2000 Words: An Introduction
They say a picture is worth 1000 words, so here is 2000. That’s the idea of this site at least.
I have been blogging consistently since 2001 (since before blogs were even called blogs) and have written millions of words during that time but no one would ever accuse me of being a writer. I have written professionally on occasion but almost always just to accompany the photos I was hired to take.
I enjoy writing and telling stories and looking back on the crazy shit I have done in my life and I wanted to start a site dedicated to that. I still want to feature my photography but I wanted to make it more about the writing than the images. As I inch closer to 40 we can think of this is a literary mid-life crisis.
I figured I would start off with my first post trying to explain what I think this site is going to be assuming I actually continue it. My site Driven By Boredom has continued for more than 15 years but I have started plenty of projects that were never really realized, but I have wanted to do this one for a while so here’s hoping this is my first of many entries.
The concept behind the site is simple one photo plus 1000 words of text is 2000 words but that isn’t literal. Some of these could be a paragraph long and some of them could be many thousands of words. And I know that there are going to be many posts with more than one photograph.
This site is going to be primarily my writing but I also like the idea of including writing from people I’ve worked with on assignments where it’s been more of a collaboration than just showing up and taking a couple photos. Art Tavana’s LA Weekly profile of the wrestler Jeff Hardy comes to mind. I am more proud of the work I did making that story happy than I am of any of the photos.
I also might include some articles I have previously written either on Driven By Boredom or for other people. I want to start with new stuff for the most part but I think I am going to republish an article I recently wrote on DBB about my failed trip to the Galapágos Islands tomorrow for Father’s Day.
I should mention that the photos might not relate to the exact story. For example I plan on telling stories that I have no photos from but I have a photo that works as an illustration anyway. Or I might tell a story about sex or drugs or something and use an unrelated photo to protect the guilty.
I also have no plans to do any copy editing on these. I have had super fun learning disabilities when it comes to writing which is one of the reasons I’ve never made any real effort to write. So expect grammar errors, typos and spelling mistakes that don’t get caught by spell check. Also, I love to overuse certain words and sentence structure so make sure you read these one at a time instead of a bunch at once so you don’t notice.
So, here’s hoping I can keep this going because I actually enjoy writing from time to time and I would like to do more of it.
Welcome to 2000 Words.
