I am currently doing what I am going to call “spring cleaning” on my blog. What this means is that I want to get rid of a huge backlog of articles and things I started writing about in the past because I have lots of ideas for new things I want to do here (how shocking), and I’m honestly not super happy with the direction this blog has been taking. I don’t think I write enough about my own ideas, or about the things I spend hours learning about. In fact, I don’t think I write enough at all.

I think the way we teach kids to think about and categorize questions is completely wrong. If I think back to any time I’ve been taught about questions formally, I’ve always been taught to think about the 5 W’s: Who, What, Where, When, Why – and the H: How? These are perfectly good questions to focus on if you’re a journalist writing a news story, but most of us are not journalists, and I’ve found a broader range of questions to be useful or relevant in my day-to-day life.

Alright, time to look back at another year of writing. I’m not quite sure what to think of this year. Last January feels like it was ages ago – I barely remember any of what happened, and it feels super removed from now. That being said, I probably did the most variety of writing this year that I’ve done in years, because I took an experimental fiction course, which forced me to write fiction.

Have you ever considered how people who are more knowledgeable about something than you got that way? A lot of them got there by asking the right questions. The reality is that most people are not going to bother to explain themselves to you if you don’t bother to come to them with questions. Some people don’t realize that you don’t know the things they know.

Hi! Here is a linkdump. I told myself I would post these with really minimal context because I am too busy to summarize these things and have a really giant backlog of links I’ve been wanting to post, but uh, the writer in me won out and I failed. Some of these have way more description than others. But I do also have quotes I’ve pulled for some of them, so maybe that will help make this post more interesting.