Eamon Byrne - writoro

Sign in Subscribe

Eamon Byrne

reading Finnegans Wake

It's the sort of book you might have on your shelf for thirty years but never read it through. A book you look at sometimes when reflecting on what it might be to be a great writer. It becomes a kind of touchstone for you. You're

the machine to live

HERE IS a version of a famous aphorism that will be forever associated with Le Corbusier: the house is a machine in which to live. He spoke it in the nineteen twenties, a time of the socialist experiment, the great aftershock, the explosion of the avant-garde, and later he died,

bluer scarce

A bird flew out of a tree. In the garden the sun came out from behind a cloud. The perfume from the rose hedge. He stood just beyond the wall. She looked down from her window. In the garden's day they sat on separate seats. Her father a

precursors of Mantegna

Light. And shade. Line and shape. Colour, form and perspective. Wall, wood, ceiling or canvas. Pigment in eggyolk or linseed oil. Stroked by brush or spread by knife. On small panels or plastered on vast spaces. All these problems to be worked over and solved. Then a commission from the

Why pagination matters

Pretty much all word processors in the market present content using a scrolling interface. This is a major difference between writing apps and reading apps. E-readers page their content, writing apps scroll their content. With no exceptions that I am aware of, true pagination is not offered to authors by

Markdown is terrible.

But what else is there? As Joe Armstrong (co-creator of Erlang) put it: "So if I hate markdown what do I like? Pencil and paper is best. Boots instantly." Then he goes on to give his preferred method: "For high quality text, I choose XML markup with