Are you still

Are you still doing that online journal? Dan asked me over lunch
at Take It Easy, a good short-order Thai place on 17th Street.
I had promised Dan a month or so ago, that if I took the
new position as a literary agent (a job that was offered
only after I made it known I was applying for an acquisitions
editor job at my old publishing house, a job Dan had tipped
me off to), Dan would be my first expense-account lunch
client.
I told him that the journal was
dormant. Sure, I still write in my notebooks as I always have,
and any number of entries could be transfered and posted, but
that was never the point of this site anyway. I told him what
I’d discussed with Sarah a month or so ago, that this journal
had at first represented a form more free than that of my ezine. I’m very pleased with
and proud of the collaborative nature of the ‘zine, and I’ve
even managed to stop obsessing about deadlines and schedules
and instead just update the site with good material and announce
it when there’s enough (something I always envied about the
way shacker runs the
birdhouse). The Pavic
story we translated anchors and justifies episode 15,
but I digress (as I did not over prawn coconut curry
yesterday).
I told Dan that I now contemplated
taking the next step, shucking the rigors of the journal form,
and simply creating a space where I would feel free to post any
new stuff I put together. Sort of a Christian’s Corner, offered
Dan. Just so. You’re really doing this backwards, aren’t you?
said Dan. I was taken aback. Most people, he went on the explain,
start off with the free-form personal website – here are my poems,
and so on – and sometimes decide to make it more structured and
turn it into something like an online journal. Only very few
actually put together a web publication. Or portal, I joked.
Well, I went on, I would never have put it that way, but it
strikes me that you’re exactly right. I have done it backwards.
I kind of skipped some of the usual steps. It’s your inner web
child, said Dan.