I write three things: reporting, short stories, and songs. They look like separate habits and they are really the same one — trying to say a true thing in the fewest words that will hold it.
The reporting
I am most interested in the parts of a story that arrive as documents: budgets, minutes, test reports, the appendix nobody reads. Launches are exciting and they are the smallest part of spaceflight. The decisions that decide whether anything flies at all are written down, usually in public, usually in language designed to be boring. Reading that language and turning it back into plain English is the work I want to do.
Long term, I would like to write about space for a living — and, if I get the chance, to write for NASA rather than only about it. Someone has to turn what engineers know into something the rest of us can follow. That is a writing job, and it is a good one.
The stories and the songs
Fiction and songwriting are where I learn the things reporting will not teach me. A song has three minutes and no room to explain itself, which makes it the strictest editor I have ever worked with. A short story lets me be wrong on purpose, which reporting never does.
None of it is separate. The song teaches the cut, the story teaches the shape, the reporting keeps all of it honest.
Elsewhere
- Currently studying at [SCHOOL].
- Writing for [PUBLICATION OR SCHOOL PAPER].
- Clips and selected work are collected on this site under the beats above.
The bracketed lines above are placeholders — fill them in or delete them.
If you have something you think should be written about, the contact page is the fastest way to reach me.