The year 2024 was a really bizarre year for me, writing wise – while I had work come out in a relatively high-profile venue, and I finally started blogging again, I didn’t produce much in terms of “literary work”, and definitely did not write any creative works that I would consider to be publishable, which kinda sucks. I made some progress on some essays I hope to finish this year, wrote a few poems, and… I think that was it?

I write across multiple genres, but my main genre is Creative Nonfiction, which writers typically refer to as “CNF” for short. Unfortunately, I always end up having to explain what CNF is to people, because the common view of nonfiction seems to be that it’s entirely comprised of informative texts and academic essays (with maybe the occasional memoir slipped in). Earlier today I was thinking about this, and I thought it would be really funny to place various types of “nonfiction writing” on a graph with labelled axes to prove my point.

Here’s another roundup of some interesting things I’ve come across lately and would like to talk about! As always, I’m sure there’s some great stuff I read but cannot for the life of me remember. This one is extremely late, since I’ve been incredibly busy and finding time to write has been hard. I think I looked at some of this stuff back in… November? October? Oops. I’ve decided I want to keep these to only 4–5 items per post, so more posts should be coming shortly!

I just finished a blog post where I discuss things I’ve recently learned about how to read research papers. I almost included this as a point in that post, but I think it’s important enough to warrant its own article. Here’s the idea: you absolutely should not be reading the sections of a research paper in order. It took me a while to learn this one – I can’t remember if I first read this advice somewhere, if someone told it to me, or if I reverse-engineered it from advice I got about how to write papers.

Last summer, I spent a good chunk of my time doing an undergraduate research project during which I worked on a project largely by myself, under the supervision of a math professor. I then took a graduate level course in a related area this fall, where I investigated the theoretical underpinning behind my summer project. I had no idea what I was doing or what I had gotten myself into. As a result, I learned a lot, and tried to keep note of the various things I had learned.