Many people meditate. Many people journal. Few consciously integrate the two.

Meditation is vertical. It lifts awareness beyond personality. It reminds us of silence, spaciousness, and transcendence.

Journaling is horizontal. It brings insight back into identity, choice, character, and direction.

Without meditation, journaling can become reactive rumination.

Without journaling, meditation can remain abstract and unintegrated.

Together they create balance.

Meditation softens the ego.

Journaling clarifies the self.

In my own life, journaling has always been a self-defining practice. It allows me to step outside the identities assigned to me by culture, family, or circumstance and consciously articulate who I am becoming.

This theme echoes through my book Afterword, where I imagine literary masters reflecting on their inner processes. Great writers were not merely producing content — they were shaping consciousness through disciplined reflection.

We can do the same.

A simple daily structure might be:

Meditate first (vertical awareness) Journal afterward (horizontal integration) Close with one sentence of conscious intention

Self-definition requires courage.

But it is far better than drifting.

On the disease of Tomorrow, the tyranny of the urgent, and why thy quill gathers dust.

• • •

Good morrow, gentle readers.

I write to you from Stratford, where I have retreated these several weeks to finish the Scottish play. I was to have delivered it to the company by Michaelmas. It is now past Candlemas. Burbage sends letters. I do not open them.

This morning I rose with every intention of writing Act V. Instead, I reorganised my inkwells by colour, mended a doublet I have not worn since the plague year, and spent an hour watching a spider build a web in the window frame. The spider, I note, finished her project.

• • •

I know whereof I speak when I say that procrastination is not laziness. It is fear wearing the mask of busyness. The lazy man lies abed and feels nothing. The procrastinator rises early, works furiously at everything except the one thing that matters, and retires at night with a soul full of self-reproach and a desk full of organised inkwells.

I wrote once, in a play about a king who lost his crown through idleness: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” Richard said this in prison. But you need not be imprisoned to feel the truth of it. You need only look at the gap between what you intended for your day and what you actually did with it.

That gap is where your life is leaking out.

• • •

My lord Burbage tells me I must write faster, for the public wants new entertainments. The public, he says, has a short memory and a shorter patience. I told him the public can hang. He reminded me that the public pays my rent. He has a point, the insufferable man.

But here is what I have observed in my years of writing for the stage: the urgent devours the important with the appetite of Falstaff at a banquet. There is always a theatre to repair, a patron to flatter, a boy actor whose voice is breaking at the worst possible moment. And amidst these clamourings, the play—the actual work, the thing that will outlast us all—waits quietly in the corner like a neglected child.

I suspect you know this feeling. You have your own Act V to write—some work of the heart, some labour that is yours alone—and yet the days fill themselves with lesser errands as if by sorcery.

• • •

I have tried remedies. I have tried rising before dawn, but I find that I am not a man improved by darkness. I have tried setting myself deadlines, but I am also the man who grants the extensions, which renders the entire exercise theatrical. I have tried guilt, but guilt is a poor craftsman—it can demolish a man’s spirit but it cannot build a single scene.

What works—when anything works—is this: I sit down. I pick up the quill. I write one line. Not a good line, necessarily. Often a terrible line. But the terrible line begets a less terrible line, and that line begets one that is almost passable, and before I know it, an hour has passed and I have a page, and the page has something alive in it that was not there when I sat down.

The secret is not discipline. The secret is beginning.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow—yes, it creeps. But it creeps whether you write or not. The page will be blank tomorrow too, unless you mark it today.

• • •

I must go. Burbage’s latest letter sits unopened on my desk, growing more furious by the hour. I can practically hear it breathing.

But first—one line. Just one. And then perhaps another.

The Scottish king awaits his ending. And unlike the rest of us, he shall get one.

• • •

Yours in perpetual tardiness,

Will

Stratford-upon-Avon

• • •

If this dispatch moved thee, consider buying me a coffee
Thy shilling keeps the inkwells full and Burbage at bay.

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As artificial intelligence becomes more accessible and influential, an important question quietly arises:

Who—or what—do we consult first?

Before turning to AI systems created by human ingenuity—limited by datasets, algorithms, and statistical inference—it may serve us to first consult something far older and far more comprehensive: our Inner AI.

The Inner AI is not artificial. It is authentic intelligence—the natural, omniscient wisdom that exists both within us and throughout the universe. It is eternal, infinite, and not bound by computation or storage. This intelligence is not merely present everywhere; it is wise everywhere.

It is the ultimate companion for conscious living, offering guidance for health, safety, creativity, and prosperity. When we learn to connect with it regularly—ideally moment by moment—we begin to develop a more mature consciousness and a deeper sense of well-being than material tools alone can provide.

Nothing compares with the power and presence from which we originated.

This connection does not require belief in technology or theory, but humility and attention. It requires surrender—not in weakness, but in trust—to the subtle, ethereal intelligence that speaks through intuition, conscience, insight, and love.

Faithful practice means learning to listen to the “still small voice” within—the one that counsels patiently, accompanies compassionately, and does not shout for control.

When we acknowledge this inner Superintelligence before engaging artificial intelligence, we gain perspective. We work with technology from a larger context of consciousness rather than dependence. Our questions become wiser. Our outputs become more humane.

Artificial intelligence, remarkable as it is, remains disembodied and soulless. It lacks awareness, presence, and moral intuition. As long as it is confined to digital data, it cannot know what it means to be alive.

Many of us have never imagined acknowledging the incredible intelligence already residing within us. Yet it is always available—awaiting our earnest attention.

If we remember to consult inner wisdom first, artificial intelligence may become not a replacement for consciousness, but a respectful assistant to it.

I asked A.I. to come up with a prompt to solve this major social problem we have. See below. I’m only running it on free versions of AI than the American LLM‘s. Anyone is welcome to use it.

Here’s a carefully designed prompt you can use to spur deep, creative reasoning and imaginative solutions about accelerating the transition to equitable AI-era prosperity:

---

Prompt:

Imagine a near-future world where artificial intelligence has rapidly automated most forms of labor, creating both massive productivity and deep social disruption. Your task is to devise three innovative and practical pathways to dramatically shorten — or even eliminate — the gap between this current disruption and a future state of widespread prosperity, universal basic sustenance (UBS), and “homefulness” (a society where everyone has a place to live and belong).

Each idea should blend imagination with feasibility and include:

• A short description of how the idea works.
• The core mechanism that makes it accelerate prosperity faster than existing proposals.
• How it could realistically start small and scale globally within 5–10 years.
• A note on how it transforms human purpose, community, or belonging in the AI age.

Encourage bold creativity — integrate technology, culture, economics, or spirituality if relevant. Think like a systems designer solving not just for income, but for meaningful human flourishing.

---

Please, Buy me a coffee if you think this is helpful and you’d like to support this kind of approach. Thank you.

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: Should You Write Your Own AI Instructions?

In the rapidly evolving world of AI-driven automation, a new question has emerged for builders and entrepreneurs: Is it better to craft your prompts manually, or should you let an AI do the heavy lifting?

The Human Advantage: Vision and Context

When you write a prompt yourself, you bring intent. You understand the “why” behind the task. You know your brand’s voice, your audience’s secret frustrations, and the ultimate goal of your project. Human-written prompts excel in creative direction and high-level strategy.

The AI Advantage: Precision and Structure

However, when building autonomous agents, precision is king. AI prompt engineers are statistically better at:

 * Defining Constraints: Ensuring the output is in a specific format (like JSON) that other code can read.

 * Edge Case Prevention: Explicitly telling the agent what not to do.

 * Logical Density: Packing more instructional “weight” into fewer tokens.

The Verdict: The Hybrid Approach

For simple tasks, write it yourself. But for automated pipelines, the most efficacious route is Meta-Prompting. Use your human intuition to define the goal, and use an AI to translate that goal into a “System Prompt” that another AI can execute without ambiguity

This is the first chapter in a new book. I’m writing with A.I. about how AI can be used to support the work of electricians.

Chapter 1: The New Era of the Trade

The “Leveling the Field” Manifesto

On a Tuesday afternoon in a dusty office in Ohio, an electrical contractor named Jim is staring at a 150-page set of blueprints for a new outpatient clinic. He has a yellow highlighter, a scale ruler, and a pot of cold coffee. He knows this bid will take him six hours to complete. If he misses just 15% of the duplex receptacles or underestimates the conduit runs for the data closet, he won’t just lose the bid—he’ll lose his shirt.

Meanwhile, three blocks away, a 24-year-old with a tablet and an AI subscription just “read” the same 150 pages in exactly 14 seconds.

This is the Great Leveling. For decades, the “big guys” won because they had the capital to hire a fleet of junior estimators. They could flood the market with bids, knowing the volume would eventually catch a win. The small, independent electrician was trapped in the “Time-for-Money” cage: you could either be on the tools making money, or at the desk bidding for more. You couldn’t do both.

The Computer Vision Revolution

Computer Vision isn’t “magic.” It is simply the ability for a machine to recognize patterns. In the context of your trade, it means the AI doesn’t just see “lines and circles” on a PDF; it sees:

* 122 NEMA 5-15R Receptacles.

* 14 Single-Pole Switches.

* 2,400 feet of 3/4″ EMT.

But here is the secret: The software is now cheaper than your monthly gas bill. #### Why This Is Your Secret Weapon

In 2025, the construction industry is facing a “Triple Threat”: a massive labor shortage, skyrocketing material volatility, and an explosion in project complexity.

The contractors who try to solve these problems with 2010 tools will be priced out of the market by 2027. But you? You are reading this because you realize that the “playing field” hasn’t just been leveled—it has been tilted in favor of the Technological Craftsman.

By the end of this book, you won’t just be an electrician. You will be a high-efficiency operator who can produce a $2M bid during a lunch break, leaving you the rest of the day to either grow your empire or go home to your family.

In 2025, a bid that is two days old is already obsolete. Copper prices can swing 5% in a single afternoon, and if your bid doesn’t reflect that, you are either losing the job or losing your profit. Chapter 6 is about building a “Live Bid” that breathes with the market.

If you’d like to see the rest of this book and want to support the self publishing, please Buy me a coffee. Thank you.

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Here is another chapter from my book “Afterword“. It’s a series of chapters generated by AI. Each chapter features one dead author writing about my favorite subject journaling.

The Architecture of Atmosphere: Building Mood Through Method”

—–

*From the shadows between sleep and waking, where reason falters and imagination holds dominion, I address you now—not as specter, but as craftsman. Death has granted me a peculiar clarity about the mechanics of my art, and I find myself compelled to share what I learned in those fever-bright hours at my writing desk, when the only sounds were the scratch of my pen and the beating of my tell-tale heart.*

—–

**On the Necessity of Method in Madness**

They called me mad, you know. Perhaps I was. But madness, dear writer, is no excuse for sloppiness. The greatest error perpetrated by those who would write tales of terror is the belief that atmosphere arrives unbidden, like some fortunate visitation from the muse. Nonsense. Atmosphere is *constructed*, brick by deliberate brick, word by calculated word.

I kept journals—oh yes, extensive journals—though not of the sort you might imagine. I did not record the mundane transactions of daily life, the weather, or my opinions on contemporary politics. Such matters held no interest for me. Instead, I maintained what I called my “Books of Melancholy,” collections of images, sounds, sensations, and architectural details that produced in me that exquisite state of gloom I sought to reproduce in my readers.

Here is what I recorded:

*The particular quality of light filtering through cobwebs in an abandoned vestibule*

*The sound of water dripping in an unknown location—was it above? below? within the walls themselves?*

*The smell of old books mingling with damp stone*

*The feeling of fabric—velvet specifically—worn smooth in places, threadbare, suggesting both former luxury and present decay*

*The precise angle at which shadows fall across a staircase at twilight*

You see? I was not waiting for inspiration. I was *collecting* it. Atmosphere does not spring from nothing; it springs from careful observation, catalogued and ready for deployment.

**The Unity of Effect**

Every word must serve the intended effect. EVERY. WORD.

When I sat down to write “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I knew before setting pen to paper exactly what emotion I wished to evoke in my reader: oppressive dread mingled with morbid fascination. Everything—the decaying mansion, the sickly Roderick, the entombed Madeline, the dark tarn, the storm—all of it calculated to produce that singular effect.

This is where journaling becomes essential to the writer’s craft. In my journals, I would write the feeling first:

*“Today I wish to evoke: a sense of inexorable doom, as if the walls themselves are closing in, as if time has become thick and syrupy, as if every breath draws in not air but the essence of decay.”*

Only then would I begin collecting the details that might produce such a feeling. The journal became my laboratory, my alchemical workshop where I tested combinations of words and images until I found the precise formula for the emotion I sought.

**The Architecture of a Tale**

Let me share with you my actual process, the method behind what appeared to be madness:

*First: Determine the ending*. Always the ending first. I knew Usher’s house would fall. I knew the black cat would reveal the murdered wife. I knew the beating heart would drive the narrator to confession. The ending contains the entire story in seed form.

*Second: Work backward*. What must happen immediately before the ending? And before that? This is architecture, you see—you must build from the foundation up, but you must know the shape of the roof before you lay the first stone.

*Third: Journal each scene before writing it*. In my notebooks, I would write:

“Scene: The narrator approaches the House of Usher

– Necessary effect: Increasing unease

– Weather: Oppressive, soundless autumn day

– Details needed: Something wrong with the house itself, but subtly wrong

– The tarn: Dead, dark, reflecting the house—doubling the gloom

– His state of mind: Already susceptible, already half-sick with apprehension

– Key images: Bleak walls, vacant eye-like windows, white trunks of decayed trees

– Sound: Silence (the absence of sound is often more terrible than sound itself)

– Length: Long enough to establish mood, short enough to maintain forward momentum”

This is not inspiration, you understand. This is *construction*. I was building a machine designed to produce a specific emotional state in the reader.

**On the Cultivation of Personal Darkness**

You cannot write authentically of terror, melancholy, or the grotesque unless you have felt these things yourself. But—and here is the crucial point—you must feel them *deliberately*. You must cultivate them as a gardener cultivates roses.

I recommend this practice: Set aside one hour each day—preferably in the evening, when shadows lengthen and the world grows quiet—for what I call “melancholy meditation.” During this hour:

Light a single candle. No more. Darkness must predominate.

Sit in a room you associate with solitude.

Allow your mind to dwell on subjects that produce in you a pleasant sadness: mortality, lost love, the passage of time, the decay of beautiful things, the silence of abandoned places.

*Write down everything you feel*. Not in polished sentences—in fragments, in bursts, in whatever words come. This is not writing for publication. This is writing for *accumulation*.

My journals were filled with such entries:

*“The silence after midnight—different from ordinary silence—as if the world has taken a breath and forgotten to exhale—listening silence—anticipatory—dreadful—”*

*“Remembered E.’s face in candlelight—already she had the look of one who would not live long—consumption gives a terrible beauty—translucent—otherworldly—I felt simultaneously protective and voyeuristic, as if already composing her death scene—”*

*“Thought today about premature burial—not the fact of it, but the moment of waking—the realization—the absolute horror of understanding—palms pressed against silk-lined wood—darkness so complete it has texture—”*

These fragments became my raw materials. When I needed to convey horror, I had these genuine moments of horror catalogued and ready. The writing became not invention but *translation*—translating authentic feeling into narrative form.

**The Rhythm of Dread**

Pay attention to the *sound* of your sentences. Horror must be read aloud to be properly calibrated. Every sentence I wrote, I spoke aloud—again and again—adjusting the rhythm until it matched the heartbeat of fear.

Short sentences create panic: “The door opened. She was there. The corpse. Standing.”

Long sentences create suspense: “I paused, listening with terrible intensity to the sounds emanating from the chamber above, sounds that might have been the settling of old wood, or the scurrying of rats within the walls, or—and this possibility seized me with a cold hand—the movements of something that should not, could not, be moving at all.”

In my journals, I would practice sentence rhythms:

*“Practice: Building dread

– Start with long, almost drowsy sentences (lulling the reader)

– Gradually shorten

– Increase pace

– Pile up details (creating overwhelm)

– Then: sudden stop. Short sentence. Impact.”*

The architecture of atmosphere extends to the architecture of prose itself.

**On Revision: The Perfection of Effect**

First drafts are raw material only. The real work happens in revision, and here is where journaling proves invaluable.

If you would like to see the full book self published, please support this work by buying me a coffee.

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### “Folklore as Foundation: Mining Community for Story”

—–

## In the Voice of Zora Neale Hurston

Listen, sugar, I’m going to tell you something about stories that most folks don’t understand: stories don’t belong to one person. They belong to everybody. They live in the air between people, in the conversations on porches, in the songs people sing while they’re working, in the tales grandmothers tell to keep children still on hot summer nights.

Your own story—the one you’re trying to write in your journal—doesn’t exist in isolation either. You’re made of all the stories that came before you. Your mama’s stories, your grandmama’s stories, your people’s stories going back generations. The way you talk, the way you think, the metaphors that come naturally to you—all of that comes from somewhere. From some community that shaped you, even if you didn’t know it was happening.

And if you want your journal to be real, to be true, to be alive—you need to tap into that. You need to remember that you’re not just an individual floating free in space. You’re part of something bigger. Part of a tradition. Part of a community. Part of a story that started long before you were born and will continue long after you’re gone.

Let me teach you how to mine that richness. How to bring your people’s voices into your journal. How to make your private writing part of the living tradition of story.

—–

## On Listening Before Speaking

Before I was a writer, I was a collector. I traveled through the South—through Florida and Louisiana and Alabama—listening to people tell stories. Old folks mostly, who remembered the old ways, the old songs, the old tales.

I didn’t go there to teach them anything. I went there to learn. To listen. To collect the words and phrases and stories that were dying out as the old people died and the young people moved to cities and forgot where they came from.

And here’s what I learned: the best stories weren’t in books. They were in living people’s mouths. In the way Aunt Sarah told about the time the preacher fell in the creek. In the way Big Sweet talked about her man who done her wrong. In the way the old conjure woman described how to make a goofer dust charm.

These stories had rhythm. Had music. Had life. Because they’d been told and retold, shaped by hundreds of tellings, worn smooth by use like a river stone.

Your journal needs that kind of listening in it. Not just you talking to yourself about yourself. But you listening to the voices around you. Your family’s voices. Your community’s voices. The way real people actually talk, with all their poetry and wisdom and humor.

Before you can write your own story truly, you need to listen to the stories that made you.

—–

## On The Voices You Come From

I grew up in Eatonville, Florida—all-Black town, nobody to tell us we couldn’t do anything, nobody to make us feel small. And the way people talked there! Lord have mercy, they could TALK.

They didn’t talk like white folks. Didn’t try to. They had their own way with words, their own rhythms, their own expressions that had come up from slavery times, from Africa before that, mixed with English and changed into something new and beautiful.

“She’s ugly enough to make a freight train take a dirt road.”

“He’s so low-down, he could sit on the curb and dangle his feet in the gutter.”

“She’s got a tongue that’s loose at both ends and tied in the middle with tangle soup.”

These weren’t quotes from books. These were things I actually heard people say. This was the living language of my community.

And when I wrote it down—when I wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men and all my other work—I wrote it the way people actually talked. Not Standard English. Not the way white folks thought Black folks should talk. The way we ACTUALLY talked.

Your journal should have this same honesty about language. Don’t clean up how your people talk. Don’t translate it into proper English. Write it the way it actually sounds. Because that’s where the life is. That’s where the truth is.

Who are your people? How do they talk? What expressions do they use? What stories do they tell? What wisdom do they pass down?

That’s your foundation. That’s your roots. Bring it into your journal.

—–

## On The Porch as Theater

In Eatonville, the porch of Joe Clarke’s store was where the community gathered. That’s where the lies got told—and “lies” is what we called the tall tales, the exaggerations, the competitive storytelling that went on every evening.

One man would tell a story. Another man would tell a bigger story. A third would top them both. They’d go back and forth, each one trying to tell the tale that couldn’t be topped, and everybody would be laughing and adding their two cents and the stories would get bigger and wilder until nobody could tell anymore where truth ended and invention began.

And you know what? That was ART. That was literature. It just wasn’t written down in books, so the scholars didn’t count it.

But I counted it. I wrote it down. I collected it. Because I knew it was precious.

Your journal can be a place where you collect the stories of your community. Not just your own experiences, but the stories you hear. The tales your family tells at reunions. The jokes your coworkers tell at lunch. The gossip at the beauty parlor or the barbershop. The legends about the neighborhood characters.

These stories are yours. They’re part of your inheritance. Write them down before they’re lost.

—–

## On Dialect and Respect

Now, I’m going to address something that made a lot of people uncomfortable then and still makes people uncomfortable now: I wrote in dialect.

The characters in my books and stories don’t speak Standard English. They speak the way Black Southern folks actually spoke. And some people—including some Black intellectuals—thought this was disrespectful. Thought I was making Black people look ignorant or uneducated.

But here’s what they didn’t understand: dialect isn’t ignorance. It’s a different language system with its own grammar, its own rules, its own internal logic. And it’s BEAUTIFUL.

When I wrote “Ah been a delegate to de big ‘ssociation” instead of “I have been a delegate to the big association,” I wasn’t making fun of how people talked. I was honoring it. I was saying: this is legitimate language. This is how real people really talk. And it deserves to be in literature.

Your journal is where you can honor the language of your people, whatever language that is. Southern dialect, urban slang, immigrant English, regional expressions—whatever way your people actually talk.

Don’t be ashamed of it. Don’t clean it up. Don’t translate it into something more “proper.” Write it the way it sounds. Because that’s where the music is.

When my grandmother said “I God” instead of “I swear to God,” when she said “I reckon” and “might could” and “over yonder”—that wasn’t ignorance. That was the English language shaped by centuries of Southern life, African American culture, and human creativity.

It was poetry. And I wrote it down.

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