When I was around nine my idea of a great weekend involved having my parents take me to the bookshop so I could peruse the children’s section. I’d pick up something from The Babysitter’s Club and any other book that caught my attention as I largely based my selections on the covers. As soon as we’d get home I’d choose a book and read until the sun went down, so engrossed in the words that getting up to turn on a light was too disruptive a task to carry out. I’d moved from Spain only a year earlier, and I have no doubt that my reading obsession had a big part to play in my learning English. I began keeping a journal where I recorded the very important things that go on in a nine-year-old’s life, in a language that wasn’t my own. My thought processes now incorporated this borrowed language, through which I was framing my world. Soon, the reading and writing were really an extension of each other. The more I read, the better I was able to express my ideas.

Nearly 20 years later I am sat here writing about why I write, borrowing from George Orwell. But I am not a writer. I am only immensely curious, and it has remained that the best way for me to make sense of my experiences, both external and otherwise, is through writing. I write to think. I write to bring ideas down to words; to pull everything apart and reconstruct the remains as I learn; to express what results; to document and remember. Underlying this all is clearly an impulse to create and transform what is already there.

I have been writing online since the early 00s. I’ve not kept a record of it all, so I am starting from scratch here on miscmoon.com until whatever comes after the internet finally gets here.

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• Featured Photo > Alexander Graham Bell’s Journal. In the 1890s, after inventing the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell became interested in aerodynamics. He began experimenting with tetrahedral box kites, documenting the entire design and trial process in a journal – a mix of words typed up, hand drawings, and photographs. The entire document can be found here.]