Words

I like words.  Maybe it's because my father set type in the campus print shop in university, or because my mother was a proofreader in high school and went on to spend most of her career proofreading things.  Maybe it's because I grew up in a house with 3,000 books, and was trounced weekly in Sunday-afternoon Scrabble games by my grandfather, aunts and uncle.  Some credit definitely goes to my 12th-grade Creative Writing teacher, Juan Vasconez, who didn't complain when I turned in whatever he assigned... and then turned whatever unassigned things I had written late at night if I couldn't sleep.  Anyway, you get the idea.

I wrote a fair bit of poetry shortly after high school, most of which was posted to online bulletin board systems and is long gone.  Then for about a decade I ran an e-mail fanzine about the band Queensrÿche, who I liked at the time.  Somewhere in there I wrote an article for a Seattle-area tech newspaper called "Computer Wave."  At the turn of the millennium, I wrote a couple chapters for John Levine's book, "Internet Secrets," 2nd edition.  There are probably other things I have forgotten now.

In the 21st century, I wound up working with the International Institute for Sustainable Development's reporting team, traveling around the world and working with scholars from various countries to produce the Earth Negotiations Bulletin and other reports on meetings by the United Nations and other international organizations.  At first I was just doing photography, desktop publishing, web publishing and tech support, but within a few years I had gotten back into writing, and I wound up doing some editing as well.

Nowadays, I serve as an editor for my wife, who's always writing scripts for her TV show or op-ed pieces for publication.  Most of my writing these days is on the question-and-answer site Quora.

Please feel free to contact me if I've worked with you as a writer or editor.


Why I'm leaving Twitter.

I've stuck it out and continued participating on Twitter while Elon Musk has run it into the ground, made it progressively more inhospit...