Say something so honest it hurts.

Is usually how it goes after you spend the day channeling your best CEO voice so when the night comes the whisper has become a scream IM DRUNK IN THE BACK OF THE CAR AND I CRIED LIKE A BABY COMING HOME FROM THE BAR.

Anything less is too much energy.

Sara Hendren on risky disco: "In the sensory workshop, a person at the far edge of the social contract encounters all the joyous, necessary inefficiencies of relationship and all the useless, urgent vitality of art."

what is the difference between containing multitudes and containing schizophrenia? These retrospective field notes are an attempt to define the space between. (The third edition of my yearly recap, after 2021 and 2020.)

Selling data is the new dream

2022 was my first year back to a conventional 9-6 after two years of independent consulting. To make the decision I turned down multiple freelance engagements after months of no work - for stuff I would've considered dream partners and projects when I first started. That really hurt. Turns out dreams change.

My first year at NewtonX was kitchen renovation era. Gutted and stripped, thanks to new owners in the house, new industry, audience, culture. At least you know your long term market value's going up.

Google meet screenshot of Vicky and her coworkers
here at newtonx we are very serious

When I joined, we just raised our Series B, $32 million. Series B is the weird state between baby and adult. Now in 2024, I'm catching up with our COO - what's working? What's not? Time, I say, time is working.

You ever make your COO smile?

You ever commit to growing with a company?

My days are mostly people managing and influencing, operations and governance. 8 contractors and 3 agencies in 2 years. On good weeks, a couple hours of strategy with my team. A half hour of therapy with our PMMs. A lot of questions thrown at growth team to make sense of creative performance. A LOT OF FAST WRITING AND EDITING. A lot of maintaining personal relationships with our execs, for better ghostwriting and corporate/investor comms.

A lot of storytelling, probably the core of the job, the part that generates millions in marketing sourced revenue. Talking about our work with Meta, Figma, Adweek, NYT, DoorDash, Checkout.com, Salesforce, Tableau, Pinterest, WSJ, Fortune, R/GA, Landor & Fitch, Microsoft. Special thanks to Jason Talwar and Matt Harris for being above and beyond partners, and Jackie Cutrone for steering the ship.

Landing page for The Office brand campaign

In B2B there's a lot of spunky SaaS or staid services; not a lot of inspiring in between.

So we launched our first big brand campaign—The Office, adapted for researchers who deal with B2B. scary how naturally this came out of my brain. First time I used GPT for creative output - not for final words, but to fashion my own episode & character guides into a screenplay. Big love to Lori Bacich for visualizing this. I've never seen a sales team so excited to share a marketing campaign. <3

--

The weird thing about the transition from indie to in house is - now fully inside a company's organs, you suppress your weird. It's a protective instinct, to yield to how others think and operate in the name of safety, all the while the artist in you dies a little more every day.

2+ years later I'm a bit more unapologetic. There's something special that happens when you let your crazy meet the company's crazy. Underlying the operational issues are always psychological issues. There is always a place to run and play, or at least cry in the corner.

I let my brain melt into Figma when reviewing 2023 performance and planning 2024. Turns out I make sense of data better when on an easel, not a spreadsheet.

Figjam screenshot

Bringing poetry to technology

The other thing about going from indie to in-house is - well, your weird internet life isn't going anywhere. It doesn't just politely stop; in fact, the orchids you have spent all year watering have bloomed once you stopped looking.

I worked with LA-based creative shop Another, on strategy and campaign planning for a GV-backed Series D consumer product startup. My sister used to be their target customer so I called her for ad hoc user research. I got very sick 2/3 of the way through the project and couldn't finish in time. I felt terrible but this is how life goes. Thanks to Micah Heykoop and Chelsea Matthews for your partnership.

--

Jennie Moser, Stagetime CEO & founder, reached out to work together on kicking off a new era of the product and rally the performing arts community around it. These are the notes that give buoyancy to hard times:

“I knew we had to work with Vicky from my first meeting with her, but I couldn't have begun to imagine how impactful her work with us to build a sharpened narrative strategy would be. Not only does Vicky have an incredible skill for creating a comfortable, creative environment that encourages organic, thoughtful feedback from users and team members alike, but her ability to aggregate soft data like user quotes, a founder's abstract vision thoughts, and the things that make our brand tick into a cogent and impactful narrative strategy is truly remarkable.”

For this project I spent 25% more time than I estimated. While the thinking and project management aspects of consulting are necessarily methodical, I don't have a catch-all framework. Clients are unique universes to ingest. Right now I try to operate from an abundance mindset - not counting minutes worked, but value delivered. Timing will improve, in time.

--

I got to work with Eugene Kan & Adam Studios on brand strategy for BETWEEN, an HK-based specialty cafe concept. Defining tone of voice and content pillars, with copywriting examples to kick off. A treat to work with a friend, and remember Asia in the process.

We wrote about strategy and fun miscellany

In 2023, I signed on as a quarterly columnist for The Content Technologist, run by Deborah Carver. I wrote a content strategy series this year covering:

Writing these took a lot of head wringing and late nights and care, and I couldn't be prouder. Thanks to Deb, Arikia Milikan, and Wye Coday for edits.

--

Colin Nagy and Noah Brier of Why is this interesting? featured my media diet and Youtube music production wormhole.

In June 2022 I published "What makes for good narrative strategy," which remains my most popular piece ever. It instantly got me 30+ new subscribers. Vimeo featured it on their newsletter. I wrote over the weekend on the couch/floor when I had covid. vicky when will you learn to chill out

That year was a fun one for personal publishing - I ran a groupchat series with creative people on miscellaneous topics, framed "friends who talk about…":

We talked out loud in public about work

I presented my content research framework for The Content Technologist's June NYC gathering. Thanks Deb for believing in this, and Emily & Tom for coming out and generously listening to me go off script.

I guest spoke at the gracious Professor Chris Collette's Content Strategy grad course at Pratt. Thanks Jackie for the connect, and Hayden who tuned in for moral support.

I shared on my career path at Jeff Reid's Entrepreneurship and the Jesuit Tradition seminar at Georgetown. The e-ship initiative was the only thing I was seriously involved in during undergrad. happy they're still fighting the good fight

Also, Currant! The first baby lives

Currant is the side hustle that changed my life that I never talk about. I was a serious nobody that serious people in food and media took seriously. Cleaned up my inbox recently and stumbled back on the sweet notes people sent:

Maybe one day I'll write about starting a low key intense food media publication/community. For now, much love to my team Sarah Cooke, Clare Lagomarsino, and Renee Hunt.

Publishing highlights:

  • We finally launched Sarah's beautiful and urgent concept - our rich rich climate change x jam series, for which I got to play editor, photographer, and producer.
  • Mailchimp/Intuit interviewed me on my advice for creative entrepreneurs. (Thank you Kristen Siharath!)
  • My profile of James Beard Award-winning writer Mayukh Sen made it to Harvard's Niemen Journalism Lab's reading list.
  • My profile of chef Lucas Sin passively drives a ton of SEO traffic, thanks to the public's curiosity on "is lucas sin married" and "lucas sin age."
  • We sent out community member Moose's cake diaries - oral surgeon in the UK reporting live on his vegan wedding cake baking adventures. I miss these.

Currant's technically on hiatus but it is so alive. It's making money for my totally unrelated current company! Friends came from the discord to my living room, wild! The things that happen when a side project is given time to ferment!

M.M. Carrigan, EIC at Taco Bell Quarterly:
If you want an inspirational after age 40 story, I’m your guy. I’ll be 45 when my first book comes out. I would tell my younger self this: No one can see you trying. No one can see you die at this. No one can see you right now, and that’s the point. Just keep doing it, especially when it feels like you’re doing nothing. Put yourself out there, even if there is no great way to do it and you don’t know how, and you don’t know what it’s about, what it’s supposed to look like, or even who you are in this process.

How will you know how much to give away when you have to give away everything? What will you save of yourself? What will you save for the book? What book? What if there is no book coming to save you? Run towards it anyway. Bang it out anyway. Blog. Submit. Send. Bleed it out on social media if you have to. Let it out. It’s not art, it’s only a pressure valve.

Throw out the work and stop thinking start feeling you sad art girl!

more words, vicky?! yes buckle up we're at the best section

Turns out grief is a more effective instigator than ambition.

In 2022, a woman called Taylor released an album called Midnights. Poetry with music. I'd never really noticed poetry in the past, but after 2022, I needed a form where each word was a bullet. Full sentences weren't working for me.

Thanks to Kristen for introducing me to your film friends as, "This is my friend Vicky, she's a poet and writer." I finally introduced myself as such when browsing a shop on Atlantic Avenue. The shopkeeper came up to me while I flipped through a poetry book, I mentioned I wrote too, she asked what kind, I realized I didn't have an answer. Oops. don't just throw on the shirt, wear the whole fit silly!

I took a workshop and spoke at Brooklyn Poets. Thanks Grace & Finney for showing up for me, for the most terrifying performance I have ever given. You don't realize until you're on stage that you've just signed up to be a theater kid and NOW, GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD BEFORE THE KIDS THROW TOMATOES. (An aside: Poem speaking does make business speaking easier - less vulnerability required.)

bby's first speaking // thanks to jesse for the film flop background
My teacher Cindy Tran's prelude:
As an instructor, I hope to see every poem ask a question. Vicky Gu’s poems are full of questions calling to the Quiet–they are not rhetorical yet they know they will not be answered. And it is in this quietness that Vicky’s images call to me: raw pork knuckles, heaven in smoke, the emergency door in a nightmare. I hope her poems will call to you, too. Please welcome Vicky Gu.

It's hard to be critical of your own art and harder to hear others do it, but it's all so helpful.

Of course you can't edit forever you still need to hit go so I self-published BLOOMER, my first poetry collection. 9 poems accompanied by pics shot by Minnow, and some simple keys/synth tracks I produced.

"I'm aware that it's a minority sport, [Zadie Smith] says of fiction. I could write 15 books, and I wouldn't be able to capture the mood of one Kendrick album."

In 2023 I started hanging around my neighborhood used vinyl and guitar shops like a teenage loiterer. At least I am also an adult hyperlocal enthusiast so it was only a matter of time before I got an electric guitar and baby amp.

I'm slowly working on a new collection, featuring the upcoming hit singles how to be a moody woman and dear god where is the operating manual? Will it become a zine? Words-pics-sound-thing? vicky it's called a tiktok

I took a screenprinting class through Gowanus Print Lab. Enter undercover hypebeast era, printing a collection of LonelyNY shirts, riffing off OnlyNY. Sold 90% of my stock in the first few weeks. SEO doesn't matter when you have a brand and a community (well, that and a very limited stock of 18 shirts). Thanks to Anna & Jessie for the consult.

Skin Contact Studio, Skin Contact Press, Skin Contact Sounds… we could go places.

Ok maybe we need to slow down the art

Making art may double as processing, but it's not the fulfillment of broken promises. It does not dispel the inertia of grief on its own. You still need to live freely, think less, dance more.

Australian editor Lisa Murray interviewing Chinese writer Yu Hua:
I am struck throughout the meal how content Yu seems. Far from the frustrated writer, railing against repression that I expected, he is holding court in his favourite restaurant, boasting about his wife, Chen Hong, who is a poet, and his talented 22-year-old son, Yu Haiguo, who is a director and scriptwriter... When he talks about the difficulties of being an artist in China it is in an unemotional, pragmatic way.

In 2024…

This volume of activity - gestures to the above words - is totally unsustainable. Life is already too much on its own. There were a couple times I broke my body last year. I'm still paying for it. In 2024 no more. In 2024, more:

  • Unlearning the value impulse when it comes to my art, thanks Charis for this reminder
  • Drinking wine on my living room floor with friends and strangers
  • Making art with friends
  • Doodling with nonverbal expression, esp image and sound
  • Accepting there's beauty I'm not meant to keep
  • Planning a retreat for high functioning cozy loving neurospicy girlies?
  • Giving and volunteering in my local community
  • Giving thanks
Hanif Abdurraqib on the Midnight Marauders album cover:
"At a time when the two coasts were engaged in harmless but escalating sniping [on the best hip hop], A Tribe Called Quest was giving thanks, endlessly."

Believe in my work? Join us for $5/mon or $50/yr

I spend a lot of time in solitude. (This the work necessitates.) I don't have a creative tribe. (Which today's fragmented world has made tricky anyways.)

My paid supporters help me feel less alone. Because of y'all, this has become my favorite corner of the internet. Thanks to Julia and Rona and my aunt for being early steady beacons of support.

As for perks - you get a deeper cuts on my process. What's the inner life of an artist who works corporate? Free subs get emails every other month; paid subs get notes on a monthlyish basis. Also an annual holidayish card - send me your address if you'd like one!

¡¡¡ JOIN HERE !!!

Of course, the work has costs. Web hosting, creative software and equipment, workshops. This stuff is easily thousands per year. You help me pay for everything from overhead costs to continued education investments.

Final note - if financial support isn't for you, you can also follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram at @granola.cool for erratic updates.

Let me know how I can support you this year.

Endless thanks,
V

Tags: field notes