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About Me

Words are my passion. I make my living as a wordsmith—a writer, editor, and proofreader—and as a photographer, computer guy, and occasional drummer too. I work in English, which is probably the world's most versatile (and infuriating) language. These days, I've cut back on freelance work because my other jobs and my family keep me busy, but I still take occasional writing, editing, and other freelance jobs.

The main page of this site is my journal, a weblog, where I write about whatever I want to write about each day. It's the focus, but there are a lot of other things here too.

In particular, you might like to read some of my essays, view my photos, or listen to some of the free music I've made and posted here.

Rates: what do I charge?

That's the most common question I get from people coming to this site and interested in hiring me. The question is simple, but the answer is "it depends." My regular rate is $75 Cdn per hour for writing and editing work. If you want me to compose and record music for you, that depends on what you need and when you need it. But often it's easier to quote a flat rate for a project, or to set a cap, or to estimate, or whatever. So e-mail me and (if I'm available) maybe we can work something out.

Other stuff you should know

Aside from that, I:

• am Canadian, living in a suburb of Vancouver (a lovely city).
• am married (since 1995, to the best friend I could ever have).
• am the father of two girls (and a stay-at-home dad much of the time).
• was born three weeks before the first moon landing (which I cried right through, my parents tell me).
• am a language geek (which means I sometimes read dictionaries for fun).
• am also a musician who records and releases free podsafe music—and you can hire me to write and record stuff for you too.

My degrees mean you can theoretically call me Derek K. Miller, B.Sc., Dip.A.C.N.F.  I would avoid that if possible, however. "Derek" works just fine.

Between leaving university and getting married, I was a full-time professional rock-n-roll drummer and singer for about two years. (Even though I studied classical guitar when I was a kid, I've pretty much completely forgotten how to read music.) I still play and sing on the side, and make some decent money at it.

The rest you can find out on my background and expertise page.

Why good writing is important

Written language might be our greatest achievement. Without it we would have no Shakespeare, of course, but also no Great Wall of China, no theory of natural selection, no quantum mechanics, no constitutional democracy, no television, no antibiotics, and no footprints on the moon. No Internet either.

I think a tool that powerful should be used properly. William Strunk, in his classic book The Elements of Style, wrote that:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

I agree with him. In fact, good writing is most often invisible. The best written words, whether on paper or on a screen, are a direct link to another mind, like telepathy.

Really.

Read Chaucer or Dante, Austen or Dickens, Toni Morrison or Annie Proulx—their stories come from inside their heads right into yours. Read the Talmud or the New Testament or the Koran, and some would say you read the mind of God.

Good writing in the real world

It's not all so highbrow, though. Read the memo management just sent around. You may wonder why they'd bother wasting paper reminding you that coffee stir sticks can clog the sink, for instance. But if they wrote that memo well, you know they've noticed the problem (the clogged sink) and would like people to do something about it (not drop stir sticks down the drain).

Good writing isn't easy. Even though a billion people may speak English, only some of them can write. Of those, most do not write well.

Whatever your business—publishing a magazine, creating computer software, or building cabinets—you need good writing. Better writing can attract more customers, make you more efficient, and solve problems.

Explore this site if you're interested in the kind of stuff I do.

About This Website

I originally put the precursor of this site together starting in March 1997, as an experiment, and a way to learn Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), before I had any way for people to see it over the Web.

Since it was a learning experience, I wrote the HTML code from the ground up with the very limited text editor provided with the Mac OS: SimpleText. I discovered it was a convenient way to learn HTML without any help from whiz-bang site tools, so I really understood what was going on.

It wasn't sufficient for long, though, and I soon came to use some of these whiz-bang (well, maybe semi-whiz-bang—I was still working in raw text, after all) tools:

• BBEdit ("Bare Bones Edit") - I began with BBEdit Lite 4.0, a very nice freeware version of the amazingly powerful HTML and programming text editor BBEdit, said at one time several years ago to be used by more webmasters than any other program on any platform. Later I upgraded to the full version of BBEdit, and kept upgrading when I discovered what a great program it is.
  
  
• Firefox, Netscape (formerly Netscape Navigator, then Netscape Communicator, now just Netscape), Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and Safari - I have to make sure this site actually works in a web browser. As I mentioned on my main page, though, I don't care which browser you use, and I don't have any particular preference myself. Even text-only Lynx works on my site (yes, I tried it).
  
  
• GraphicConverter - a fabulous shareware program, by Thorsten Lemke of Germany, for working with almost any graphic format you can imagine (without hogging resources like Adobe's Photoshop, which I also used a bit).
  
  
• It's hard to make file transfers sexy, but Panic Software's Transmit does comes pretty darn close for an FTP client.
  
  
• I do most of my web and other work on Macs, with my main machine being a 1.25 GHz eMac I bought in early 2004, supplemented with an 800 MHz iBook G3 from work, and a six-year-old Power Macintosh G3 I got in May 1998. For awhile I also ran a G3-upgraded PowerBook 1400, which I've made wireless. Sometimes I use Windows PCs for testing.
  
  My faithful old Macintosh Centris 660AV (circa 1993) gave up the ghost in 2001, as did the Power Mac 6100 I found to replace it. We now have a Power Mac 7100 (vintage 1994) for my daughters to play with, but it's not even on the Internet. I also have a Mac Classic and a Mac IIsi kicking around, plus a Mac Plus sitting on a shelf.
  
  
• I've moved totally from the old Mac OS to the Unix-based Mac OS X on my main machines, the eMac and iBook. My Power Mac G3 is barely up to the task of dealing with the new operating system, but even on that computer it has many benefits and certainly looks cool. My older machines (the PowerBook and Power Mac 7100) continue to run Mac OS 9.
  
  
• Ah, poor Nisus Writer - Nisus Writer 6 was what a word processor should be: powerful, not too big, customizable, and chock-full of the kinds of tools writers and editors really use. Nisus had some decent HTML tools too, plus some very weird ways of doing some things, but once you get used to them, the whole package makes sense, so it used to be my word processor of choice. The new Nisus Writer Express isn't bad, but it has to evolve somewhat before it's really ready for heavy-duty writing work. I'm forced to use Microsoft Word more than I'd like.
  
  
• The HTML code on this site meets either the HTML 4.01 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Transitional (or Strict, when I can get away with it) specification, so it should, in theory, work on darn near anything at all. I've been using stylesheets for font control since 1998, and since 2000 in this site. Since 2003, I've started to take them more seriously, and over time I use HTML more for plain markup, and stylesheets (a.k.a. CSS) for layout and presentation.
  
  
• Despite occasional snafus, I'm generally happy with JaguarPC, the Texas-based company that runs my web and e-mail server. They took over Aletia Hosting in the summer of 2002. Long before that, in 1997, this site was originally hosted by AngelFire, a nice company that provided free (really free) website space, but began to put up annoying pop-up ads whenever you go there. The site then moved to Telus, my high-speed Internet provider, with domain redirection from Domain Direct, part of the Toronto-based TUCOWS Network. I moved over to Aletia, then Jaguar, because I needed a lot more server space than Telus provided for free. In late 2005, Telus annoyed me as a long-time customer, so I switched to Shaw cable broadband.
  
  
• Free or inexpensive web services I use here include Blogger for my home page journal and newsfeed, Blogrolling for the links list, Atomz for site search, HaloScan for comments and TrackBack, Extreme Tracking for visitor statistics, Morten Frederiksen's syndication subscription service, and the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML and CSS validators to check the web page code.

The 1997 website content limitation of 200 K at AngelFire (yes, 200 kilobytes, smaller in total for the whole site than some of the individual images I now have here)—later extended to a much larger 5 MB—was actually great for learning HTML and web design: it meant I had to think seriously about what is really needed here, and take care to make my graphics as small as I could. That, in turn, made sure that my pages loaded quickly for you, although they are getting a bit bloated nowadays. I try!