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Over the years I've dabbled in various forms of writing and journaling. I've honestly gotten widely mixed reviews. Below are some pieces or excerpts I thought it might be cool to share, especially since a lot of this stuff will otherwise never see the light of day. This material is in various stages of completeness, edition, and refinement; please read knowing that I have, in nearly all cases, not taken any time to review, revise, and re-edit this material. I suppose I just figured something was better than nothing.
Please peruse and perhaps even enjoy as you will. I am always open to feedback, of course. Also, please check back now and again; I will be adding material to this page as I dig up suitable scrawlings.
Please respect that, perfect or not, this material is my own and subject to the applicable laws of copyright, not to mention to common decency and integrity. I am nearly always willing to let my material be used for other purposes, but please ask me before assuming that you may. I request that any fair use quotation of or reference to any of this material be appropriately credited, accurately represented, and (ideally) used with my permission.
Thank you for any thoughts you have, and for your support.
2000-06-01 or thereabout - I wrote this in response to the closing of the Lonely Hearts Club, an awesome, badly-needed, and short-lived downtown Ann Arbor music venue. I had been in correspondence with Judy McGovern of The Ann Arbor News about submitting the piece, and her commincations had been very open and friendly. Upon my sending it in, however, my multiple polite requests for her feedback or verification of receipt went coldly unanswered. Perhaps I hit a political nerve. Needless to say, this piece has never been published. - HTML format
2000-11-10 - In 2000, a good friend convinced me that voting in the U. S. Presidential election was worth my time. Perhaps his timing could have been better. I submitted this piece to Judy McGovern as well, but with a preface explaining my intentions given her unwillingness to explain the paper's policy last time I submitted something ("One Step Forward..." above). Needless to say, this piece was never printed, either. - as originally emailed, put in HTML format
2002-09-01 or thereabout - In 2002, I had the honor of leading the National Anthem at a Boston Red Sox game at the legendary Fenway Park. This opportunity was part of my visit to the national convention of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. Bill Nowlin, the leader of Boston's Chapter of SABR, spearheaded a project to collect as many separate personal documentations of a single baseball game in history. This piece was my contribution to this project, as submitted to Bill for edition and inclusion in The Fenway Project, the published collection of these accounts (released April 2002 from Rounder Press). The piece tells the tale of the origins, emotions, and surprising tribulations of my journey to the microphone at Fenway. - HTML format
2002-09-10 - This subsite contains an email message and a link to an untitled journal piece both written about the events of September 11th, 2001. The email was written and sent out to two people in the hopes of starting something of a small pro-thought movement about the many effects of the tragedy. The journal piece was actually written several months earlier, and was dug up as an afterthought to tack onto the web page drawn up for the email movement. - local website that also references the essay
late 1999 - One of the benefits of a good roleplaying game is the opportunity to collaborate with the other players in the creation of a semi-improvisational story. Good friend and fiction writer Merrie Haskell Fuller encouraged players in our campaign to write diaries to help develop the story and our characters' points of view. Hoping to practice my narrative skills, I wrote my character's diaries in the third person, and each can almost be read as if it were a chapter of a much larger story. The full set of diaries is mostly available online at Shenrakari's page, part of my old website. This selection is one of a few about which I received some positive reviews, and while a few of the references to the overall storyline may not make sense, I think it stands fairly well alone. - HTML format
early 2000 - This is another selection from the Shenrakari diaries about which I had gotten some interest from a friend. This piece was purposefully written to simultaneously describe the feelings of my character in his situation and my own feelings at the moment I was writing. The result is something of a philosophical piece that makes specific references to both my world and the story's world, but whose literal text can be wholly applied to either. - HTML format
2000-10-16-ish - One more selection from the Shenrakari diaries, this piece is actually a flashback to Shen's childhood. In my spinning through some of the diary pieces, I read this and recalled being very happy with how it turned out. - HTML format
2003-06-16 - An observation of a simple moment, and the accidental insight into life and personality that it yielded. - HTML format
2000-04-10 - This short piece was inspired in part by the storyline of a roleplaying game in which I was involved (see "An Unseen Fire", above), and in part by long conversations with a good friend about Buddism. - HTML format
2002-02-08 - In a rare moment of impulse amidst a typical workday, I wrote this to my wife as a reply to a humorously romantic email she had sent. As the context may reveal, we were still only dating at the time with no clue as to our future plans. - HTML format
Last modified: 4 September 2003