#notes

Writing what is this site? #3 made me think about how this site reimagines the process of writing books to emulate the process of software development.

I anticipate confusion regarding the name of this site. How is it a book?

I began with this sentence:

These opportunities in my early life allowed me to become not only natively proficient in Spanish and English, but also multicultural.

I want to make the following sentence more fluid by removing its commas, but they are preventing ambiguity:

Vague memories, without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing, bubbled into my conscious mind.

I wrote what makes a good shower? a couple months ago and I saved four versions of the same paragraph to analyze side by side.

The standard bathtub-shower design seems like a good idea.

most…wonderful places of the world were not made by architects, but by the people.

I’ve written before about rules in games and the motivations behind their implementation.

I had this encounter in October of 2022, almost two years ago.

In her New Yorker article about suspense, Kathryn Schulz uses a clever image to describe how suspense exists at many scales.

In November I posted my first /now update and since then I have posted three more.

The main reason I read Cormac McCarthy is to experience and learn from his writing craft.

…looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of [Cormac McCarthy’s] voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished.

In chess, there’s a niche rule with an untranslated name that amusingly befits its esotericism: en passant.

Dr. George Pransky in his book The Relationship Handbook writes:

[M]aintaining a sense of well-being is all it takes to make [relationships] enjoyable and easy.

This site – okjuan.me/vbook – contains all my public writing.

Here’s an example of coordinated metaphors, something I wish other writers used more often.

King’s advice is mostly for fiction, but some of it applies to non-fiction, too.

There was this little voice whispering to me that the book was really good, and if I didn’t finish, I would regret it forever.

Don’t come up with the plot of your story, says Stephen King.

I love IPAs, and I’ve had a lot of them, mostly in the Pacific Northwest. These are my few favorites.

As someone who likes to think and learn about psychology on my free time, here is my understanding of ego.

This page is inspired by Viktor Lofgren’s The Small Website Discoverability Crisis and Tom Critchlow’s list of digital bookshelves.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term.

It’s important to keep your metaphors from bumping into one another.