Writer’s Bushido, Day 0

The Way of the Warrior and the Writer’s Life

Oliver “Shiny” Blakemore
5 min readMar 23, 2024
Photo by Ben Karpinski on Unsplash

I’ve been justifying some of my odder actions with a consistent mantra:

It’s my bushido.

I have a lot of areas of my life where I use lessons I’ve learned from thinkers in that area where thinking and doing come into confluence. I use these lessons in my writing life.

As part of my practice, I want to improve my use of them. I’m starting a blog series where I do that.

Disclaimer and Claimer

I will tell you real quick why you shouldn’t listen to anything I’m going to say in this series: I’m not Japanese. I’d probably make a terrible samurai even if I were on account of I spend a lot of energy attempting to dismantle classist ideologies.

So bear that in mind.

Now why it’s a good idea for me to do a blog series like this: as far as I can tell, the thinkers I’ll look at put their writings into the world so that anyone who came across them would learn and be enriched.

I have a keen interest in the way that bushido is interested in the confluence between thinking and doing. That means these writings mean as much to me as anyone, if I treat them with respect.

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Oliver “Shiny” Blakemore

The best part of being a mime is never having to say I’m sorry.