About

This is not a polished place.

It is an experiment.

The words are rough, ideas rushed and effort extreme.

This is a little playground for me to find a groove and routine, with goal of simply developing a habit of writing.

My guidelines are fairly simple:

• Write an essay a day, with a loose limit of 1,000 words, but aim for 650~
• Do it quickly, in the morning. Normally I have a maximum of about 90 minutes, but the average is closer to 45
• Whenever possible, use another’s essay as the basis for my own.
• Don’t be afraid of the mistakes made as I go along, accept they’ll happen and, in this playground, they are meaningless.
• Bleed.
• Have fun.

I love to write and did so for a couple of years at my main site, Retinart. But I was never consistent and would linger over an article for days, if not weeks. I was slow, and fumbled my hopes because of it. After the writing running horribly dry for a few years I became sick of the plans I was making. I would get to it, at some point, I told myself. Any day now, when everything is perfect, and I’m moving towards perfect, so absolutely, any day now I will start to write.

That day never came and I grew nauseated by own insecurities and perfectionism.

In the mean time I was lucky enough to work and talk with some of the smartest and most wonderful people on the internet who continually reminded me of what I needed to be doing with myself through the examples they set.

So I jumped in, with only one focus – to write, every day.

The articles here are filled with mistakes. The spelling is never going to be perfect and there will always be grammatical hiccups to be found. I’ll overuse words and ideas, things will get slide from interesting to boring. The design is bordering on the poor due to my grabbing of a template that was good enough and making changes to it that were, again, no more than good enough for what I was after. In other words, this is the digital version of a mind-dump of writing. As well as the habit I wish to form, it’s dress rehearsal. An opportunity for me to purge the cliches and get out all the ideas I have in reserve, so that I will be forced to start fresh when I get back to writing at the main blog.

I’m a graphic designer who loves words and ideas, both clever and obscene. I have a small understanding of what an aesthetic shell does to the contents poured into it. If I spend too much time making the design and ideas perfect, then I will attach to anything I write a sense of value not inherit in the words. I love Moleskine journals. They’re beautiful, elegant and scream a kind of professionalism that I like. But I never write in them because of it. I find myself reaching for the cheap, $1 notepad instead. Something that doesn’t change the quality of my ideas and leaves them raw. This site is the cheap notepad at best, a damp napkin at worst.

Thanks for stopping by, and please, do feel free to email me.