www.michaeljmaguire.com Creative Technology & Technological Creativity

Thanks for stopping by, your precious time and attention are valued. Writing and creativity are gifts that those of us privileged with education and experience often take for granted. We should share these gifts.

Many of us engage in both those connected activities daily, creating emails, text messages, blogs, comments, websites, articles, videos, even books - we get creative and we write and make stuff. We also often forget just what a complex process writing is. Writing is really an under the hood form of magic, that extends, expands and challenges our conscious and subconscious minds. To write really well, you must be very talented, really well practiced, focused, lucky, inspired, informed, in form, appreciated, all eight or none of these things.

The only way anyone can learn to write well is to.... well.. write. Seems so 'wood for the trees' simple, yet there it is. Write and write and write and you may become a writer ! Writing is usually the initial building block of so many creative technology based activities and projects. The key to entertaining communication is creativity. Listen to what other people have to say about your writing and decide whether to accept or act upon the opinions and information they feed back to you... and you may eventually become a writer that is read by other people.

Not the advice I wanted to hear in my early teens when I started out completely clueless, and thankfully not the advice I received. I was told way back then that I had to learn a whole encyclopedia of rules and regulations in order to understand what ingredients, temperament and components were required to become a professional writer. Today's txt msg generation know that those oh so vital requirements are actually bullshit and the key to being understood is the aforementioned feedback by any other name. Today's gap between professional and amateur writer is wedged apart by money, information and opportunity.

I have been writing for over thirty years, some days I'm pretty good at it... other days.. (like today I hear you shout).. I just plain suck. But thirty years down the road, earning my living from writing and creativity, I am more aware that I still need to learn, I still need to improve. I want and need your feedback for that to happen.

This site is a test, its a test site in every sense, it will test me, test you if you want to become involved, test my patience with technology (yes even after all my eulogizing / evangelizing of it elsewhere) it tests my commitment to the destigmatization of failure, my embracing the fuck-up as a method of personal learning, my firm belief in the inherent goodness of intelligent and creative people and my preparedness to be very wrong about many things. This is not intended to mimic myspace and certainly not intended to become a veritable ocean of competing voices, opinions and styles where simple truths drown and common sense submerges in clambers for ego preservers.

This site is my personal journal, devoid of all advertising or commercialism, while I'm creating, writing, learning, studying and exchanging at UCD and elsewhere, I want to treat this particular website like a cross between an aspiration for shared workshop space, a closed community platform and an amoeba like ambition to do the correct and proper thing. All of which means I will confess to wanting to allow the site to grow organically over the next couple of months and years and see where it takes me & maybe us... or even just me. So welcome and thanks again for stopping by.