Well hi!
Call me JP. I'm a middle-aged cishet honkey devil (or, if you prefer, a straight white man) living with my spouse, L, in beautiful Portland, Oregon. I'm glad you're here!
People who've worked (or lived) with me know that I write like a fish drinks water. I probably wrote 2000 words before lunch most days at my former job, which was uninteresting and which I will not be discussing on this page. (I am currently writing a novel instead. Bad timing, I know, but I have a chance and so I'm taking it.) I've decided that this Neocities site can serve as a public place to post some of the missives, lists, guides, and observations I've been in the habit of writing down for my own private enjoyment for about as long as I can remember. If you're interested in text content, you're in the right place!
My original idea for this site was to post only my "Free Trash" book and story reviews (this page is currently inactive, but you can have a glance if you like). These are short reviews of professionally-published texts that are, for one reason or another, (legally) free for Americans to read online. Usually these will be texts that are firmly established in the public domain, such as those found at Project Gutenberg. In other cases, they may be stories or excerpts from more recent authors who've chosen to make their work free to the public. You can read more about the idea behind this project at the link above. I stalled out on this when I managed to lose about 2 years of preliminary work on it--thanks to one of my ancient laptops finally frying itself--but I would very much like to get back to it when I can.
Since I first created the site and discovered my lost progress, I've considered all the other (nonfiction prose) writing I crank out, and I've now decided it will be ideal if I publish some of that text to this site. That way, the things I find most interesting and/or useful will all be in one place! Here's a partial list of what I'd like to set up on this site, eventually:
That's hardly the full scope of what I'd like to post here, but as for my "creative writing" (prose fiction and some poetry), I'd rather save it for submitting to professional markets, though it's been a long time since I was last published (I have submitted poems for publication in small literary magazines twice; I was published once). Still other things I write simply aren't ready for prime time, as the saying goes - not that I'm going to stand on perfection as a posting requirement, of course. There's just a wide range of imperfect content to pick from; some of it is good enough, but a lot of it really isn't. As with any other form of creative expression, cranking out mountains of garbage is critical to the process of coming up with bits that are worth sharing.
I am something of a tortoise, in terms of personality - I move slowly and I take my time with most things. That includes this website. I am an unskilled web developer, to put it mildly, and though I'm generally quick to pick things up, I also just don't have a huge amount of time to devote to this site. Between these two factors, you should expect Free Trash to come together very slowly - but come together it will! I'm determined of that. Anyway, thanks for visiting. I hope you'll come back now and then to see what progress (if any) I've made on bringing all this text to you in one simple, ad- and tracker-free place. Until then, take care of yourself, and don't forget to mask up whenever you have to be indoors with strangers (COVID is still out here killing people every day) or outdoors at a protest (state-sponsored goons can't get good results from facial recognition tech if your face is covered).