in the morning.

Right, so that’s a little update on the campervan. Now on to the recent projects.

30 days, 30 essays

I've started a 30 days, 30 essays project and am now on day 7. You might have read a mention of this in my previous post in the footer. It's going well in terms of honouring the commitment of 1 essay everyday. I've also learned a few things, like how unappetising it is to read a more-or-less unedited draft. A lot of readability comes from the writer editing for clarity, missing substantiations and elaboration, which is lacking when, well, you're short on time (I have 1 hour per day, more or less, to write and publish).

As a paying subscriber, you get to see me in my glorious fumbling about in this project by using this trick in the URL - just visit nickang.com/r1 and change the URL's number to see the others. So far, I'm at /r6, and the project will end at r30.