I never thought I was particularly good at writing about science and science-related things. I always felt as though there was someone who knew more, someone who could convey my ideas better than I could. I also felt as though it was a relatively new niche. I discovered quickly that I had been mistaken. It is for these reasons that I am no longer going to be writing about science and related interests.

While writing for polyscience.org, I always got the most enjoyment from writing about medicine. Specifically adding commentary to news articles written by journalists whose first area of study was certainly not medicine. In the meantime, I’ve also picked up quite an interest in business, and so it only seemed natural to marry the two ideas.

Thus, On The Pharm was born. I’ve been writing there for a few days, I can honestly say that writing for it does not feel like work. Indeed, it’s more fun than anything else, probably because 1) it’s easier and 2) I don’t have to learn so many ideas from scratch like I did when writing about science as a whole. I can focus on my niche, and that’s what I want to do. I also like the look of the site much better. So without further ado, here is my latest work-in-progress:

URL: http://onthepharm.net
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnThePharm

Some stuff will be technical, some will be fluffy, some will be business-oriented, and some of it will be tongue-in-cheek. And all of it will likely be informal. I prefer to talk in my posts as though I’m talking to a person, and I hope that comes across, unlike here where I pretended to be an omniscient narrator. I’m writing for it every day (so far), and I have a small backlog of material from the last two weeks, but I’m slowly clearing it out.

I can only hope that it’ll find a niche of readers so I’m not listening to myself echo in cyberspace, because isn’t that what every writer wants? Readers?

[tags]writing, On The Pharm, Pharmacy, medicine[/tags]

There will be more tweaks in the near future.

I have decided that I want to write for myself again. Not because Ars is a bad place to write and hang out — it’s not, by any means — but because I miss creating something that’s truly mine. As you probably know, I use WordPress to do my publishing here and on my personal blog, and one of the plugins I use is wp-cron in conjunction with another plugin to send me a backup of my database every night. I’ve missed seeing it grow little-by-little. I mentioned on my personal blog back in September that I was reluctant to give up writing for myself. Well, the pull back towards doing my own thing has proved stronger than my desire to be paid for my writing and have a huge number of readers. That’s the entrepreneur coming out in me, I guess.

I don’t regret my time writing for Ars at all. I learned a lot while I was there about doing a thorough job writing and researching. Having a much larger readership forces you to alter the way you write and think about things. Jonathan and Jay are great guys — I don’t regret sharing space with them at all. Truthfully, I wish I had a partner here at polyscience to write alongside me regularly as an equal “owner” if you will.

Anyway, starting today I’ll be back writing for myself, here on polyscience.org. Which I’m very excited about. I don’t intend to give it up again anytime soon.

It is with a small amount of sadness that I’m saying goodbye to polyscience.org. I will leave the site here as it stands now, with comments still open. (I get email notifications of new comments so I’ll still reply.) I accomplished more here than I ever really thought I would. I learned quite a lot about a great many things, and I’ll be referencing some of the posts that I wrote here in my journal entries for Ars. When I say I accomplished more than I thought I would, you have to understand that most of the projects I start start well, and then fizzle out in about a month. You see, I’ve got a fantastic first gear, but when it comes to doing things for the long-haul, well… I’m not the greatest at consistency. I am surprised and pleased that I ended up having several full-length features. I didn’t think I’d ever see the day that that happened without someone holding a gun to my head.

It was nice to have my own sandbox to play in. I’m a little depressed because I won’t be able to write longer features like I used to here. I am pleased, though, to be writing under Ars’s “pirate” flag for lack of a better term. I will be free to speak my mind to a much larger audience. I will have to elevate my game, though, and I know that. More background research, more review time before I click the publish button, as recent comments by Hat Monster have shown. And this is fine; I look forward to the new challenge. I’m sure I’ll get flamed plenty often by people who know more than I do about a given subject — that is simply the nature of the game when you write about such a broad field like “science.” As I said in my very first post, I am a science enthusiast, not a scientist.

Some closing stats for you all. All of these are figures from July 3 up until now.

• 17,638 page impressions
• 156 comments and pingbacks (more comments than PBs, though)
• 152 posts (including this one)

And an immeasurable amount of pride. :)

What is this site about?

Well I love science. I’m what you might call a science enthusiast, and I’d like to share my love of science with the world. I’m not an expert, nor am I an amateur. To call myself one or the other would be a discredit to the amateurs of old and the experts of today. Nonetheless, I like to think I know a little bit more about science than most. That could be my ego talking, but I think you have to have something of an ego to write something that anyone can read and criticize.

What can be found here?

What you will find here is anything science-related, ranging from pure science to the impact of science on society. Mostly the former, but some of the latter. Some posts will be more in-depth, and some will be more blog-ish where I quote something and post a link to something that I thought was cool. Some philosophy as it relates to science will also be covered.

The subject matter will likely be diverse. I’m interested in almost everything: physics, medicine, computer science, and it’s likely that I’ll even post something chemistry-related at some point as well. (The horror!)

What is my background?

I’m currently working on my Doctor of Pharmacy degree (PharmD). You might think this isn’t very conducive to knowing much about the more traditional sciences like physics — and you would be right. Nonetheless, I spend a lot of my free time (of which there seems to be very little) reading books on cosmology and other subjects. I am weak in math: you won’t see my pontificating on anything other than cutesy little basic math things, because I do not enjoy mathematics, nor am I especially good at it. (But I’m not bad at it either.)