The title above is just the sort of word play I’ve long been warned against—or at least I should have been warned against—but if I can’t have fun playing with words, why write? I really like writing essays and as a longtime reader of The New Yorker and a chronic devourer of academic and political and climate pieces my bona fides as an essay reader are well secured.

Of course, there are many kinds of writing and in many forms, including long-form fiction. I mean, jeeze, I seem unable to avoid the novelette form, for instance, even if I do have to keep looking up its defining characteristics. And then there is my publishing the first of a four-novel series this September as yet another sign of this sort of long form compulsion.

But short stories are another form I write, and I believe there are two collections close to being ready for publication, at least if I ignore my tendency to always find fault and overcome the drive to keep tweaking drafts.

And god be merciful, but I have been writing poetry since my college days, and there are several manuscripts’ worth of such poems, although the question of this work possessing any intrinsic worth remains open.

My plan for “Other Writing” is to present examples of my various work, and I plan to start with essays. I don’t write all that many essays these days, although I’d gotten a lot of practice with what is a closely-related form, the editorial, back when I was the editor of new media trade publications, including my first, New Media News, which published through The Boston Computer Society (if you recognize the name of this organization, then congratulations on collecting Social Security!). New Media News started around 1985, going away sometime in the early 1990s when digital publishing and online trade periodical publishers emerged. I emerged right alongside the commercial publications, editing Meckler Corporation’s industry newsletter, Multimedia Report and then the magazine CD-ROM World, and then a bit of a detour as Associate Editor for Kodak’s short-lived CD-Interactive (a format that the company was pushing but which proved as short-lived as the periodical itself), and then I settled in at Online Inc.’s CD-ROM Professional, as Editor-in-Chief, shepherding this into eMedia Professional and into a big monthly with a tripling of readership and ad revenue. There were a lot of editorials written along the way, and articles, and, of course, editing. I can also claim the questionable honor of having attended the first two generations of ebook conferences, as well as the third generation, when Amazon finally showed up with Kindle and moved the concept of ebooks into an actual market.

Speaking of Amazon, the first essay that I think I’ll post is titled “Horsewhip Jeff Bezos, Part One,” which explores the shortcomings of the Amazon Search mechanism, and at the time of its writing, I worried that I was being too tough of a critic. Rest assured, there will be a Part Two someday, and part of that future will report that my early critique was far too soft, as subsequent research reveals that the poor search interface and junk results are not a matter of incompetence and/or stinginess, as I had originally suggested, but entirely intentional and with self-serving commercial purpose.