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I’ll say it plainly: squirrels are my favorite animal. They’re everywhere and nearly invisible until you decide to see them. Once you do, you notice patterns—how they cache, how they rehearse routes, how they debug a leap before they attempt it. I started treating them like tiny mentors in a gray hoodie, and I swear my craft got better.
It’s not nostalgia; it’s mechanics. Squirrels model a loop I want in my work:
I use that loop to write chapters, tweak LifeOS, and survive “cracking lost” days. The loop is calm. It’s iterative. It’s enough.
Watch a squirrel on a fence line. They favor waypoints—posts, knots, corners—and they keep them close enough that a single miss won’t be fatal. That’s a product roadmap:
In LifeOS, that means thin slices with visible waypoints: a List↔Grid toggle that persists; a metadata row that reads well at narrow widths; a token flow you can reason about on paper.
Drafts are caches. Scenes are branches. I quit trying to “fly” a whole chapter in one go. I build landing spots: a true line, a beat that clicks, a reveal that earns its jump. If I miss, I can grip the last good sentence and try again. Squirrels don’t apologize for taking two hops.
They chase each other, pause, spiral a trunk, vanish, return. That’s not wasted motion; it’s skill rehearsal under joy. Builders forget this. If everything is grim, we hold our breath and ship worse. A little play (a fun commit message, a tiny animation, a clean φ-grid poster) keeps the muscle elastic.
Squirrels stash hundreds of seeds knowing many won’t be found. That’s fine. In creative work, not every note must “pay off.” We overvalue perfect recall and undervalue generous caching. Put the idea where future-you can stumble on it. Let the forest help.
Circles are promises you can keep with your feet. Squirrels keep them daily. I’m learning.
— Rev. Brian Scott O’keefe (randomblink)
“Notice a small life doing a great job; copy the loop.”
Some days don’t make highlight reels. Today was a cracking lost one: blood draw to start, a long walk to clear the head, and a wall of fatigue that didn’t care about my calendar. My son’s coming home soon—good noise, good interruption—and I’m supposed to work on two things that both matter: the book and LifeOS. Honest ledger entry: I am wiped.
That’s the whole point of building in public on hard days. Not because struggle is spectacular, but because it’s normal. The question isn’t “Did you crush it?” The question is “What still moved, however small?”
I keep two anchors even when I’m tired:
Everything else is applause management. These two are the work.
I use a tiny, golden-ratio loop when energy is low:
That’s 31 minutes total. It’s not heroic. It’s honest. It’s the smallest repeatable shape I can keep when the day fights back. It keeps me building in public on hard days without burning tomorrow.
Ship notes like these are boring. Great. Boring is sustainable. Sustainable is how we get new features later.
When I’m exhausted, I don’t chase pages. I chase one line that belongs. If it still rings tomorrow, it stays:
“Circles are promises your feet can keep, even when your head is loud.”
That’s enough. One sentence can hold the door for a scene.
This is building in public on hard days: a small ship, a true line, and a little mercy.
— Rev. Brian Scott O’keefe (randomblink)
“Ship the smallest true thing; rest; repeat.”
Two universes in flight—one where teens are the strongest magicians on a newly-enchanted Earth, and one where a quiet operator named Mr. Kincade survives an impossible nanotech “accident” on a world exactly like ours. Read the early cuts, then tell me what to shape next.
Genre: Near-future urban fantasy for teens
Premise (one-liner): Magic comes back—and the kids carry the biggest charge.
Age guidance: 12+ (themes of danger, friendship, agency; no graphic content)
Series promise (what it is):
Sample book / arc working titles:
Attendance was mandatory, which is how you know no one wanted to be there. The gym smelled like rubber and nervous fruit punch. On the bleachers, kids compared Spark stories in the sideways way you talk about a dream—half brags, half please say yours was weirder.
When Ms. Delaney wheeled out the “safety kit,” the overheads flickered. Not from the kit. From us. The air felt like before a storm, but the thunder was inside your teeth. I glanced at the glass case by the office door—the antique lantern the school kept for decoration. It hummed once, so soft I thought I made it up.
“Pair off,” Ms. Delaney said. “We’re going to practice containment.”
We did not pair off. We drifted. We found each other the way filings find a magnet, shy and certain. By the end of first period, seven of us had decided something without saying it: we were done being supervised like a problem. We would meet after school. Not here. Somewhere that didn’t hum.
We thought the lantern was the artifact. It wasn’t. The shadow it cast on the trophy case was. When we traced the outline with chalk, the chalk line went cold. When we touched the cold, it pushed back—like pressing on a drum.
Controls: afternoon only; no touching after sunset; no solo tests.
Observations:
Genre: Low-profile spy / techno-thriller (each book stands alone; slow burn arc across the series)
Premise (one-liner): A discreet fixer on today’s Earth survives an illegal nanotech “melt” that should be impossible—then learns to work with what lives under his skin.
Age guidance: Adult (violence implied; tense situations; no gratuitous gore)
Series promise:
Sample book / case working titles:
The vial wasn’t supposed to open; it was supposed to be proof. “You bring it sealed,” the broker had said. So Kincade brought it sealed. Until the cab braked hard and the seal hair-line cracked, and the contents did what mercury dreams about—unbeaded, reached, and chose.
It felt like warm ink. It didn’t burn. It listened. It read the sweat map of his palm, slid under the watchband, and went looking for a way in. There was no time to get to a hospital without getting to a report first. He pressed the vial to the curb and watched the last silver thread climb his wrist like it had a schedule.
By the time he reached the café, his pulse had a counter-rhythm. He could hear the room in layers: the hiss of milk, the scrape of spoon, the way the man by the door was trying not to breathe like a runner. The nanotech settled somewhere he couldn’t name and—very quietly—started negotiating.
Test one: silence. The melt dampened his footfall by half if he thought about the sound instead of the step.
Test two: signal. He could feel radio the way you feel a draft, not words, just presence. Networks became weather.
Test three: stress. Under pressure the tech wanted to protect the host, which meant sometimes it wanted to pick the fight. He wrote a rule in his notebook: We do not escalate for proof.
Kincade adjusted his watch crystal and walked into the meeting three minutes early, the same way he always had—like a man for whom nothing unusual had ever happened. It was almost true.
(If a post slips, the next one carries a margin note: what changed, why, and what it taught.)
Best place: comments below this post.
What helps most: clarity, tone, continuity, and one concrete suggestion.
Paste-friendly feedback template:
Tell me which excerpt you’d read next; I’ll polish that chapter first. Your comment now shapes what ships Friday.
- randomblink
English