Writing Craft Collection

Bold, retro poster illustration in flat red, blue, green, and yellow. A globe showing North and South America in green against a blue backdrop, labeled 'TTY' sits at the top and connects via a diagonal striped beam down into a white-bordered panel. Inside that panel, five colored bands (yellow, pink-and-white, and black-and-yellow stripes) sweep diagonally across a red background, each carrying a label: 'State Relay Service,' 'Synthesizer,' 'Video Conference,' 'WWW' and 'E-Mail.' Below the panel, a white computer labeled 'Internet' leads down to a stylized keyboard rendered as rows of dashed blue lines on a white rectangle, above a black-and-white striped band. Flanking the whole column are two large abstract head silhouettes built from layered flat shapes, purple and yellow on the left, blue and green on the right, facing inward.

I've Never Wasted My Time Writing

#294 September 28, 2026

Why writing—and writing back—is never wasted time. From Patricia Lange's troll whispering to reparative civility, deep canvassing, Daryl Davis, Megan Phelps-Roper, and moral elevation, I defend engaging difficult people as a deliberate ethical practice rooted in curiosity, grace, and love.

Colourized archival photo of a classroom full of boys at wooden desks, most bent over open books or writing with pens, in an early 20th-century schoolroom with a world map on the chalkboard and a teacher leaning over a student's desk in the background.

Proper English is a Myth: There's No 'Correct' Way to Write

#286 September 15, 2026

Responding to a blog post urging people to 'please learn how to write,' I pull rank with my English degree to argue there's no such thing as proper English. Looking at the 18th-century grammarians who invented 'correctness,' the linguistic racism of policing dialects from AAVE to Jamaican Patois, and why blogging should be about meaning, not mechanics.

A cluttered wooden table holds a row of obsolete beige desktop computers and CRT monitors, including a Dell and Compaq, with tangled cables, stacked against a stained wall lit in a pink-to-yellow-to-green gradient. Wooden stools and a chair sit in front of the table, suggesting an abandoned classroom or office.

A 450-year History of Blogging

#267 August 24, 2026

A four-century etymological journey from wooden ship logs and logboards to the modern web log, tracing how the word 'blog' emerged from centuries of record-keeping, computing, and online publishing. On Peter Merholz's coinage of 'blog,' Jorn Barger's 'weblog,' Justin Hall's online diary, the rise of Blogger and Medium, and the state of the blogosphere in 2026.

Antique textile sample mounted on a tan card, featuring black silk fabric with horizontal teal wave-stitched lines. Along the lower edge runs a colorful floral embroidery border with pink and yellow lilies, red poppies, pink roses, brown carnation-like blooms, and clusters of small pink and white flowers, connected by green and teal leaves. A row of small white and pink flowers forms a trim along the very bottom edge. Handwritten catalog markings '1992,' 'vie.,' and '537.' appear in the left margin.

What Remains? My AuguStory

#249 August 6, 2026

On the shutdown of EchoFeed and the ephemeral nature of services, why I blog (legacy, existentialism, making a mark), participating in AuguStory, academic studies on blogging benefits, and the paradox of 'nobody cares' as both a source of freedom and as a reminder that we all deserve to be heard, seen, and loved regardless of metrics or response.

Post-impressionist oil painting of a bearded man in a dark suit and tie, seated at a desk with his forearms resting on an open book. Behind him, a bookshelf holds rows of colorful volumes, and a chair with a yellow patterned back is visible. In the foreground, stacked books in red, green, and blue bindings sit beside a glass of white and pink roses. Loose, visible brushstrokes in warm gold, blue, and coral tones.

The True, Unglamorous Life of a Writer

#230 July 16, 2026

Let me be unglamorous and honest about the actual furniture of a writing life. What do my private, invisible days look like? What does it cost and what does it pay? A look at the 4 a.m. writing routine, the physical setting, and what I hope my writing will do for others.

Impressionist interior scene: a woman in a white dress leans over a mahogany writing desk, pen in hand, beside a leaded-glass window with a bookcase behind her. To the right, a girl in a patterned dress and dark hair bow sits in a wingback chair reading a small blue book, lit by a white ceramic lamp on a side table

There Are People Who Would Give Anything For Your Ability to Read and Write

#222 July 7, 2026

In our current year, there is a global literacy crisis. As a result, there's a privilege in being able to read and write. Notes on Frederick Douglass, the problems you don't think about, and why the ability to write is something to be grateful for and use rather than take for granted.

Close-up of an old handwritten ledger book open to a page of cursive names and columns of numbers in blue ink, on ruled accounting paper with red and blue grid lines, photographed at an angle with shallow depth of field.

Every Commit A Sentence: Git Commit Messages for Bloggers

#211 June 25, 2026

I had 448 `feat:` commits and 417 `fix:` commits. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. Here's why conventional commits were never designed for a writer's blog, and the eleven-type system I built to replace them.

Oil painting of a dark-haired young man seated at a small desk in a cramped, sunlit room, writing intently in a book or letter. He wears a dark robe or coat and has an intense, weary gaze. The cluttered room around him features an unmade bed with white sheets, dark coats and a hat hanging from pegs on the wall, a washbasin and jug, and a vase or bundle of cut flowers and greenery spilling across the foreground table. Loose, impressionistic brushwork in muted greens, golds, and blacks. Signed 'John S. Sargent' in the upper left.

COMPULSION: The Writers Who Wrote The Most in History

#208 June 22, 2026

I've been writing publicly every day for seven months, and I wanted to know what that looked like for other compulsive writers. From Chesterton dictating past midnight, to Chinese web fiction authors racing through 10,000 words daily. What does their obsessive output reveal about the nature of writing itself? The volume isn't the point. The showing up is.

Watercolour painting of a lush garden scene dominated by deep and yellow-greens, with clusters of soft lavender-pink flowering lilacs blooming throughout dense foliage. Small white wildflowers dot the lower foreground. The brushwork is loose and impressionistic, with washes of colour blending into the cream-white of the unpainted paper at the upper left. Hints of red stems and teal leaves add contrast within the greenery.

Blogging Saved My Life

#205 June 17, 2026

Writing publicly and frequently for the past seven months has saved my life. Six ways consistent public writing transformed me: cultivating curiosity, building connections, investigating rabbit holes, starting new projects, creating accountability, and seeing life's patterns in real-time. An invitation for others to begin writing without restraint.

Historical engraving depicting a print shop in the 18th century. Two workers in period clothing operate a wooden printing press: one figure in a red coat pulls the press lever while bent over the press bed, and another in a blue coat inks type at a compositing table near a multi-paned window. Freshly printed sheets, each bearing a small portrait, hang in two rows on drying lines strung across the room. Ink balls, tools, and other workshop materials are scattered on the floor.

A New IndieWeb Publication? or: I Want to Start Something and Be Bad at It

#203 June 13, 2026

Inspired by Good Internet Magazine, I'm starting a new volunteer-run IndieWeb publication tentatively called Long Horizon. Exploring my readiness to launch a digital and physical magazine focused on creative non-fiction and lyric essays, and seeking collaborators who want to build something meaningful on the Internet together.

Screenshot of the writer-cli homepage. The page header reads 'WRITER-CLI' followed by the headline 'Write from your terminal. Publish with one command.' A subheading describes it as a command-line tool for bloggers with a static site who want to open a terminal, write something, and have it live on the Internet. Below is a dark install command: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/brennanbrown/writer-cli/main/INSTALL.sh | bash, with a 'copy' button. A note below states it installs to ~/.local/bin/ and links to the installer source. Navigation links at the top read: home, guide, reference, source, GitHub.

Introducing writer-cli: a bash tool I built from scratch to blog in the terminal!

#192 May 24, 2026

After finding the tildeverse and the Tilde.town feels engine, I decided to build my own simple command-line tool for blogging that handles the full lifecycle of a blog post (creation, editing, building, and git push). A walkthrough of the design decisions, the modular architecture, and the tradeoffs of writing 700 lines of plain bash.

Printed pages burning on rocky ground outdoors, with tall orange flames rising from the center. The pages are from a book, and visible names include Steve Wozniak, Stanley Kubrick, and Leslie Stern, M.D., with a section header reading '[End Of Tra...' and a headline at the top beginning 'Why Did Navidson Go Back To The Hou...' The surrounding area shows ash, gravel, and dry vegetation. The image has a subtle chromatic aberration effect, giving the edges a yellow-green fringe.

Writers Who Burned All Their Words feat. Bix Frankonis

#176 May 2, 2026

I am a compulsive archivist, terrified of losing my words, but many of history's greatest writers asked for theirs to be burned. Kafka, Dickinson, Plath, Virgil all had their reasons. A meditation on self-erasure, ego, and the difference between the writing and the written thing, with an interview with Bix Frankonis, a contemporary writer who one day decided he needed to be smaller online, not bigger.

An elderly man sits in morning sunlight outside a weathered blue doorway in Basantapur, Nepal, absorbed in reading a Nepali-language newspaper. He wears black-rimmed glasses, a blue vest over a checked shirt, and light grey trousers. The newspaper catches the early light brilliantly against the dark background. A cane rests under his arm.

Being a Citizen Journalist

#169 April 24, 2026

From Drudge to Salam Pax to Darnella Frazier and Zhang Zhan. The world needs citizen journalists. There has been a hollowing of Postmedia's local press, the radicalization pipelines mainstream coverage fails to trace, Andrew Callaghan's compromised platform, and what I owe under the SPJ Code of Ethics as an independent writer with a blog.

Dozens of origami paper cranes in a wide variety of colours and patterns. Blues, pinks, reds, greens, white, and earth tones, many made from patterned washi-style paper with florals and stripes, suspended from thin strings against a blurred warm-toned background.

A THOUSAND CRANES: Why I Write Every Day

#164 April 19, 2026

My daily writing is a practice of releasing messages in bottles and folding paper cranes—from Montaigne in his tower and Johnson writing in poverty, to Sadako Sasaki folding 1,450 cranes in a hospital ward. What the essayists, drift bottles, and Senbazuru share, and why the attempt itself is the whole math.

A softly lit interior scene shows a young person seated at a small table, writing with a quill pen. They are viewed from behind, wearing a loose white shirt, while a mirror in front reflects their face as they concentrate on their work. On the table are ink bottles and writing tools. A wooden chair and a draped coat sit to the right, and the textured wall and muted colors give the scene a quiet, intimate, painterly atmosphere.

Poetry Saved My Life

#159 April 14, 2026

I snuck off school grounds to write in a back alley, shoplifting Ginsberg and Neruda from Chapters, and I'm alive and writing today because of that. Recent neuroscience confirms poetry activates the brain's dopaminergic reward system, treats anhedonia, and is—more than metaphor—medicine.

Oil painting of a rustic countryside inn scene. A thatched-roof whitewashed cottage with two brick chimneys serves as a wayside inn, identified by a hanging bell sign on a wooden post. Several figures in 18th-century rural clothing gather outside — some standing and conversing near a haycart, others seated by the inn's entrance with a dog. A wooded hillside rises behind the building under a partly cloudy sky. A small stream or puddle is visible in the foreground. The painter's signature appears in the lower right corner.

Earning My Keep

#156 April 10, 2026

On the poets who found different terrors inside the phrase 'earn my keep'—Jeong Ho-Seung, Brecht, Heather McHugh, Kim Hyesoon—and the theological dispute over whether grace can be deserved, turning thirty in borrowed time, and the nuthatches outside who do not know the feeder was set out for them.

An ornate, hand-colored illustration in an old European style shows a person standing in a grove of stylized palm-like trees, surrounded by symbolic emblems and text. Above, a radiant triangle containing an eye (the “all-seeing eye”) shines through clouds. Each tree bears oval crests and circular plaques with letters, Roman numerals, and heraldic symbols. The central figure gestures outward while holding a shield-shaped panel with decorative script.

STORYTELLING Part Two: The (Literal) Magic of Writing

#144 March 27, 2026

Grammar/Glamour/Grimoire. 言霊 & heka. Spelling & spellcasting. The Word. Writing is generative, not descriptive. Cultures across millennia have understood that words conjure reality. Writing conjures, symbols activate the brain, serving as telepathy across distance and time.

Oil painting (1904) of a man seated at a cluttered desk, writing with a pen while pressing one hand to his forehead in concentration. He wears a dark jacket and glasses, surrounded by open books, stacked papers, and an inkwell. The background is a muted blue-grey. Signed in Cyrillic in the upper right corner.

Being Taken Seriously as a Writer

#143 March 26, 2026

There's tension between creative authenticity and professional presentation in the IndieWeb space. What does it mean to be taken seriously as a writer while maintaining personal joy and rejecting the aesthetic standards of capital?

A 19th-century-style anatomical diagram of the human brain in lateral cross-section, rendered in fine engraving style with black-and-white linework. The brain's gyri (folds) and sulci (grooves) are depicted in detail, with numbers (1–10) and lowercase letters (a–g) labeling specific lobes, fissures, and structures including what appear to be the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, brainstem, and ventricular regions. The image has been digitally processed with a chromatic aberration effect, creating rainbow colour fringing (cyan, magenta, yellow, green) around all edges and a horizontal scan-line pattern across the image.

STORYTELLING Part One: The Neurology of Narrative

#142 March 25, 2026 CC BY

How do our brains physically process stories? The neurology of narrative transportation, brain synchrony between storytellers and listeners, biocultural theory, and Indigenous storytelling traditions that collapse Western narrative structures.

A Baroque celestial hemisphere map, depicting the constellations of the northern sky as mythological figures and animals. The circular map is bordered by a red ring marked with constellation and zodiac names. Within the map, labelled constellations appear as colourful illustrated characters: Aquarius pouring water, a large red Scorpion, Cancer as a red lobster, Pegasus as a winged horse, Ursa Major and Minor as bears, Orion, Perseus, Cygnus, Boötes, Virgo, Draco, Andromeda, and many others. Star positions are marked with small white rosettes. The map is overlaid with grid lines indicating celestial coordinates including the equinoctial and solstitial colures. The corners of the image are decorated with cherubs (putti) floating among pink and blue clouds.

Constellation of Living Stars

#134 March 17, 2026

I've written 120 blog posts in the past 140 days, averaging 1,900 words per post. 250,000 words total on my blog currently. It's as good a time as any to review my work so far and speculate on the possibilities of my future.

A loose, expressive watercolour and ink sketch depicting an interior scene with multiple figures. A reclining nude figure in blue and pale pink dominates the lower left foreground. Behind them, a seated figure in purple and green occupies a chair. The background is filled with warm golden yellow and features framed artworks or windows on the wall, rendered in dark gestural lines. Additional standing or seated figures are suggested on the right side through rapid, overlapping ink marks in blue, green, and dark brown. Red accents appear throughout the composition. The style is spontaneous and gestural, characteristic of mid-20th century expressionist drawing.

Write Weird Shit

#128 March 11, 2026

Dogfooding my freewriting; an experiment on why writers need to embrace the weird, unfiltered, and unconventional rather than fearing AI detection.

A lady in early 17th-century attire is seated at a table pondering a letter she is writing. In the background is a high Japanese screen. The artist has lavished great care in the rendering of the contrasting surfaces of his subject's satin dress and of the rug covering the table. In its intimacy and in its oriental note, this work approximates the painting of Alfred Stevens.

My Blogging Workflow: A routine for nearly a post a day for 4 months straight.

#121 March 2, 2026

A detailed look at my personal blogging workflow that has enabled me to write nearly a post a day for four months straight, including how I generate ideas, organize thoughts, and maintain consistency.

Busy vintage newsroom with journalists working at long wooden tables under industrial pendant lights. Men in white shirts and ties review papers and documents in a high-ceilinged space with exposed ductwork and black metal framework. The industrial-style office has a mid-20th century aesthetic with workers engaged in various reporting and editing tasks.

Substack's Subpar Subculture

#99 February 5, 2026

The newsletter platform is supposed to be the new economic engine for culture. Yet, they let hate speech fester. Why? The answer is obvious. Writing is treated as commodity instead of sacred art. But there is a solution.