I Would Be Dead Now Without Books
From convicted murderer to French Riviera-dwelling author and sculptor
Greetings, writers—
As I’ve previously confessed, these posts are never1 truly planned. Instead I wait until a couple of hours before I intend to hit send, trusting (with varying degrees of pleasure and faith) that some interesting writing idea will occur to me, some critical mass of related quotes will gather, or some page in a book will fall open, delivering, as if by magic, a few thoughts worth sharing.
Every productivity expert in the world will tell you to task-batch or time-chunk—e.g., write six Substacks on a Sunday and send them out one by one—but I prefer to rely on the serendipity of the procrastinator.
Today my writing process involved making an extremely large cup of coffee, removing the cat from my laptop keyboard, and deciding that I would find a diary entry written on a different June 26th, which would, with any luck, offer a writing prompt. (Those who believe they are lucky tend to be rewarded—or so says science.)
Here is an entry from this day in 1976, written by a man named Jimmy Boyle from a cell in Barlinnie Prison.
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