Writing

“You sit down at the keyboard & you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy & that hard.” - Neil Gaiman

For at least a decade, I have been telling myself countless times that I should write more. Half-formed thoughts have been piling up in my brain all that time, leaving me with the uncomfortable feeling of a littered floor. Now I need to take all that out, one at a time. Also, I need to assert which matter enough to be written down. Finally, I want to discuss them, put them to trial in the Real World© and see if they hold water.

I did write a bunch of stuff before in differents corners of the Web. My hard disks, mailboxes and web accounts are scattered notes, drafts and fragments that never manage to pass the publish button. Years in social media and academia have lead me to completely overthink writing, as a sort of giant scheme strategic of things that should be carefully planned. But more than that : I was in a state of paralysis at the simple idea of people actually reading what I had to say.

So I just decided that it was about time to stop my headaches and start experiencing writing as a selfish and deliberate act. The imperative of performing with words in a foreign language is tough enough already, so I am going to skip having an agenda here.

I may pursue topics that look totally unrelated just because it made perfect sense to me. Things like art, computer science, geography, technical systems, China’s maker culture, weird art projects, data visualization, historiography, ethnographic methods, UX design and media archeology may be discussed AT THE SAME TIME.

So please bear with me here…

…and godspeed !

This text was originally published in read/write blog.