The last time I wrote here was a couple of years ago. I didn't mean to let this much time pass, I was actually writing a lot but never published anything here in my personal blog. What I did instead was build a site and start publishing texts there.
On August 14th, 2021, I published my first post there. Some friends and I began publishing more frequently and even started recording a podcast. Unfortunately, some personal issues got in the way and we had to stop recording.
A few years went by and I didn't want to let this project die. A lot has changed in the tech world since then, AI being one of the biggest shifts, so I decided to move away from the static site I had and actually build a proper system to publish texts there.
I did just that, it's an MVP, but El Librero Negro is already live. I've been working on adding more features, and I'm planning to release them over the next few weeks, and I know this is going to be a long journey but one that is worth the effort.
Where It Really Comes From
If you go back to where this all started, writing has always been one of my many hobbies, but one that I kept letting slip away. One of the things I have always struggled with is procrastination, and I knew that if I wanted to actually write more, I needed a dedicated space for it, and I needed people around me to keep me accountable. That is why from the beginning I wanted to invite friends who also like to write to join me in this, because I knew that doing it together would make it harder to abandon.
But beyond fighting procrastination, there was something more personal behind it. I wanted to leave a record of the way I think, somewhere I could come back to years later and see how much I had changed, or how much I hadn't. What I believed, what I was wrong about, what ideas I was carrying in a particular moment of my life. There is something valuable about being able to trace your own evolution as a person, and writing felt like the most honest way to do that.
Then Something Shifted
At some point I also stopped using social media, not because I made a big decision about it, but because it slowly stopped being worth it. Everything became ads, and content designed to keep you scrolling, and feeds that had very little to do with the people you actually care about. The connection it promised had been replaced by something completely hollow.
That made me think that El Librero Negro could be something more than a personal journal or a space to fight my own procrastination. It could be a place where real connection, the kind that happens when someone writes something honest and another person genuinely responds to it, could still exist. Not because an algorithm decided they should meet, but because the writing itself brought them together.
I don't want this to be yet another place where content is ephemeral and disposable. I want ideas to take root here, to grow, to outlast the moment they were written. I want creativity and human expression to be the reason people come back, and the reason a community forms.
I know there are already platforms out there for this kind of thing, Medium, Substack, and others, and they are great for what they are, but they are built around a different purpose. They are optimized for reach, for monetization, for growing an audience. And there is nothing wrong with that, it is just not what I am trying to do here. El Librero Negro is not meant to become a newsletter empire. It is meant to be a honest community of poets and authors who write because they have something to say.
Poetry, the main form of writing I started with, is a good way to express my own ideas, and I want to continue doing that but now with a greater purpose.
A Personal Pushback
In my professional life I also work very close to these ideas, in a space where thinking about what it means for human creativity to thrive is part of the everyday work. That experience has only made me more certain that there is something genuinely worth protecting in the way humans create, and that it requires us to intentionally build spaces where it can happen.
El Librero Negro is my personal version of that. It is me believing that a human voice writing something true is worth more than anything generated to fill a feed. It is my small, stubborn pushback against a world where AI is producing content at scale and where the things we make with our own hands and hearts are being treated as inefficiencies to be automated away.
What I Hope It Becomes
As I grow older I find myself more and more drawn to let my creativity point the direction I want to go. This project is part of that. It is a place I am building for myself, for my future self looking back at who I was, and for anyone else who feels the same pull toward something more lasting, more human, more real.
I'm excited to share this with you, because this is something I have poured my heart into. I hope people find it, I hope they find each other here, and I hope that together we can build something where creativity and a sense of belonging are reason enough to keep showing up, one text at a time.