In an article for the now sadly defunct Metajournals project, the Mighty Kymm demanded any potential journalist examine their motives, or their ideas at any rate, before barfing up their lives all over the web. Your journal may end up as a hairball if you don't think about what you're doing before you begin. Quite right. I, for instance, knew exactly what I was doing when I began keeping a diary. I did it to prove to my old friend Nigel Richardson that I could, too, create a decent web page so he'd have to admit he was wrong to imply that my pages were fatuously bad, and kiss my feet in craven apology for doubting my ability to insert content into my site.
He didn't kiss my feet, but he did approve of the diary since it was his suggestion. At any rate, the transistion from writing fanzines to writing online was no big deal. My basic motives for both were the same: write well, get people to read it, bask in praise. Beyond that, I wasn't too worried about presentation. I just picked a name, whipped up a readable design, and started writing. Kids, don't try this at home. Better yet, don't feel obliged to learn how to write on the 'net. Write offline, then put your best efforts on your web page. It's okay to practice first.
One popular device used by new journalists to get themselves psyched up for exposing their every thought and to-do list is creating a theme or persona, such as "imaginary friend," or "gothic babe," or "Gen-X Kerouac." Themes are great if they are meaningful to the creator and are thus a natural framing device, but otherwise they're not germaine to the business of writing. A theme won't help if you haven't got anything to say. I almost said, 'anything interesting to say,' but as we all know that mileage varies quite a bit. Lord knows there are plenty of diaries on friends' favorite journals lists which I find tedious or banal.
I don't have an overt theme for this journal. It's a collection of my writing, and I have a particular style, but you'd be hard pressed to come up with a one-word description of the contents. Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed that I haven't used it as more of a forum for disseminating my ideas about life, but I'm unaccountably shy about offering my opinions on important issues of the day. Well, alright, if you must know I don't usually have any. I try to be topical once in a while, I really do, but what interests me more is creating an illusion of structure to my life by writing it down (okay, barfing it up) in small, digestible chunks, laying out various strands, and attempting to decipher the auguries.
What an indelicate metaphor. I think I'll talk about something else now.
I had an excellent time at dinner with Terry and Jennifer, even if I did talk about myself at impolite length. The restaurant had the most misleading name I've ever run across: there was nothing remotely related to flying saucers inside the Flying Saucer, unless you consider the ancient Etruscans to be descended from visitors hailing from Alpha Centauri. The food was quite good, and we squeezed in close to three hours of quality time before I had to catch the train south. There is something deeply satisfying about meeting people you know instantly you will enjoy talking to for years and years if given the chance. I do hope they move out here.
It occurs to me that by the end of this year I will have met more than a third of Archipelago: Ceej, Diane, Blunt, Eric, Meghan, Al, Elizabeth, VJ, Terry, Kymm, and Helen. I already knew Nigel, of course, without whom, possibly, only not as (cf. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Making Book). These links, by the way, are not guaranteed to be good after 1998. People change domains, rename sites, or drop out like flies so I'm not going to try to keep up with link decay.
NB: Happy birthday to my favorite composer, Ned Rorem, who turns 75 tomorrow. I'll always be grateful I discovered his Paris Diary when I was 18 years old. He got me excited about modern composition and American composers, to the perpetual bafflement of my music professors who favored dead Germans over living locals.
