Wide Margins

I’ve settled on blog.hystereo.

There was a time when I’d have insisted on the full and proper word. Weblog. I said it deliberately, with the faint air of a man correcting a waiter, as though the shorter version were something inflicted on the language by people who didn’t read. I was nineteen and owned a wooden plank of encyclopedias, and I’d mistaken having books for having taste. Twenty-odd years have worn that edge off. It’s a blog. Everyone knows what that means. I’ve decided to stop standing in the current and just go with it.

And I did it. It’s up, it works, it lives somewhere other than my own hard drive.

I won’t pretend I did it unassisted — there was a lot of hand-holding both ways, and it’d be dishonest to say otherwise. But the speed of it genuinely surprised me. Empty directory to a live deployment on Vercel, a database sitting patiently in Supabase, all inside an evening or two. I remember the old way well enough: tutorials hopped between like stones in a river, each one assuming a competence the last one didn’t give me, the forum post from 2013 that solved nothing, half an hour spent discovering the error was a missing semicolon. I don’t miss it.

What was stranger was being told my own backend could be better. Not in the places I’d worried about, but in places I hadn’t thought to look at all. There’s a particular humility in having your work improved by suggestions you’d never have arrived at yourself. It’s not far off a colleague mentioning, kindly, that your margins have been wrong for years.

* * *

The front page has to change then, and start earning its keep.

What I want from it is simple, and vain enough that I might as well say so: somewhere to put the things I’ve made. Projects, small experiments, the odd thing that actually worked. Something to be proud of, arranged where a proud man can see it. You spend enough years making work that belongs to a department or a ministry or a committee. There’s no harm in keeping one shelf for the work that’s mine.

But it’s the other section I keep coming back to.

I want a place for writing, and I want it to look the way I actually read. Sepia, not white. Wide margins — the kind that give a paragraph room to breathe instead of shoving it up against the edge of the glass. Old-style serifs, uneven numerals, the sort that look like someone cut them by hand. I spent a good part of my youth insisting no screen could replicate the weight of paper, and I still think that’s true. But a screen can at least be taught some manners. If I’m going to read on one — and I do now, almost entirely — it may as well hold the text properly.

Which brings me to the awkward part, and the actual reason I’m writing this.

I’ve written a lot of stories over the years. Most of them are gone. Nothing dramatic happened to them: no flood, no dead drive, nothing I can blame. I just abandoned them, or deleted them, or left them in folders I haven’t opened in ten years. The duller truth is that I revised them until I couldn’t bear to look at them anymore. A fourth draft, a seventh, a ninth, each one nudging the same sentence slightly to the left, until whatever made me want to write the thing had been polished off it completely. Then I’d close the file and that was that.

I used to call that discipline. Or humility. I don’t think it was.

So: an archive. Somewhere a thing can sit unfinished and a bit embarrassing and carry on existing anyway. That plank on my bedroom wall wasn’t what made the encyclopedias exciting to read. It only functioned as a pedestal for the books to be there when I reached for them.

I should probably start reaching.