Thanks, Brian. I have been writing a little less of late, reducing the number of 'this silly idea popped into my head' blog post type stuff to only the occasional article. And I suspect my output will drop further in the coming months. A lot of it comes from pent-up ideas that I had swimming around my head with no avenue of expression until starting on Medium a year ago, as I've never used social media and never bothered setting up a blog.

Mainly, if something of interest occurs to me, I try to connect it to other aspects of life, often tangentially, and look for metaphors that express the concept, to give greater strength and depth to its presentation.

The metaphor itself can sometimes suggest a further connection: A is like B, and B is like C, which reveals to me that A is also like C to an extent.

I would say that this is my thought process in layering concepts to try to build up a whole. The end result can seem a little disjointed if I'm not careful enough to establish the conceptual links to the reader. That is the part I should polish, and where a professional editor would doubtless revise or reject some of what I publish. But that is one of the beauties of Medium - you can use it for genuinely polished writing, or just get ideas out of your system, and let the platform sort the wheat from the chaff.

Another thing I tried recently is to 'recycle' an idea in 2 or 3 different articles, from different angles.

For example, my recent piece about 'living abroad to gain cultural insight' span off into another specifically about the 'job swap exchange programme' I mentioned as an idea in that piece, and another about McDonald's, and how the small differences in what they sell in each country helps give an insight into our commonality and differences, which in turn fed into the concept of the Big Mac Index, and global disparities in wealth.

So one idea gave birth to three separate articles. I will probably start doing that more - as the well of ideas slowly dries up. And actually have an article planned about doing just that: meta-re-recycling of content!

But above all my approach is just to join dots until I have a complete picture, and then try to set that down on 'paper', as I describe.

It works for me - I hope you find that description meaningful and useful.

Thanks again for your appreciative words.