It's midnight on a warm Friday night. The stars shine through a veil of clouds. Frogs croak in the yard. And I sit at the computer, putting the finishing touches on another site update. Another few pounds on the great monster.
Don't get me wrong. I love my sites. Always have, and hopefully always will. Sometimes, though, when I'm looking at what I've somehow created over six years (has it been six years? Eight, counting the Realm), I wonder how I managed to come up with it all. 500+ individual pages. 34 Skyhaven species/variations to date (25 in the Lair, 9 in the Hunt.) Over 400 reviewed books, and counting. At some point, it stopped being a simple accumulation of ramblings and became a monster, taking on a strange life of its own. Certainly, even over six years, I couldn't possibly have concocted this huge, sprawling beast, could I? I can't even string two chapters together reliably in my own writing, and yet somehow I've been weaving a world of words without consciously realizing it, surprisingly coherent considering the sporadic nature of its origins and growth. Maybe I am more of a writer than I think I am, if all this crawled from my mind at some point or another.
What really astounds me, though, what really makes me think of my sites as something beyond my own making, is that they exist at all. I'm rather self-conscious about most of my writing. My own mother doesn't read anything I write. Seriously - she won't go near it. She doesn't disapprove of writing (despite preferring "Fluffy Bunny" stories to my usual not-so-sappy style), but she never reads mine. Every so often my sister or father get to read my stuff, incomplete as it is, but for the most part my fiction never leaves the house. It always needs something - better characters, a tighter plot, more chapters, fewer chapters, an ending, a beginning - before I can call it "done" and show it to the rest of the family, let alone the rest of the world. So to look at the sprawling navigation trees of my sites in FrontPage, to see the hit counter at Skyhaven Keep crawling higher, to read the posts in the guestbooks and the occasional e-mail, to stop and think that all of this is visible to anyone, anywhere, with a computer and a modem... this can't be all my creation. Somehow, somewhere along the way, an invisible entity must have attached itself to my computer. An invisible monster crawled into the hard drive and found a place to live, calling itself a website. There it sat, growing fat like a leech, ingesting the occasional minimal input, creating a great virtual nest of pages and links, and there it lives to this very day.
At least it's a nice monster...
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2 comments:
I've found it easy to expose myself via computer rather than in real life, because although it's a larger audience, it's an invisible audience. Gathering slides, filling out forms, presenting them with shaking hands to a publisher is all so very real, yet this 2D medium... in my mind I'm all alone in my den working on the computer.
You are a great writer, don't talk yourself out of publishing your work.
I agree with Jade. Don't talk yourself out of it; talk yourself into it. After all, isn't it a little selfish to keep your great stories to yourself? ;)
But, yes, it's a lot easier to do it on the web, I know. The anonymity is freeing.
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