Logic Gates and Language

I used to debug timing violations by day and collect favorite words by night. Eventually, those two selves found a way to write together.

I found this passage in an old blog, written when I was still debugging timing violations by day:

I live in Seattle where it rains a lot so there is plenty of grey sky that is conducive to bouts of reveries, a fitting place for a practicing engineer who is overly fond of words. My favorite words used to be iridescent, loosely, and peal. They were replaced by melancholy, pleasure, chiaroscuro, and Michaelmas. I prefer Moore over Mealy state machines, dark chocolate over milk, tennis over baseball, baths over showers, Michael Innes over Ross McDonald, Fitzgerald over Hemingway.

Reading it now feels like receiving a letter from a former self—one who already knew she contained multitudes but hadn't yet learned how to live with them.

That woman was “overly fond of words,” even while designing ASICs. She collected favorite words like other people collect vintage postcards, watching them evolve from the bright simplicity of iridescent to the complex shadows of chiaroscuro. She organized her entire world in careful contrasts and preferences, as if mapping the logic gates of her own identity.

What I didn’t realize then was how much those two minds would need each other.

Engineering taught me that every system has constraints. Poetry taught me that constraints—meter, form, even silence—can be beautiful. When I debug code, I follow logical pathways until I find the break. When I write, I follow emotional pathways until I find the truth. Both require patience, precision, and the willingness to start over when something doesn’t work.

In my novel, Many Earths, Fiona struggles with this same duality. She’s spent years believing she had to choose—that being logical meant abandoning the lyrical, that success in STEM required silencing the part of her that noticed how light fell across her cubicle walls during late debugging sessions. When her doppelgänger appears from a parallel universe where she chose poetry instead of engineering, Fiona has to confront what she gave up—and what she gained.

The thing is, I’ve learned that the split between “logical” and “creative” is largely artificial. The best engineering solutions often come from intuitive leaps. The best poems often have mathematical precision in their structure—like the metered, luminous work of A.E. Stallings, where form becomes a kind of architecture for feeling. Both require you to see patterns others miss, to find elegant solutions to complex problems.

My favorite words today are diffraction, aperture, and resonance—terms that belong equally to physics and poetry, describing the shifts in perspective that happen when you're willing to see the same thing from multiple angles. The web still offers amazing possibilities, and this Substack has become what I hoped that old blog might be—a place where both minds can coexist, where the engineer and the poet don’t have to take turns but can write together. Often, the most interesting work happens in the space between what we think we're supposed to be.

From Seattle, still lost in reveries. Until next time.