I'm unhappy. I have been arrogant, and my arrogance has brought scorn upon me. I have been naive, and ignorant, and willfully blind. I feel soiled. For I have thought of this diary only in terms of what it means to me, and how enjoyable I find writing it, and I have not pondered much on the attitude I have which is "If you write it they will come." I have thought of my place in the world of online diaries as minor but significant, and if that isn't willful blindness I don't know what is. I have been happy here in the minor leagues with my 200 daily readers and my 5-10 emails a day. I didn't even know it was the minor leagues, that's how naive I've been.

Oh, I knew other journals had much bigger audiences. All of them appeal to a much broader reading public than I ever will, and I accept that with equanimity. I've never been universally popular in person, and I never expected to be in print. I'm an acquired taste, I have a certain sense of humor, and I don't write about popular culture, politics, or the dynamics of my relationships. I've been thrilled with the number of readers I have acquired, and I've been mostly pleased about the work I've done here. I've enjoyed being part of an online phenomenon.

But last night I read Beth Campbell's forum thread on how people felt about her putting a donation button on her site, and I was shocked to realize she was asking for donations. I was depressed to see Rob has done the same. I went to Pamie's site and was disturbed by the blinking, intrusive banners of Chickclick with whom she recently signed a contract. Diarists are wanting to get paid for writing their diaries, and it makes me unhappy.

I'm embarrassed about my reaction. I don't have any beef with getting paid to write. I don't think it's wrong to make money from art, far from it. I buy books. I buy paintings. I enjoy being a patron of the arts. I just hate the idea that people I used to think of as a peer group are no longer content to perform as amateurs. I can't see that donation button, or that blinking banner, and fool myself that I am working at the same level they are. I feel like a number one chump because I am giving it away for free.

Where I come from, artistically speaking, art and commerce mix all the time. Fanzine fans frequently grow up to become science fiction publishers, editors, and authors. Some of them continue to participate in the fannish mediums, especially in the free-for-all that is Usenet. Greg Benford, much-published author and well respected physicist, contributes articles to fanzines, and he's not the only guy with a fairly famous real world profile who turns up in the amateur press. You can write for pay and still write for free; you can be a pro and and an amateur simultaneously. So why do I feel such a terrible sense of having been let down by the introduction of remuneration into the online diary world?

Fear, maybe. Fear of competition, fear of not measuring up, fear of division among the ranks. Don't think I'm not aware of the rich irony of this as the administrator of Archipelago. I'm the woman who singlehandedly challenged a community's concept of itself as a cohesive and loving unit by creating a web ring with an invitation-only membership. Plenty of people have felt rotten because they didn't want to apply for the ring in case I turned them down. Why should they have to be held up to my standards just to belong to a web ring? Who am I to decide who lives and who dies? Yet here I am, bemoaning a similar dilemma.

But fear is only part of it. I've always had a problem with the notion of selling my own artistic endeavors. At a young age I showed a marked talent for drawing. My teachers and my parents encouraged me by telling me I was so good I ought to be able to sell my drawings to Hallmark. My dad made a special effort to encourage me to put together a portfolio with the idea that I could become a freelance artist. I was flattered, of course, but I was also crushed. Another person would have been entranced by the idea, but not me. In my mind the equation was clear: if I wasn't trying to sell my artwork then I might as well just not draw. Creativity clearly wasn't a goal in itself to anyone but me. I was expressing my innermost self, and all anyone wanted to know was if I had ever thought of asking others to pay me for doing so. I felt besmirched by such questions, my innocence stripped away. To this day I don't draw much, not even for myself.

I believe this is playing into my depression over the money and diaries issue. I'm once again afraid that if I'm not willing to try to make money at my art then I'm stupid, or foolish, or going at things ass backwards. As long as no one upped the ante I was happy to play in the sandlot with the rest of the kids. Now that the financial reality has trickled down to the people I know and read I can't fool myself that we're all equally happy down here in the minors. We aren't. We never were. Some of us always did want to find a way to get paid for what we do all the time anyway.

Since those writers who have recently gone to banners and donation buttons have audiences three times, four times, ten times bigger than I do they are not, in fact, playing the same game I am. ISPs demand more money from big traffic sites, and that's no fun when it's coming out of your pocket. What depresses me is how easily I ignored the reality of that. I ought not to have been so shocked by big traffic sites asking the source of the higher ISP rates to kick in a little. It's voluntary. No one has to hand over their credit card numbers. It's not such a big deal, really.

But if I don't have the same kind of readership, and thus don't have to worry about those bigger bills and bigger administration problems, then maybe I'm not as good as they are. This is what is so depressing: not the mere fact of their larger audience but my realization that I don't want to strive for that kind of recognition, that kind of headache, that much contact. And if I'm not striving for that, if I'm not trying to play with the big kids, then by definition I'm content with the sandlot games and I worry that somehow that makes me the lesser writer.

What I'm so unhappy about right now is how bad that makes me feel. Maybe I should wise up and call it a day. I am never going to "get anywhere" because for me the writing and posting was almost an end unto itself. It's neat to get feedback, but I never worried about how much I was getting, or how many people signed up for my notify list. I felt bad when I didn't win any awards my first year, but then I won a couple and that was enough for me. I saw the numbers rising in an unbroken curve on my web tracker, and I was satisfied that I was offering a good performance. The creativity was pretty close to being an end to itself, although no one publishes on the Web without wanting an audience. I did want one, and I did want to be popular, and I still do. In fact, by my definition I am popular.

I think what it comes down to is I want the Web to be free. I want there to be an area where the public can post and read anything they damn well want to. Buy my book, buy the magazine my article comes out in, pay to hear me give a seminar on Lucy-ology if you want to patronize my art. But let there be one place left where I can be an amateur if I want to, where competition and advances and revenue per minute don't matter.

And if that day is gone for good, if that's the direction most web content is going, then I might as well take this site down. Because I gave up all my other artistic endeavors when I got so good that my choice was to either get paid for it and compete in ever bigger stakes, or be thought of as insufficiently ambitious and therefore derided and ignored as not good enough to compete. I am not giving up writing. I'll write privately, and to prove that I don't object to earning money for my art I'll publish that biography I want to write. But I won't play the money game with my online diary or anyone else's. The diary is the thing I do for free. My problem is I thought it was like that for everyone else, and my innocence has once again been stripped away. It feels just as bad as it did the first time.

I'm going to take a week's hiatus. I'll be back next Tuesday, August 1st.

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