I write things down so I can stop carrying them.

This site is a long-running exhaust pipe for a novel called Trueborn, a handful of code experiments most of which were abandoned for honest reasons, and a small but growing file on alpine plants that survive at heights I never will.

What you'll find here

Trueborn. Drafts, fragments, sentences cut from chapters, occasionally a whole scene. The novel is set on a continent that does not exist and concerns a cartographer who refuses to draw it correctly. I post in chapter order when I can and out of order when I can't.

Code. Field notes from things I built. Mostly small. Mostly abandoned. The post-mortems are more honest than the launches were. There is no startup advice here.

Curiosities. A loose folder. Vintage postcards depicting violence as folk art. The history of the gear icon. The first known use of the word "user" in a software manual. A defence of the purple saxifrage.

What you won't find

A newsletter signup. A "subscribe to my next thing" lightbox. An author photograph in soft focus against a brick wall. A list of the podcasts I have appeared on. A weekly digest. A commenting system. A newsletter. (I said this twice.)

Contact

If you want to write to me, the address is on the colophon page, and is a real address that goes to a real inbox that I read on Sundays.