Unless you’ve dived deep into these writings you may be blissfully unaware that I am doing (and posting) a lot of words. I’ve written about writing at various points through this project, from explaining about this blog, to name dropping my other parallel projects, to lamenting my struggles with trying to get my fiction into a state of something bigger than some scribbled drafts. Whatever you’ve read, it’s probably not half of the story, but all you need to know is that I’ve been putting words on paper (digital paper, ahem) without break since leaving my government job, and that has been going on three and half years now.
Phew!
And with all that sitting in drives and blogs and files and all over the place, I had an idea and the inclination to do something with it.
I built a digital publication studio… which is not really all that much to do in the modern internet: a couple plugins, more words, some imagery, a payment gateway and a storefront.
As you are reading this, my shop has been online for a couple days.
Now look, I’ve committed multiple times in things I’ve written to not advertising on these sites. But when I write that what I mean to tell you is that I’m not going to pepper this site with third party click ads or do sponsored posts or dive into corporate collaborations.
On the other hand, every creative maker needs a way to sell their own wares.
My wares are words. My products have for a long time been (free) blogs that are not cluttered with paywalls or ad breaks or spammy experiences.
To supplement that I decided (like any responsible creative) I should turn those free blogs (still now and forever free) into something with a bit of added value. My storefront will start to have a collection of anthologies in PDF or DRM-free ePub formats so that you can download larger collections of posts to read offline, in a more coherent order, and will be yours to own forever.
So I lied. One advertisement is coming to this site: the occasional nudging reminder that you can support me and my sites by buying a digital download of my work. It’s the dirty side of creativity, but—and I’ve written this over and over, you can download an anthology and check—what’s the point of making stuff if no one ever sees it?
Terms FROm this POSt
- blog
- I admit, I am pretty old. And I started posting formatted words and photos online before the word blog had entered the common lexicon. Most people work in the medium of social platforms these days, but being both a product of my time and a stickler for content ownership and control, I still lean into and promote the idea that the blog (a content managed general purpose personal website) is the beating heart of the internet I once knew and loved.
- corporate
- Having worked in many desk jobs, I tend to think of the corporate mindset and anything related to it as a kind of collective brain of capitalism and the search for profit. It is a core piece of the culture, but personally I’ve found it to be the antithesis of creative spirit, and often use the word as a pejorative in this sense.
- government job
- I worked in local government for over a decade before escaping. Government work is not easy, though it is often portrayed as soft. It is, instead, rigid and suffocating for anyone who seeks any kind of individuality or creative outlet. There are always exceptions, but government bureaucracies are generally meant to be the silent foundations of society not outlets for creative expression or individual elevation. Comfortable and claustrophobic.
- paywall
- Not everything can necessarily be free. People need to eat. But the concept of a paywall often has a negative connotation: in that seeking compensation for a product, someone has been lured to that product, tempted with a partial or incomplete product, and then asked to pay money in order to see the rest. We all understand that stuff costs money, but paywalls have the vibe of something that feels like it was offered for free but the reality of the “wall” sets in when one is partially through enjoying the product.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
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