Remember dat speeling test u tok in graid skool? You do? You probably didn’t pass it the first time then, if the above sentence actually made sense to you. But that’s beside the point. About that test—oh yes. It wasn’t real. Nor are all other manmade ones. Each test that’s known, explained, or prepared for…
The Poetic (and Ironic) Nature of Life
Yesterday, the last article I’d write under my own name for a client was published. It’s the third part of a blog series on “Generative AI: How to Use It To Be Productive…But Not Lose Your Soul” from Freedom Matters. This blog series is now a cornerstone project for my freelance writing portfolio–a fitting ending…
Scared of Being Okay
One thing scares the living daylights out of my soul as a creator, and that’s being okay. Or having my work described as “average”, or “nice”, or with such other platitudes. It might as well be unimportant, insignificant, worthless. It might as well be discarded—or better yet, never been made—if it isn’t something another soul…
Order and Originality
A month or so ago, I came across a quote by Gustave Faubert, which goes like this: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’m not sure if this correlation between one’s approach to regular life and approach to creation is true for all…
Too Alive?
I used to be afraid of being viewed as too philosophical. Or too extreme. Or too unconventional. Or too emotional. Or too whatever. As if “too” was an objective stamp of shame, instead of the infinitely subjective and personal concept it is. What more does it mean than imbalance? And isn’t life made possible by…
Love, Simplified
One thing that’s always fascinated me is the difference between the traditional and simplified Chinese characters for “Love”. Here’s what they look like. The four red strokes in the character on the left represent the word “heart” in Chinese. It’s replaced by a single stroke in the simplified character. In traditional Chinese, the heart is…
Only The Dead Have No Problems.
The graveyard’s both the most expensive real estate on the face of this earth, and the only place you’d find people without troubles. “Only the dead have no problems.” Three things about that statement: My shrewd Christian readers would note that it’s not theologically sound; if one dies without Christ, one spends their after-death existence…
“Nice Picture To You As Well”
I don’t like the idea of joining my voice to the uproar of conflicting, often half-baked opinions of another million writers coming to grips with the emergence of ChatGPT (partly because, try as I might, my thoughts would probably be the most unbaked ones of them all). But a few things happened in my interactions…
Writers Don’t Know Anything About What They’re Writing
It’s funny how instinctively people reading something would assume that the writer knows what they’re writing about. It’s as if they believe that they’ve got to have figured out what they were going to write before they actually wrote the tweet, blog post, book, or what-have-you. It’s as if they trust the writer to know…
It’s All a Mind Game
I was teaching my sister to sing yesterday. Nothing fancy; just two girls with a beautiful song and an upright piano. As I walked her through how I produce sounds (and demonstrated examples), she told me three things: What I was saying doesn’t make sense (and is impossible to perform) She could understand what I…