Welcome
Hi, I'm Rian, the person behind Blotted Ink. I'm a writer and entrepreneur; sometimes I'm both.
There are few things in this world that I love more than writing. I love interesting problems, interesting people, and I love when they come together on interesting projects. My early days in professional writing were in journalism, and after that I transitioned into medical and technical writing, where I've been ever since. I've been fortunate to get to do a lot of innovative work with wonderful people.
Like most curious people, I have diverse interests. Consequently, I've written about a great many things covering a lot of topics, formatted to suit many purposes. I've written business plans, small business grant proposals, in-depth technical articles, long-form journalism, promotional copy, and other things that don't fit neatly into any one category.
The best way to know if we're a good fit for each other is to take a look at my interests, and read through my writing philosophy. If we overlap, we'll probably get along pretty well, which means you should contact me. If something is listed here, it means I've done quite a bit of work in that niche. Unfortunately, I can't show you a lot of this work because it's covered by NDA.
If you're like me, when you're thinking about buying a product, you skip right to the user reviews on places like Amazon or NewEgg. That means you'll want to head over to the testimonials page.
Resource scarcity and engineering
- Hydropower
- Nuclear power
- Solar energy
- Greywater reclamation
Technology
- Software documentation
- Functional specifications
Health care
- Physiology
- Infectious disease
- Psychopharm
- Internal medicine
- Comparative effectiveness research
- Public health and epidemiology
Economics
- Microeconomics
- Macroeconomics
- Public finance
- Health econ
- Environmental econ
- Statistics
I'm familiar with a broad range of software products and suites. I'm as comfortable using Mac OS X as I am using any flavor of Windows. I've also played with Linux (Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu), and taught myself several programming languages (Python, C++, and I'm working on R). I've done data analysis using SPSS and Excel.
Other stuff
When I was in pharmacy school, I got tired of [this phenomenon]. You health science people know what I mean: you've got a document full of red underlining, even though you're sure that 99% of the words are spelled correctly. You have a few choices: click "Add to Dictionary" a million times, ignore the errors and hope everything's okay, or buy an expensive medical dictionary. Well I got annoyed with these sub-optimal choices and created a fourth option: LexisMed, a freeware medical dictionary that anyone can download and use.
After I graduated, I was asked to come back as an alumni coach for my university's federal reserve challenge team. I think I learned more from the students than they did from me. This is the kind of shared-learning, give-and-take interaction that I love best.
I'm quirky. I have favorite words the way most people have favorite foods. I get the same thrill from writing that an engineer gets from solving a hard problem. Writing isn't just something I do; it's part of who I am. I can't not write.
I'm a member of the American Statistical Association and the American Medical Writers Association.
Send me an email or give me a call, and let's talk!