In 2020, I wrote 4 Highbrow courses, and finished the year with my latest, a study on longevity. To kick off 2021, I’ve decided each time I have a publication, I’ll share a bit with you on what I’ve been up to.

To start, a bit on Highbrow:

For those not familiar with it, Highbrow is an email-based learning platform. There are over 300 courses, from 100+ experts. More than 500,000 people subscribe to this platform, where they can sign up for a course anytime. It’s a great way to learn. I myself have taken over 100 of their courses, over the last 4 years, and to this day, I continue to keep my inbox full of knowledge.

These courses aren’t hard to learn. You receive an email each day that can be read in about 5 minutes. Everything you need for your lesson is there in that email. No need to set time aside to watch video lectures. That is the brilliance of Highbrow. You can learn in bite-size chunks, a little each day. Instructors work hard to hone their topics down so it can be delivered in this form. With 18 courses now under my belt, I can tell you, it sure is hard achieving this.

Highbrow also has a separate audio platform, with a different selection of courses, called Listenable. I have adapted most of my courses for this platform. If you prefer receiving lessons in audio form, as part of your daily listening feed, it’s a great alternative to reading lessons in your inbox.

Here’s a link to my latest course on Listenable:

Secrets to Long Life: A Study of the World’s Oldest People

Lessons about writing, from the garden:

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, then you’ll be familiar with my fantasy epic. Indeed, a blog called “Epic Fantasy Writer” is one where you’d expect to find stuff relating to fantasy writing.

Over 2020, if I had one writing lesson I would say stands out over the others, it’s this question of what it means to figure out your gig when it’s not quite what you set out with at the beginning, but what you see coming together is far more interesting.

We all struggle with this at some point as writers. It’s a dream like winning the lottery to imagine writing your one book you’re passionate about, then having that launch your career, then writing sequels, and nothing else. From vision to success, the path is laid by hard work.

I’m sure that happens to some. In fact, I’d say it happens for many. I, however, am not one of those people.

I began with a fantasy book. I’m still, somewhere deep inside, a fantasy writer. But in the process of maturing these richer, longer-term works, I’ve come to see there are rich byproducts, and in fact, I have discovered there is a short non-fiction writer in me.

One hobby that has helped me realize this is gardening. In particular, the art of creating rich soil.

Each year, I grow several things in my yard. I have my potatoes, squash, beets, onions, spinach, kale, corn, and a few other things that I can fit in the 200 or so square feet of yard available to me. The harvest is in the hundreds. Last year, I had over 120 potatoes, and, with winter nearly done, am still halfway through eating the stockpile.

Half the success of this is down to something else I started doing a few years ago. I began composting. I have a recipe I follow which lets me turn food into dirt in a few weeks (provided temperatures are warm). As a result, I now have 5 different households giving me their organic waste, and in the spring I’ll have 3 compost bins to start cooking down everything from the winter.

Composting builds up layers of nutrient-rich soil over several years. It is, in a sense, like the annular rings of trees that thicken and harden every year. Every year a gardener invests in the garden, keeping on top of this vital flow of waste into the soup that makes new life, and in turn is later the food you eat, discard, and break down in future years of compost — this adds up to a garden that is happy, rich, and vibrant.

And so I have learned my fantasy epic continues to thrive and evolve each year, at its slower pace, while the more relevant harvests are the Highbrow courses, my short non-fiction works, which themselves are byproducts of the reading and research I do to try and write better fantasy, and all around, to just bringing better thinking and feeling to the page in all I do.

Whatever it is your writing career evolves into, I think the main lesson is, keep showing up. In my garden, I laid down a simple rule: I show up every day, no matter what. Quickly, from doing this, the yard revealed little hints to me — weeds that could be pulled, soil that could be turned, a patch by the fence with good shade where grass could be torn out and beets might grow happily alongside the walkway. Adventures, waiting to be discovered, but only to the one who is willing to come there and discover them.

I can’t say what I’ll be writing by the end of 2022, or beyond that, but I can say, as now, I will still be showing up every day, eager for a new spring, and as in my garden, will be ever looking forward to the surprises that await, and the results that accumulate over year of commitment.

What is it that keeps you coming back to the keyboard every day? I’d love to know!

Be sure to check out my latest course, Secrets to a long life: A study of the world’s oldest people | Highbrow (gohighbrow.com), and begin your Highbrow learning adventure today. Or check it out on Listenable if you prefer audio.