I woke about 4:30 and fought my body until 5:15 but eventually had to get up to go to the bathroom. The keyboard on my phone suggested garden, blog and office but it was definitely the bathroom. The next couple of hours saw me drift in and out of that lucid half-sleep. Not particularly restful so I stayed in bed for half an hour after the alarm.
That's not a habit I want to encourage but maybe, on this occasion, it helped as I have now finished the first draft of Chapter 3 with something I hadn't even considered and wasn't in my notes – one of those sparks of insight, a sudden realisation. A good way to finish a chapter on inspiration.
Phil commented on yesterday's post that Font Awesome allows you to download SVG copies of icons for self-hosting. I looked into it but it was a little involved for just a few icons.
I spent some time last night manually converting them: screenshot, crop, apply transparency – repeat for light and dark modes where necessary. It didn't take very long and I've now removed the external call to Font Awesome entirely.
"I haven't quite hit exactly what I mean by this post, but that's the beauty of blogging. I'll keep “thinking out loud” and one of these days I'll really hit on what I mean."
As the post says "Beauty in writing is like beauty in everything else" but it has to be "properly deployed" – there has to be balance. There is an inherent beauty in the craft yet not everything can be beautiful all the time; beauty gets its power from contrast.
The rough edges, the mistakes, are as valid and as vital as the beauty.
