So.
I finished a novel this year. How'd the rest of you do?
Aw crap. And there goes my resolution to be less self-absorbed.
Now that I've kicked down the gates, we might as well go all out, hm? Or not. If you do something more than once, does it automatically become a tradition or is it just some random twitch, a quirk of circumstance. I mean, what if I fully intend to do this every year and I get hit by a bus after I've only done it twice? Will people go, "I really looked forward to his tradition of writing a year-end column full of nonstop narcissism" or will it be something more along the lines of "I can't believe Dan let him do it twice in a row". Time will tell I guess although my mother will be glad to know I hope to keep dodging that runaway bus for yet another year. Although sometime you dive out of the way of the bus and right into the path of the meteor. Or something. Where was I going with this again?
To myself, of course. Right, right. How could I forget? As I write this it's not quite the end of the year yet and I really have no intention of rushing things but it's close enough that we can look back and see all the spots where I've gone terribly wrong.
Like writing that column. And that column. And, oh that one was particularly bad. And don't even get me started on-
Whoops, off-topic again. Won't happen again, I swear. And who really believes that? But in all seriousness, it's not really up to me to write a State of the Website column, since the website isn't really mine. But I can say that things are looking pretty good from where I'm sitting. The number of submissions has exploded over the course of the past year, judging by the amount of the stories that are getting posted every time we update. There was a point where I thought I would be able to review everything that was on the site, a point where only one or two stories were being published at a time. Now it's not uncommon for five or more stories to be thrown up at a time and if I'm lucky I can pick one and talk about it for a bit and maybe finish it in enough time to make the next update. It's just not feasible for me anymore to review everything on the site, regardless of what my original intentions were. These columns can take over a week to do, between reading the story (which yes, I do, contrary to what you might think) and putting down my thoughts in some resemblance of coherence. Multiply that by a bunch of stories and a work schedule that redefines what "random" is, I'm surprised I get as much work done as I actually do. If I tried to do everything I'd just be running on a treadmill and we all know what happens when you miss a beat on a treadmill. So unfortunately I have no choice but to skim, which bothers me because I know for every story that I read, I know I'm missing out on other tales that are of at least the same quality as the one that I spent six pages talking about in tedious detail. And I like to be complete. On the old AOL days, I was well known for reading every single chapter of your story, once I started I tried to finish and I would keep plugging away until I reached the end of the story or you stopped posting. And I rather enjoyed that reputation, as much as it made look like an utter madman. So to have myself bumping against the constraints of time is a rather annoying thing and something I could very much do without.
But I know, you're saying, whine, whine, whine. Get on with it already. I suppose there are worse things in the world than not being able to do all the things that you want to do. Like not being able to do anything at all. But I think we established earlier that my ego won't allow me to consider anything other than myself. That said, I do consider it a personal failing that I was only able to do like five or six columns this year, when last year I was able to crank out a zillion more than that, it felt like. It makes me feel unproductive and that's a terrible feeling to have, at least for me. I'm always terribly cognizant of time rushing by, even as I refuse to acknowledge that things are going way too fast and I try to cram every idle moment with something that I consider productive. There's a pile of unread books in the other room that could keep a shipwrecked crew warm for a full month if someone had some kerosene and matches and it keeps staring at me every time I walk in there. There's a million stories in my head that I have to get down because no one else is going to, dammit, and once I'm gone that's it. If they're not down on paper then maybe nobody will ever hear of them again. Although I always wondered if ideas are recycled, you know how with the laws of conversation and everything, how matter and energy aren't really destroyed, they're just changed. I wonder if stories are like that and all the stuff that I won't ever get to write down will kind of hover in the air and wind up in some other poor person's brain and leak into whatever stories that guy wants to write. I'm not saying that at the moment of my death some bloke over in China will suddenly and spontaneously start to write about Tristian and the Agents, but maybe elements of it will pop up somewhere else. There's a lot of coincidences in life and a lot that we can't explain. I doubt that would be the strangest thing in the world and it would be neat, to know at least that it will all continue somehow, in some form or fashion. Or maybe I'll just start a cult. Either way is probably equally likely. Of course, the flipside of that is the idea that I'm just siphoning off some dead guy's ideas from back in the day, that some poor soul invented the Agents and never got it down and I'm just feeding off the corpse of his never printed prose. We all write stories in our heads and they have to come from somewhere. But it's not real until you get it down.
That said, what I'm trying to say is that I never lack for things to do. There's too much else that needs to get done. I complain about having no time to get any "work" done and my family looks at me funny and says, "What work do you need to get done?". It's useless to explain, really. I try to explain to my friends that I have this column to get done, this chapter to finish, all of these things and nobody really understands. I want to experience it all, I guess, I don't want to sit around and play a board game or go out and drink, I want to see how far you can take your imagination and see connect to people, how much you can write before you wear yourself out. And maybe I'm falling into it too much, churning it all out when I should be enjoying life with family and friends. Because this time we get is all we have and when the voice is silenced it's for a lot longer than when the sound was there. And yet I sit there at family gatherings and feel utterly detached from it all, I go out with friends I've known for years and feel completely out of place. The problem isn't them, of course, it's me but I don't see it to be a problem. Sometimes I think I enjoy going to work more than anything else (well maybe not for twelve hours and maybe not for eight days in a row, but you get the idea) because it forces me to be productive, forces me to interact in ways that I'm not used to, stretch my feeble social skills to the breaking point and try to get something across. But instead I come back here, to the printed page, the blank expanse that no sound ever escapes from, to spew my thoughts onto it and try to say something, even if the chances are that nobody is going to read it and even if they did, I probably didn't explain myself properly. I scream and shout and rage and giggle in this space and dozens of others and in the end I'm just preaching to the back row. And that poor crew fell asleep a long time ago. I'll have to give them a refund or something. In college I remember one of my classmates talking about his difficulties in writing a paper because he could say what he wanted to say and argue it well but when he tried to get those thoughts down on the printed page it all became gibberish, he didn't know where to start. And I realized that I have the opposite problem, I can't explain myself at all in person, people don't so much talk to me as much as tolerate conversation with me for as long as they can bear. I was always under the impression that writing was the best way to express myself and now I wonder if I'm any good at that, if I haven't become so insular that it's just a dense web of text, impenetrable to anybody not sharing my brain. And if that's true, then what does that mean for those poor people that still try to talk to me? Sometimes I think they do it just out of morbid curiosity, and I'm just some exhibit, invited out only to see which fanciful quirk I'll display next or which bizarre thing I'll come out with, given enough rope. Some lackey in a cage, displayed for the moment for anyone to come around and see, but they'll readily move away when something more interesting comes along.
Geez, something's been triggering my latent paranoia these days. It's probably all you people out there watching me, watching every move I-
Ahem. Hold that thought for a bit.
Christ, I moan a lot. I keep waiting for my acquaintances to throw me off a bridge or something, if only so they can enjoy the silence for a little bit. Until I become one of the undead. The chatty kind. But I guess we'll cross that river when we come to it. So how did I do this year? That's the question I'm sure we all have. And if not, we'll get to it now. If I was grading myself on a scale of one to productive, I'd probably go with a resounding "Eh." I was able to churn out at least one column for every update, but last year I was able to write a column for every story (not that every column has seen the light of day, there probably isn't enough space on the website for that) and a lot of them I thought came off very well. This year . . . subconsciously or not, I did my best to make up for the lack of columns by pouring everything into each one. So, as everyone found to their utmost delight, the word count of each column was climbing up more and more with every update, until I would saturate the page with my sentences. I do actually like those columns, I tried to craft each one from a different angle and while I'm not the best judge of whether I succeeded or not, I did my best to make the feel of each one different so that you got a unique reading experience from every one. Your mileage may vary on how that went in practice but the idea this year was to do some deeper analysis, to go beyond critiquing the actual writing of the author and look at what they were trying to do and trying to say and see how that came across, if it did, and look at what I as the reader took out of the story and how I got there. And if what I took out was what the author intended me to take out. Because to be perfectly honest, Dan isn't accepting people who are totally green around the ears here, the majority of us are probably unpublished but to a good extent we know what we're doing and for me to point out every spelling error and congratulate you on how good your grammar is really strikes me as pointless. We're not the big leagues but we're not the amateur hour either, certain things are expected now. And what has always fascinated me in stories are the ideas behind them, which is probably why I always gravitated toward science-fiction stories. Because those stories, while not the only font of ideas in literature, are certainly overt sources of wacky ideas and different ways of looking at things. But there isn't much science-fiction on this website, other than what I drag kicking and screaming to my stories (how else to showcase my utter disregard for background research) and to be honest I haven't missed it at all. I've been impressed by the variety that Dan has been able to bring to the website, people doing horror stories and fantasy stories and regular genre fiction, every person doing their best to put their own little stamp on the world of fiction. Nobody is simply painting by numbers or throwing those feet on the ground and simply following them wherever they land . . . I wouldn't be able to do those six pages analyses of your stories if you folks didn't bring ideas to the tales in the first place and give me something to work with. Yes, sometimes I go a bit (a bit?) overboard and take the analysis in a direction you probably didn't expect and I would not be surprised to find that I overstate my point in the most inappropriately grand fashion as possible but unfortunately you people out there are the cause of it. So you really only have yourselves to blame.
It occurs to me that I really haven't said much in the course of this. The obvious answer is that this is nothing new, that I'm more quasi-amusing rambling than actual content but that seems like too easy of an answer. These days more and more it's a reflex for me to just duck behind the shield of a self-indulgent self-depreciation and I don't really know what it means. Someone recently commented that it's almost to put me down because I'm almost instantaneously ready with something to top it, a more destructive missile aimed right at my own head. But do I do it because I enjoy the easy laugh that comes with it, the knowing humility of constantly deflating my own self-inflated ego? Or is it just easier than engaging in actual human contact? I've come to believe several things about myself over the past few years, the insistence that I have little in common anymore with the people I know, the increasing feeling of being detached from everything, the sense that if everyone I knew went away I really wouldn't notice. It seems to me that these things may not be true and I may not be as lost as I've led myself to believe and it's all just a glorious feint, a design to make my life easier by avoiding all those things that make it more complicated. Or maybe this tedious self-reflection is the feint and it's just one last grasp into the thin air in an attempt to convince myself that I'm actually capable of honest emotion, not coached in an arch slyness, cloaking my feelings to the point that I forget what mask I'm supposed to be displaying for the world today. Perhaps I'll use my pharmacist's voice. That's always a hit with the senior citizens.
But wait, we have to connect it. Make it relevant. Let's yank a thread out of that paragraph and apply my own techniques to myself. Key words, then, key words. "Communication." I like that one. If there's one thing that I want to see this year as the site continue to evolve into whatever it's eventually going to evolve into (hopefully not a giant dinosaur that will crush our cities . . . that's always awkward) it's the site growing into more of a community, rather than a group of scattered people who tend to visit every couple months and drop some stories before heading out on the road again. Instead of the place becoming something of a loading and drop zone, I'd like to see it take some steps toward something a little more vibrant. The forum is a good place to start but more often than not it seems to be a ghost town (not that I'm active presence there, either but I do have a column on the site you might have heard of), with a brief flurry of activity from people making brief comments on the stories that they did read and falling silent again until the next update. I would love to see it become a more active place, with people trading off ideas and comments, working over ideas and working out kinks in their stories. Not that I'm saying every person should devote a week of their lives to overanalyzing five pages of someone's prose, but I'd definitely like to see a lot more back and forth between authors and audience. One of the things that I like quite a bit about being an amateur and being on the Internet is that you get the chance to develop your own following and you get to interact with your audience on a level that someone like Stephen King really can't do. If the man entered into a dialogue with all of his readers then he wouldn't have time to do other, more important things, like open the mail to all his royalty checks. For me, having an audience of two (the number varies depending on how much alcohol I have in me), it's rather easy and quite interesting to debate different aspects of the stories with like-minded people and that's something that the Internet has wrought and we really don't take enough advantage of. In the old days of the Phantom Realms, when my wrists were a little sturdier and my free time a bit more prevalent, every comment I made on a chapter would often unleash a storm of commentary as people debated the merits of it, tossed in their own comments, called me out on any crap I spewed, went back to clarify things and so on. And while that was a different situation, a group of people united by a common purpose (at least in the beginning), I don't see this as all that much different. Perhaps the forum isn't the best place to facilitate that kind of dialogue, it needs something like a listserv or some other e-mail based mechanism to really get things going, so that we can toss comments out to the group for further comment. The back and forth I had with Gabe last year, where he tossed out a comment and I responded to it, I really enjoyed that. I wish that happened every single time. And it's the kind of thing I'd really like to see develop somehow and maybe it does occur between the various members in smaller groups, just out of my sight. Maybe you all get together and talk about what an ass I am. Hey, at least you're talking. But I think something like that would further develop a sense of community, hopefully the kind that allows people to come and go as they please and not the type that becomes inclusive and shuts out newcomers. And definitely not the type that gets populated by all kinds of "buy my drugs!" type of spam (who is that guy anyway, can we get rid of him?), which is definitely the kind of thing we don't need.
However, I do think the script calls for me to alternate irrelevant website commentary with useless personal introspection with every paragraph. So pointless introspection it is. Right on schedule. For the record, I didn't bring up the above in some lame attempt to fish for more comments on my columns, to somehow beg for attention by including the website as a whole and avoiding the fact that I'm really talking about it. This time, I'm not. I swear. I don't think I'm going out of my way or stretching things when I say that this column is not the most widely read fixture on the site and that this particular column probably won't be read at all. Chances are, if you are reading this, you have plenty of elbow room in the balcony, if you know what I'm saying. Still, I'm haven't seen any hit statistics on any of the pages, so it's possible that I'm popular beyond my wildest dreams. But I doubt it. Whatever novelty I once had amassed a long time ago has since evaporated into a mere curio, an oddly shaped vase that you put somewhere out of sight, only to run across it every so often, in those moments when you're least expecting it, just long enough that you wonder what did I ever see in such a thing? before moving on to whatever it was that you were doing. I'm fairly sure the authors who are the target of these columns read that particular one at least once, for the experience. Everyone else? Not so much, I think. But any fault you might want to assign to that is totally mine. Either you haven't connected with the audience, or you're not talking to the right audience, it's never the fault of the audience itself. I don't see any overriding reason why a person would want to subject fifteen minutes of their life to this drivel, and thanks to the magic of the "back" button, you don't have to. However, this is the way I like to do things and I've been down the road of trying to guess what the audience wants to see and it's gotten me nowhere. Because what happens is they say, "Well, if you did it this way I'd be more likely to read it" and you do that and then they say, "It's not for me, but maybe if you did this" and you keep changing things and try to craft it to attract people. And in the end, the bottom line is they just don't want to read it. For the last few years, I haven't written for anyone but myself and have only been the happier for it. But those people who get all huffy and say, "Well who are they to not want to read my stuff" are missing the point entirely. If it's good, people will come. That's probably the best advice I can ever give anyone and it's not really that original and I'm pretty sure that I didn't make it up. But it's true. It doesn't matter where you hide it or how you cloak it or whatever tricks you play to make sure people don't read it. If it's out there and it's worth it, then the recognition will come. You may not get the numbers that Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy or that Harry Potter lady get, you may not get a hundredth of the fame that they get, and you probably won't get anywhere near the amount of money they get, but people will read it. And isn't that why you do this? To be read? To sit down and tap out something and when you're finished say, "Here's something I want to share with the world." It's possible "the world" might be only you and your family and the ten friends you can bear to let read the thing, but that's a start. That's something. In this world we don't always reward what we consider the best, often we have to sit there and watch as the books and the movies and songs that we consider mediocre are awarded the grand sales and the heaps of praise and we can only sit there and watch our favorite things gather dust on the shelves while other, perhaps lesser works fly like the proverbial hotcakes. That's just the way the world is, and the world, not that I need to remind anyone of this, really isn't fair. Oh well. This includes us. You get what you deserve and if your work is of sufficient quality to warrant the attention of the likeminded, then they'll find you. I'm content with that, if you are. You can be true to your muse (or vision or whatever you want to call it) and make lots of money or be true to your muse and be universally liked or be true and have both or be true and have none of that. The important thing is to stay true to it. If you're writing what you want to write, then you have nothing to worry about. If nobody reads the first thing you write, well, tough. Write another one and maybe people will read that. And if not, maybe the next one. You keep doing it and if the worst case scenario is that nobody bothers to read, then at least you have a body of work that you're proud of. Which is what matters. The fanfare can come later, if it ever does. But if you don't keep plugging away, you'll never get anywhere.
If you're waiting for some kind of wondrous revelation to come out of all of that, I'm afraid you're going to have to keep waiting. That was all I had. You've taken all I got.
So, this year. Looking at it, you want to ask, "is that all you got?" Maybe so, maybe so. There's really no way for me to sum up the year in one word, unless that word is "Skittles" but that doesn't make any kind of sense. Which we could drag into a clever metaphor but I have to be at work in an hour and there really isn't time to do that. How can we summarize? Everyone on the site wrote a bunch of neat stories, I wrote a handful of columns, some parts of which I liked, some parts of which I didn't. I didn't get nearly all the things done that I wanted to get done. But that happens. I don't regret the things I did accomplish, if that means anything. And I never missed an update, which is something, although I'm told a deadline well in advance so the amount of scrambling around I have to do is minimal. I did manage to finish a novel this year, a brief excerpt of which Dan was able to convince me to provide (like I'd ever deny free publicity, the conversation was probably like Dan going, "This is nice, can I use it?" and I went, "Sure, go for it." . . . we keep things simple) and I made a lot of headway on my giant novel in the first half of the year, before I started working on something else. I'm going to restart work on it in a few weeks and maybe this time we'll be able to chug all the way through to the end. I'm within spitting distance of a million words on it, which is both exciting and frightening, since I never imagined it would get this large when I started it. Big, I knew. Huge, I suspected. Gigantic, I really didn't expect. I'll probably have to pay people to read it or something when it's finally done. Or sell it as a multi-function doorstop. Or any one of a million uses for a book that's become too large for its audience and almost its writer.
Oh, but there I go. Discussing myself, when I don't mean to. Let's bring it back to the people, if we can. The year's over and you've all gotten quite a bit done. But there's still a lot more to do. The site's two years old and it's barely begun.
The year's over. But so what? That's the wrong question.
The right question should be: what's next?
Now you're talking.
Onward, then. Onward.
• MB
12.6.05
"There is a me you would not recognize, dear . . . call it the shadow of myself . . ." - Over the Rhine, "Latter Days"
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