What happened next?

Maps are great. You combine the desire to discover with a need to control the world around you. If you can locate where you are on a map, right now, then just head out and see what happens. You can always follow your way back.

I guess this sort of summarises where I am at with this project. I am here in my life, surveying the world and wondering that I want from it. I’m aware that fear of doing anything means I will inevitably do nothing.

I’ve travelled since the days of Nanosphere. Literally and metaphorically. I left that behind without any sense of what might follow, but I had a sense that something would follow. One day something would make sense. This now just feels right. It feels like the meeting point of so many good things before.

Such as maps. Obviously maps. I love them, always have done. And now I I can look at them and say I am working. Sort of.

And drawing. In a former life I went to art school. I guess being creative is in there. I can even combine the two and draw maps. Ask my girlfriend. She has a lot of hand-drawn maps. Probably wishes I would stop.

I also really enjoyed writing Stationery Wednesday. If you don’t know this, it was a weekly newsletter we sent each week on a Wednesday to promote our online stationery shop. That then became Nanosphere, which was loosely stationery-based. That has had a bit of a break and now become this, with no stationery.

I even quite liked the pressure that a weekly schedule brought. And I loved the response it would get from the people that read it. We were genuinely moved by how many people were sad to see it go.

So this just seemed to tie it all together. The future? Well let’s see.

2021 and all that

Anyway, you came here to find out what happened after Nanosphere stopped. So we stopped in the summer of 2021, had a short break, came back, went, came back and then just stopped. We never intended to fully stop, we just took a break which went on a long time. I think (confession time) that maybe we were not as into stationery as we should have been. I like it, I can even love it, but not enough to write about it every week.

So it gathered dust, and we would talk about it, and we would put it back in the drawer. Rinse and repeat. Lives went back to normal as 2021 came to an end. Covid drifted into the past for most of us. I guess there were distractions along the way and then the next thing it’s 2025 and I have had an idea involving maps and drawing and now you’re here.

I have ideas on where this will go, but no laser-focused masterplan. I just have a desire to make this work, and an amount of time between the actual day job and the other things in my life. Some of them are in the email (my YouTube channel for instance), others might appear from time to time.

So let’s see where this one goes.

Thanks for joining me.