The numbering has reached 800

Today, while looking through my WeChat publication's dashboard, I noticed that the numbering for my "Rebuilding My Voice" practice had reached 800.

That number needs a little explanation. The project began on June 17, 2024, roughly 780 calendar days ago. Early on, I sometimes published several posts in a day. Later, when I wrote other kinds of articles, I did not always keep the numbering.

So 800 is hardly a strict count of consecutive daily updates, nor does it equal the total number of articles. I will treat it as a milestone and skip taking attendance.

In June 2024, during the 618 shopping festival, I bought an iPad with an M4 chip.

After more than ten years of freelancing, this was my second fairly concentrated round of hardware upgrades. Once the new device arrived, I felt I ought to do a little more with it, so I started a project called "Rebuilding My Voice."

The first entry, written on June 17, was titled "I Have Something to Say, So I Am Writing It Down."

I took it quite seriously at first. I even made a diary template in Affinity Designer, divided into painting, photography, and reading and writing, with spaces to fill in what I had done each day.

That format did not last long.

I soon discovered that life does not allocate itself according to a template.

Some days I painted but took no photographs. Sometimes I read a book but had no sentence in my head that insisted on being written. Forcing things into the empty boxes just to complete the layout was rather joyless.

By entry No. 19, the posts had gradually become image-based daily check-ins.

Later, I began sharing paintings I had collected. At first, I used art books and images already saved on my computer. After a while, that supply began to run out.

So each day I went to Instagram to find painters I had not seen before, saved work I liked, and put together a post for WeChat.

Fifteen minutes a day gradually became a habit

When things went quickly, it took about fifteen minutes.

For now, I do not want to hand those fifteen minutes over to AI.

Finding and choosing paintings is, for me, part of my daily time spent looking at art.

How does a Korean painter leave a large expanse of blank paper in an urban sketch? How do colors and lines change when a similar style passes through different hands? I have to look for myself for any feeling to remain.

I do not choose the paintings according to a single standard, either.

Some are genuinely well painted. Some simply touch on a subject that means something to me. Others have a relaxed quality that feels good to look at, and that is enough to make me want to share them.

They may not meet someone else's definition of "excellent," but they make me look a little longer.

Over these nearly 800 days, there have been times when I left it very late.

A few times, it was almost midnight before I remembered that I had not posted that day, and I hurried to put the images together. I have not carefully checked whether I missed a single day. From memory, I did it on most days.

There was always a little reminder in my mind: have I done this today?

Fifteen minutes is short, but roughly multiplied over time, it comes close to two hundred hours.

Spread across individual days, it hardly feels like much effort. Looking back, though, finding paintings, looking at them, saving them, and sending them out have become connected actions. I no longer need to talk myself into keeping going.

Only after reaching 6,400 followers did I think about running the account

As for deliberately managing and growing the publication, I have to be honest: over this period, I have done almost none of that.

I did not study the best time to publish, regularly check the dashboard, or work backward from readers' needs to decide what to write.

When I restarted the account, it had about 1,600 followers. That slowly rose to more than 3,000, and this year to around 6,400. I knew the numbers had changed, but could not tell you which article brought people in. I had not seriously reviewed it.

It was a little like my early experience with Sina Weibo.

Back then, I simply enjoyed sharing. I wrote some things myself and reposted good things I came across. The platform happened to be in a period of strong traffic growth, and my following grew quickly.

I had not designed my content to attract followers. People happened to want to see what I enjoyed doing, and I happened to have watercolor courses ready to meet the demand that later emerged.

For a while, that experience left me feeling a little undeserving. I kept thinking that I had not made much of an effort, so how had all this come to me?

Looking back now, luck certainly played a part. But if someone has been doing something for a long time and happens to have work ready when an opportunity arrives, that cannot all be put down to luck.

Over these nearly 800 days on WeChat, I have followed a similar path.

For a long stretch, I concentrated on keeping up the act of sharing, without thinking much about what readers might gain from it.

Now I want to give that part some attention.

Using AI to sort through what I feel

In the past, I might look at a painting and only be able to say that I liked it. Why I liked it was often harder to pin down.

Now I use AI to help me sort through that feeling. Is it the blank space in the composition that makes me comfortable? A color applied with a very light touch? Or the fact that the painter has not filled every corner?

AI can help me find words and arrange sentences. But which paintings to choose, and whether I agree with the explanation, remain my decisions.

Nor do I intend to turn those fifteen minutes of daily sharing into a heavy job starting with the next post.

I will begin by adding one or two sentences that explain why I chose this group of paintings. Perhaps a reader will then notice a detail they had overlooked before.

If I can do that, today's share will be a little more useful than yesterday's.

Tomorrow, I will open Instagram as usual and find a group of paintings I like.

The difference will probably be small: a few more sentences to explain what I saw. Whether that will make the account grow faster, I do not know yet.

I will try it for a while, then come back and see.