Writing I'm not too ashamed of
This page lists all of the writing I've put up for others to see, and is updated whenever I post a new piece. There is no schedule, sorry. All of the individual pieces have a place for comments at the bottom of the page, so you're welcome to give feedback, argue, correct me, or anything.
If you're interested in writing as well as reading, I also run a writers' discussion site. Feel free to pop on by, leave comments, make an account if you want to stick around...
How does it work?
Explanatory articles on whatever topic I feel like writing about. This series was kicked off by a message board post correcting a few misconceptions about computer viruses; that post grew and grew and grew that day while I was writing it, until it was several pages long and explained the history of viruses, what they could and couldn't do, and some practical advice for protecting yourself from them. Suggestions for future topics welcome; if I know enough about the subject, I might write it up.
- Computer viruses
- What they are, how they work, their history, and how to protect yourself.
- The World Wide Web
- What goes on behind the scenes
- Privacy on the Web
- What you can expect, what you can do to protect yourself, and what you shouldn't worry about.
- Hard Drives
- What's inside the box, how information is stored, and why (if you use windows) you have to run "defrag" so much.
Fiction
A mixture of short stories and exercises, sometimes first drafts and sometimes more polished. The pieces listed here are a lot more likely to be first drafts and/or change every so often than those in "rants" and "how does it work?". Some of them I may even submit for publishing at some point.
- My NaNoWriMo 2003 entry
- I decided to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and post the novel I came up with. The goal of NaNo is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. This is first draft quality writing, so be warned. :-)
- Writing within limits 60*80 challenge
- This was an exercise posted to Write On! in December 2001. The idea was to write a story in no more than 60 lines no more than 80 characters long - ie, one standard printed page. I decided to go one step farther, and created a brick: all lines start on column 1 and end on column 80, no tricks with spacing allowed, no hyphenating words to split them over a line, no spaces allowed at the end of the line. I did allow a two space indent to mark off paragraphs, in the interests of readability. This is a first draft, and it took a while for me to decide what was going on, so the beginning is kind of weak and the ending is kind of abrupt.
- Chapter 1 of my novel
- The nameless novel has been in the works since 1996, when I was in grade 12. (I didn't work on it much when I was in university, so between 1996 and 2002 I ignored it completely for about 3 years, equivalent, and only worked on it during the summer or the work terms.) The first version of chapter 1 (not this version; there have been some major changes) was published in the Young Author's Conference anthology. Yay, my first publication! Anyhow, the novel is about half done, I think, and enough has changed since I started it that many parts badly need a rewrite. Therefore, it's currently being rewritten to make it self-consistent and hopefully make it easier for me to write new scenes that are consistent with the existing scenes. Blah, blah, blah. I'm using a wiki to sort out my background information - they're insanely useful for that kind of stuff. Updated 18 June, 2003. I've been doing some editing.
- Exercises
- Random exercises, a bunch of very short pieces of first draft writing, really. The most recent is old man mountain.
Rants
Things that bug me, how I wish things would work, and generally just me venting. You could also call them opinion pieces, because they don't tend to be as flame-y as some people expect from a rant.
- One size doesn't fit all
- Why having one company make computers for everybody isn't a good idea.
- Spam
- Why I hate spam; describes the various forms spam can take and why it's not just a matter of clicking "delete".
- Why should you follow standards anyway?
- The browsers don't follow the standards, so why should you? Well, the standards don't change in incompatible ways with every revision...
- Linux
- The joys of linux on a slow computer, after suffering through windows' bloat and general heaviness.
