Bart Westgeest

There are many programs for writing and editing texts and most are good for anybody and anything. Because basically they all do one thing – they let you create texts. As a writer you write, as an editor you edit and as a publisher you publish. The writer in you wants a tool that can create [...]

This quote reminds me that writing in the first place is something you just want to do – and as such it shouldn’t be aimed directly at an audience. Liberty is available if you dare to let go of your always weary “Lizard Brain”, as Seth Godin calls  it – the part that is always [...]

Some people argue that there are too many easy distractions in our time. That we are seduced by an bombardment of entertainment on television, the internet and even in books and newspapers. Because of our acceptance of this mostly shallow entertainment we get less interested in more complicated issues, we don’t take the time to [...]

I made a change in my WordPress setup two days ago that I couldn’t undo and as a result this blog didn’t show up properly. I think I made WordPress make a change in the .htaccess file. It was possible to reinstall the blog by visiting (…../blog/)wp-admin/install.php in my browser but since it wanted to create [...]

I think, honestly, that of all the things I wrote in the past, like diaries, short stories and poems, I only feel satisfied with about a handful of writings. At the moment that would be perhaps 3 poems and 3 short stories. The older works are not necessarily that bad, but I don’t want them any [...]

There are texts on the internet that are so stupid that they irritate. Maybe we have too many voices. Many are screaming and trying to sound wise and some, probably to attract readers, abandon good sense or judgement. I wish there was a method to exclude rubbish from good things. I suppose there is only one [...]

The article “Litterære manifester for et nyt årti” in the Danish newspaper Informationen gives 9 manifestos of contemporary Danish writers containing their thoughts about literature in the new decennia that we just entered. As always the thoughts are personal and thereby very different from each other. Some don’t believe in manifestos while others write a [...]

This thought was somewhere in between my notes. It is from not too long ago, but I actually can’t remember where I got the inspiration from. It must have been a blogpost somewhere. Life has to be a selvfølge (something obvious, literally: following its self), one does things because one has to. Because it is needed [...]

This post from 43folders.com contains a video with another interesting line of thoughts by Merlin Mann, who thinks about productivity, creativity and the caveats surrounding them. Merlin presents his ideas in a popular way, fast and often funny, but he is serious and dedicated in trying to find out the truth about his subjects. It is another [...]

Hope Gate, Québec ca. 1871, by Louis-Prudent Vallée There are many languages, many words. All spoken languages are prefect because they have been used for centuries. But sometimes there is a word in a language that seems to be unknown in other languages. I looked up the word prudent, as I didn’t know exactly how to define it. According [...]