Colin Wright's Blog, page 38

Takeoffs and Touchdowns

Taking off in a plane is one of my favorite things in the world.

It’s a moment ripe with possibility; the act of becoming airborne compresses you further back into your seat even as it hurls you forward. You spiral upward into the clouds, first tucking away your landing gear, then gaining altitude, then setting a course for someplace new.

Touching down on a runway can be equally exciting.

When the wings change shape to slow your forward motion, the landing gear descends, and the massive mechanis...

Inherited Silver

Walking into a friend’s apartment not long ago, I was struck by the casual elegance of the place. The color scheme was mellow but invigorating, the wall of books passionately pruned. Every piece of artwork was obviously hung with intent, and every bit and bob on every shelf was carefully curated. The place was an aesthetic and functional masterpiece.

How strange it would have been, then, to compliment my friend on the quality of the silver candle holders she’d inherited from her parents. Piece...

Practical Pedestrians

We all have ideas about how things should be. How the world could be a better place, if only x, y, and z.

Unfortunately, in most cases these ideas are tested only in the laboratories of our minds and fail to move beyond the dry-erase boards of conjecture. All the wine-sparked discussions and rage-laced manifestos in the world won’t change a thing if no one ever makes manifest the concepts they contain. Walks an actual walk, rather than endlessly talking the theoretical talk.

Even if the practic...

A Better Version

A Creative Act

We’re told that artists cannot be business people, because that would be selling out.

We’re told that business people cannot be artists, because that would be idealistic.

This wall we imagine between the two fields is bullshit.

Building things is, by definition, a creative act. Conceiving and making manifest a business or product or methodology or idea is inherently imaginative. Inventing a way to make money from what you’ve built — to make your work sustainable economically, while also allowing...

Coffee with the Other Man

This is a short story pulled from my most-recent fiction collection, Coffee with the Other Man, which focuses on relationships and is available on Amazon for $.99.

Brill wished the world had a face he could punch. Or balls worth kicking. He was certain he’d heard a story once, about some sort of creation myth that someone, at some point, actually believed. The myth involved testicles and a massive penis and something about creating the world with the ejaculated seed of a god. The details were...

Mastery is a Double-Edged Sword

I spend at least an hour a day answering questions about my life and work.

Travel, publishing, self-education, branding; the emails pile up and I love that I’m able to share what I’ve learned with other people so easily.

It’s not uncommon to see someone who has achieved some degree of mastery (or even just competence) in a given field spending a good deal of their time answering questions. Work your way up any learning curve and you’ll find the ratio of people who can learn from you to the peop...

This is What I Do

I’ve never been a fan of convention.

It’s not that I’m intentionally trying to throw myself off the well-worn path: It’s more that I find growth and happiness in the ditch alongside the trail, or in the woods away from the guideposts that will ostensibly tell me how to get where I’m going. I know I’ll get where I need to be, and following such markers increases the chance that I’ll end up at a destination, but not my destination.

This mode of operation has led me from challenge to challenge, ne...

I’ll Never Know

I’ll never know what it’s like to be starvation-level poor, wondering where my next meal will come from, and if I will, in fact, have a next meal.

I’ll never know what it’s like to be so hooked on a substance, so truly dependent on the chemicals it causes my body to release, that I’d do anything for another fix; anything at all to avoid the inevitable shakes and pain and depression that overtake me otherwise.

I’ll never know what it’s like to be morbidly obese, because of genetics or my own hab...

Tethers and Change

Each and every city has a color palette. Sometimes that palette is meaningful, and sometimes it just is, but I’m willing to bet Santiago’s has some deeper meaning. The prominence of reds and earthy yellows and sooty blues are too consistently thrown over an idealized white that I imagine must have once represented something clean and modern and Westernized, but now leaves most buildings with a not-unattractive rusty undertone that I find quite pleasant, to be totally random.

There are still bi...