Garden 03 — Three Candles

I save far more than I read.

Six years of bookmarks. A podcast queue I won't catch up on. YouTube tabs open in three browsers. The intention is there every week. The evening to sit down with it isn't.

Three Candles takes a week of what I've saved and turns it into one issue on my Kindle. First page, last page. Done when I'm done.

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What it's for

Reading that ends.

An article on a Kindle lands differently than the same article in a browser. Thirty pages is thirty pages. You can see the end from the start. You finish, close the cover, and it's done.

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How it works

• • Connect your sources: RSS, X bookmarks, YouTube, podcasts, Instapaper
• • Set a reading-time budget for the issue (mine is around 40 minutes)
• • Articles keep their shape; threads get unpacked; podcasts become short briefs with the timestamp
• • Each issue opens with a short note and closes with a synthesis
• • The EPUB lands in your Kindle inbox on the schedule you pick

Most of the work is deciding what to leave out. Most weeks, half of what I saved doesn't earn the page.

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What I notice

I read what I meant to read.

Not all of it. The share that fits in an evening. Whatever doesn't make the issue rolls into next week or gets dropped.

I used to count saves. Now I count issues I've finished. That's a different number.

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Inside an issue

• • Sources sync (RSS, X bookmarks, YouTube, podcasts, Instapaper, manual links)
• • A scorer ranks candidates against your reading-time budget
• • A planner lays out the issue: a lead, digest cards, a quote, one piece that pulls against the rest
• • Per-item agents rewrite each piece in its own register — an article stays an article, a thread becomes a recap, a podcast becomes a brief
• • A director pass reads the whole thing and writes the opening note and closing synthesis
• • The EPUB is built and emailed to your Kindle inbox

The pipeline is slower than it needs to be. The issue is what I look at, not a dashboard.

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What I'm still figuring out

Three Candles is the most public of the three gardens. Other people use it, and that changes the questions.

The hardest one is voice. How much should the editor intrude? The synthesis at the end of an issue can feel grounding, or it can feel preachy. It depends on the week and the writing. I'm still calibrating.

The other one is cadence. Daily is too much for most people. Weekly works for me. Some readers want a Wednesday issue and a Sunday issue. I haven't decided.