16th March, 2026 - ai ew, bootcamp and Mitsubishi pencils

I just logged into my Wix account to write this blog post and I was hit by an AI prompt asking me "what kind of blog post I'd like to write". I'm sick of AI. It's seemingly everywhere and for me it seems completely hollow. It's become a buzzword at work with zero substance behind it. Someone will occasionally chime into a conversation with something along the lines of "...AI can help here..." with no detail beyond that. Just some vague suggestion that AI will help somehow. It doesn't matter if nobody understands it, we've been told it will be helpful so, we'll keep mentioning it until the AI actually gets smart enough to do the work for us and make it look as if we knew what was going on all along. Rant over. Anyway, writing.

I've been doing some of the exercises in The Creative Writing Coursebook. It's been a mixed bag so far but there's been some good bits generated by it. I also booked myself onto a course run by Curtis Brown Creative - a 30-day writing bootcamp. That should get a bit more writing time under my belt hopefully. It has been tricky lately as we got a puppy just over a month ago. Puppies take a lot of time from your day. The bootcamp starts in April I think so it will be good to get some proper writing time clocked in with that. Until then I've got my book and any random moments I can snatch when puppy (Blue) is asleep and I have the desire to sit down and put words to a page.

I also saw an Instagram post earlier from a writer that describes his writing toolkit. He writes in Mitsubishi pencils on yellow legal pads and has his pencils stored in a rolled leather case. Naturally, I now want all of those things. The pencils is an interesting one to be fair as I always like writing in a fine Bic pen but I am well aware they are crap for the environment. I did get a nice pen that sold itself as a cross between a ballpoint and a fountain pen but it wasn't as nice to write with, despite it being refillable and so better for the planet. Maybe pencils are the way to go.