Why I write
I write to explain things to myself and discover what I think about them.
I write to challenge the language to do something it hasn’t done before.
I write to challenge myself to stretch my (somewhat lacking) communication skills.
I write for fun, and for the enjoyment of anyone who might read what I’ve written.
What I’ve written
Digital Poetry
I was a software developer in another life – before the industry finished chewing me up and spat me out in 2008. I used to love programming: working out how to make computers do what I wanted them to, identifying where the idiot machine had misunderstood what I wanted and done what I’d told it instead, learning new coding languages and techniques. After a decade or so I got bored with having to learn yet another new skill to write the same old types of software to enable my employers to help other companies make loads of money out of people like myself. It was a great pleasure to rediscover the joys of programming when I decided to have a go at writing some digital poetry. That’s now my focus, when I find time to write.
I wrote a sequence of poems about my experience of depression and my stay in a psychiatric unit to test whether words on a screen which could move around, change, and interact with the reader, would be an ‘improvement’ over static words on the page. ‘Improvement’ can be defined however you like… why not have a look at the poems and see what you think?
I’m currently developing some of the ideas which came out of that project into a sequence of digital poems about my family and its recent history, including some of the silent or hidden aspects of the family: secrets, skeletons rattling in closets, odd relationships, shared and disputed memories.
Page Poetry
to be done
Graphic Fiction
to be done
Short Fiction
to be done
Creative Non-fiction
to be done