From the Introduction: "This project began with a simple idea - how long can I write without stopping? I didn't set a time frame for how long I had to write - only - how long can I write without stopping - mistakes and all? How long can I resist the temptation to go back and fix the misspellings and all the other errors that are likely to occur when writing in this fashion? It made perfect sense then to start Addition with a maxim I'd been throwing around a lot at that time - one which I'd been trying my best to apply to life every day (and still do): "if it's not adding, it's subtracting." So, that's what I did. I opened with that line and just kept going as quickly as possible with as little regard for punctuation - grammar - etc. as possible. The objective was to remove the filter I normally use when writing so that I could let my insides out without trying to shape them at all - to let them be whatever they became in all their beautiful imperfectness - to let life's randomness and unpredictability shine through on the page in real time by playing the keyboard like a piano player improvising on a riff. Unfortunately, I did stop once (for a few minutes) and I did edit a little immediately after completion but I stopped myself from further editing when I realized it would defeat the purpose of the experiment and would also ruin the uniqueness of the imperfections. I believe everything happens for a reason - in life and art (subconsciously and otherwise) - and so I decided to leave it as is - to accept the imperfections as a part of the piece - imperfections that somehow ended up flavoring the piece in a way that fixing them would have diminished. And during the writing process - I came up with a few terms to describe the type of writing drill this project had become: 'Wordeling' or 'Now-Writing'. Both are accurate descriptions but I like 'Wordeling' better. There are no periods in life - no exclamation points - no paragraph breaks, etc. Life is not a perfectly grammatical sentence. It flows as it is - exactly how it comes out - misspellings and all. There's certainly no time to go back and correct all the misspellings anyway - and even if there were - even if we had a chance to - we'd end up spending more time editing our mistakes than creating new sentences and paragraphs. And who's to say the misspellings aren't spelled correctly in the larger scheme of things anyway - in an alphabet with different grammatical rules we don't quite understand yet. In the end - this was my attempt at creating art that imitates life in all its beautiful imperfectness - because - after all - how lucky are we that we get to participate in this infinite mathematical symphony of addition and subtraction. Addition is one installment in a continuing series of writing exercises I've started which include (as of now) four other works: Then Now Later, U, Addition, and a collaborative linking haiku project entitled Linking - which was written mostly via text messaging with a friend (Joseph Eugene Davis). Besides being writing exercises - these projects (I've come to learn) also function as psychoanalytical tools similar to inkblot or word association tests. Without a doubt I've found writing to be very therapeutic and one of the main reasons for this seems to be that it allows us to 'get out' things from the inside that we may not have any other way to get out. And this simple act of getting things out and putting them down somewhere (anywhere) instead of leaving them inside our heads to spin and jump and circle and fester and multiply (as they see fit) is where the therapy happens. And not only that - but to put them somewhere that we can view them in a different light - on a piece of paper or a computer screen - allows our conscious mind to view what our subconscious is up to - to view things that we are otherwise unaware we're thinking about."