Having just finished Austin Kleon's previous book Steal Like an Artist, which I liked but didn't LOVE... I didn't expect anything different here. I mean, the book's exactly the same size and shape, the same layout, similar in approach. But this one hit me right between the eyes half a dozen times over.

I immediately started rereading this one, a library copy, and bought this one and Steal Like an Artist. I suspect that I didn't click with the first one because I read it too quickly and didn't really let it settle in. Or maybe it just speaks to a different stage of the artistic journey than I'm on. But Show Your Work... Oh, goodness. The second night I was reading it, I sat up four hours past my bedtime curating photo streams, removing the junk and the fluff, the "so what?" stuff that Austin speaks about. I kept in the stream photos of things-in-process, whether my new attempts at sketchnoting (and I'm NOT a drawing artist) or my attempts at yoga (I'm a middle-aged guy, inflexible and newb-like). I culled old photos of lattes and omelettes. I moved nearly two hundred photos of my family - fine snapshots, but not where I found creative inspiration for this stream - from my photo stream up to Facebook, where more folks are enjoying them as family photos anyway. Grandma and friends are there, not waiting on my photo streams. Four hours.

I also wrote six pages of journal notes, some by hand, some electronically; began to reshape my 9-year-old blog that I've left to die many times over. I revisited the great question of how I can find the metanarrative between all my distinct interests and outputs, to see what the main through-line is.

It's not just Show Your Work alone that sparked this - it was also much of David Whyte's poetry and lectures, as well as learning to doodle note and sketch note - but Kleon's book shaped and unblocked so much.

I can't recommend this book highly enough, and I'll be rereading Steal Like An Artist when my purchased copy of it shows up too.