Welcome!

You know when you're at a party, and midway into the night a group of six friends arrive, and everyone cheers them in? HUZZAH!! Kari brought guacamole! That's right, the fiesta has grown from 21 to 27. Our metaphorical gathering space is warm with the glow of all your faces :)

Thanks for being an early subscriber to my digital postcard. I prefer the description postcard (rather than newsletter) cuz it feels more casual, personal and specific to a moment in time.

In this postcard I’ll share updates, anecdotes, and links to things I enjoyed recently. I’m committed to weekly publishing, but not yet tied to a particular day of the week. The arrival will have the same element of surprise you get with a traditional postcard.

TIP: First-time recipient? A reply will help prevent these emails being marked spam. Don't feel obligated to say something kind or clever. In fact, I encourage the opposite. Make your reply as conveniently incoherent as possible. A quick: "sDGHsdasd" is splendid :)

Narrative Presence

In my latest article, I explore the magnetic pull of a good story. It's my attempt to put into words the force we FEEL when we're gripped by a great book, movie, website or song.

I'm excited about this one. It feels like the most 'shareable' thing I've written so far. Most of my other articles focus on my specific process. This piece should be universal to anyone in a creative or entrepreneurial domain.

The post also marks 5/5 completion of my official Write of Passage assignments. This was the 'coin a phrase' prompt. So next article you see from me will venture into one of the 72+ seed ideas I have in my ever-growing *WRITE: Abundance folder.

Twitter Experiments

Monday I attended a biweekly Twitter group with friends from Write of Passage. 10min before the presentation I'd still never tweeted. I wanted to show up with skin in the game. So I fired off 3 fortune cookie tweets, notes-to-self I'd made in the past. Here's one of them:

Tommy Lee @thomaselliotlee What’s truly authentic does not need to declare itself so. November 1st 2021 1 Retweets 7 Likes

I'm a total beginner. I have 49 followers. But I'm eager to learn and grow an audience on the platform.

A few weeks ago I was thinking:

Later that week that I recognized I was essentially describing the functionality of Twitter... 🤦‍♂️ So rather than figure out how to rig up some elaborate custom system on my site I'm leaning into the engineering that already exists. 🙃

Song: The Hardest Cut

The Hardest Cut Spoon

I don't think Spoon had the 'kill your darlings' stage of editing in mind when they wrote their new single The Hardest Cut. But that's the role its served for me. I had the song on loop as I did the final format and finesse of Narrative Presence.

Album: I Don't Live Here Anymore

I Don’t Live Here Anym... The War On Drugs

Yup, it's a 2-for-1 music week here in the TLee postcard.

I'm loving the new album from the War on Drugs. They're the best band at carrying Bruce Springsteen / classic rock vibes to present day (while still sounding modern + unique). The first track has such a glorious build up.

Played this album through twice as I wrote this week's email. Had to include it.

That's all till next week!

Hope you've had a smooth shift into daylight savings time.

Thanks for reading,

Tommy

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PS. Replies Encouraged :)

• If you have 27 seconds to jot an impression of this postcard, please do!
• I know each of your lives bustle with activity. If it helps, think of the reply as a text (rather than an email).
• A quick jotted: “Too much music” or "what happened to the podcast tidbits?" is valuable signal of where to re-invest :)