Writing is communication, and communication is hard. It takes a great deal of artistry to know how to combine just the right words, phrases, and rhetorical devices to get across precisely what you mean with all its little subconscious nuances. If you are lacking in artistry, that means a great deal of painful, laboring work instead.

I like writing. I like communicating, and I like crafting those magical combinations of words that perfectly encapsulate what I mean while also being elegant and beautiful. But I am not always particularly fond of the blood, sweat, and tears often necessary for me to craft a lovely sentence. I don’t have enough grit, enough stubbornness, and enough unbreakable devotion to beauty to really be a writer. Anybody who does has my deep respect.

So I do write, and I try to get better at the craft. Papers and articles for school and for this website let me dive into subjects I love and perhaps help others catch my passion for them. Short stories, novels, and the occasional poem let me work through subtler things and capture experiences that are more than what they seem on the surface, exploring the implications of ideas and people’s true natures and personalities. But, as I said, I lack the nerve and the commitment to pursue writing very seriously right now or try to publish anything. For now, I mostly use writing for my own benefit, to help me think through things and express experiences.

Here you can find some of my essays and papers, short stories, and poetry. The essays and papers are generally philosophical, sometimes written for school, sometimes not. The short stories are all fantasy, concerned with characters and their worldviews and attempting to use the strange outside trappings of a fantasy world to illuminate internal worlds. The poetry is mostly old stuff I wrote before I realized that I didn’t actually read poetry that often and thus I didn’t know how to write it. I do still occasionally write a poem if I want to put something into words that is too elusive, emotional, or subconscious for my prose.