Reflecting on Q2 2026 • Total words written: 52,930 (+27,126)
Last week, my friend was telling me about the time she prepared a fish for dinner.
She'd cleaned it, descaled it, and finally laid it down to chop off the tail. The thud of the blade shook loose a question: why do I cut off the tail?
Well, she thought, because that's what my mum did.
Unsatisfied, she called her mum, but that only thickened the mystery.
'My love, that's what your grandma did. I was simply copying her.'
Grandma was also a phone call away, so she gave her a ring.
'I'm sorry, dear. I have nothing new to share. I saw my mother doing it growing up and followed along.'
My friend was the product of a classic love story. Boy meets girl. Girl gets pregnant at 19. Boy and girl get married at the insistence of both pairs of parents (and probably a concealed firearm).
The upside to her parents' youth was that great-grandma was still alive, well, and only a short drive away.
'Great-grandma, why do you cut the tail off the fish?'
'Because I couldn't afford to buy a larger pan.'
'The unexamined life is not worth living' and so much of what we follow are ideas we've adopted without inspection. When we take a look, however, we often find a litter of obsolete habits.
I'm now over six months deep into Jamie's Journal and, as I did last quarter, I'm regrouping on what my readers and I have been collectively enjoying.
I continue to have my ability to guess what will be popular humbled with my piece on 4:6 Breathing enduring as my most popular article, while How To Write Satire is the best newcomer.
I've had readers share how the ideas in Capacity, Not Character helped save their marriage, and others give their support to the new Darkroom section of the newsletter, where I share things I've seen over the last fortnight.
Some readers have even found the website's secret comments section, decorating my writing with kind words and encouragement. One reader, NudePics56, said 'Very good I like it' and 'Good content'. While GiantHooters12 said my story, Russian Hackers, was 'hello world may you always find beauty and joy in the simple things'.
I have since found the comment management system and labelled these thirsty bots as spammers.
Good bots have also been visiting my site and referral traffic is growing – one of my rewards for publishing more consistently.
At the start of the year, only Bing cared about my work, which felt like a backhanded compliment. Who's ever found what they were looking for on Bing? The answer is China, as that's the only Western search engine legal there.
With three more months of writing under my belt, Google and Claude AI have now started indexing and recommending my writing. So, to my new human and non-human readers, welcome.
I'm a firm believer that the becoming is in the doing, so becoming the writer I want to be is in doing the writing. Pushing the boat out in January to revive my newsletter, I had a vague sense of the topics I wanted to write about. Now I'm six months in, I thought it prudent to revisit the editorial mission of Jamie's Journal.
Really, what I want to do is create a space for people who ask, 'Why am I chopping off the fish's tail?' These people wonder if a better way exists, and want to live with more curiosity and intention.
The first new tagline I thought of to express this idea was Question The Default. My friends said it sounded like a recruitment pipeline for anti-vaxxers and flat-Earthers. Not fancying my inbox filling up with messages chiding my use of peer-reviewed papers and lack of multi-vitamin powder sponsorships, I reconsidered my options.
For the next quarter, I'll be experimenting with the editorial mission: The Examined Life.
Yes, it's inspired by Socrates, and no, he didn't pay me for the placement.
All in, the before and after of this refocusing exercise is:
Speaking for myself, the new version feels much clearer and I'm excited to see what the upgraded focus does to my writing over the next three months.
Perhaps I'll save some more marriages or get lavished with more thoughtful comments from PerkyBum69.
A writer can dream.
