The last few weeks have been a strange mix of hectic and energising. The kind of busy that doesn’t feel like a grind because you chose it.
I’ve been going deep on content creation: recording my personal audio journal, building a note-taking app for language learners (more on that soon), and finally committing to YouTube, Spotify, and a handful of other platforms I’d been avoiding for years.
That last part is still uncomfortable, honestly. I kept social media at arm’s length for a long time deliberately.
But if I want to build something real here and clean up some of the noise around my name, I need to show up consistently.
I’ll talk openly about the “cleaning up the noise” part in an upcoming podcast episode. It deserves more than a parenthetical.
For now, though, this post is a snapshot. Where things stand, what’s working, what isn’t. Partly for anyone reading along, but honestly, mostly for me. I want to be able to look back at this in a year and have a clear record of where I started.
Recording & The Audio Journal
Ten episodes recorded so far. Each one runs somewhere between four and eight minutes. That might not sound like much, but crossing ten felt like a threshold I needed to pass before I stopped second-guessing whether I should be doing this at all.
My mic setup isn’t ideal yet. I know that. But I made a decision early on to record anyway, with whatever I had, rather than wait for the perfect conditions that never quite arrive.
Sound can be fixed. Silence can’t be undone. I’m also moving to a new place soon, and I’m already thinking about how to build out a proper workspace with better acoustic treatment, maybe some soundproofing rather than the half-measures I’ve been living with.
The one area I’m clearly behind on is thumbnails. For YouTube and Spotify, I’ve been using the same template for every episode.
Same layout, same palette, just the episode number and title swapped out. I asked Claude about this directly because I wasn’t sure if that was lazy or intentional.
The answer was reassuring: visual consistency is the stronger play, especially for a personal journal format where I am the brand.
Viewers learn to recognise the look before they even register the title. That framing helped me stop worrying about it and just keep going.
Blogging: Still Not Where I Want It
This one I can’t blame on circumstances. The podcast, the app, life, the bedtime stories project. They’ve all taken up more space than I expected. Writing has slipped.
But I’ve also found a better rhythm lately. I’ve been tracking everything in Notion. Content across formats, social links, and episode planning alone has made things feel less scattered.
When I can see the full picture in one place, I make better decisions about where to spend my time.
The target I’ve set myself is two to three blog posts a week, starting in May.
I might build in some kind of writing challenge to force the volume early on, and get the muscle working again before I overthink the format. I’ll figure that part out closer to the time.
StoryBrew: Getting Longer, Getting Better
When I started recording bedtime stories for English learners, most of them ran four to five minutes. That felt right at the time. Now I’m consistently hitting eight to twelve minutes per story, and that feels like the actual sweet spot.
Long enough for a B1–B2 English learner, short enough to finish before sleep wins.
Distribution has also improved. Stories are now live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.
Most of it runs semi-automatically through Spotify for Creators; YouTube is still manual, but it’s a manageable overhead for now.
What’s Still Missing
The biggest gap is the blog itself. The design, the structure, and how it is presented. This site is supposed to be the anchor point for everything else I’m building.
Right now, it doesn’t fully look the part yet, and that bothers me more than I let on.
I also haven’t written properly about the note-taking app for language learners yet. It’s a bigger topic than a paragraph buried in a progress update, so I’m giving it its own post, and probably its own podcast episode.
I want to document the build in a way that works across both formats: something a reader can follow on the blog, and something a listener can follow in audio, without one just being a transcript of the other.
There are other things in motion, too. Projects and experiments that are still taking shape. Those deserve their own posts when the time is right.
This is where things stand at the end of April. Not perfect. Not finished. But moving after one month of dedicated focus.