Eccentric Flower:199903/blackout and fishbowl
From Eccentric Flower
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twenty-three march blackout and fishbowl I am not scared of success. I am scared of the overhead. If I write things that people want to read - and I have never lacked faith that I can do that, despite my moaning and wailing - then eventually people will come and read them. No matter how I conceal it, people will come. Every week, the hit count on this site goes up a little bit. This pleases me. It also frightens me. It frightens me even more with mouth organ, which is beginning to get a steady, devoted readership at exactly the same time that I'm running out of creative steam with it. I have never publicized either of these sites. If you ever see a listing for these sites, a link somewhere, et cetera, it didn't come about because of me. And yet - on the web, if you write half-decently and stick around long enough, people find you. It's not like the real world, where you have to have P.R. machinery as well. People find me, and the two reactions I have summarize my two fears: On this site, when I realize people are reading, my reaction is "Why are you here?" And that's not meant to be insulting - I'm just perplexed. How did you find me? If you stayed, why did you stay? What did/do you expect to see? What do you want from me? On mouth organ, my reaction to more readers is "Oh, god, what do I say to them?" Unlike this site, mouth organ is consciously built for an audience. Therefore the obligations are higher. I have a duty to write something that people will want to read. And that duty can only possibly get harder to fulfill as time goes by. Right now I am out of ideas for mouth organ. I have no takers for guest articles (not surprising, since we don't pay), no usable suggestions for new articles (usable = I think I can realistically write 2500-3500 words on the topic), and nowhere to go. Even if I sustain the creativity somehow, the site will grow to a point before the end of the year where the traffic will suddenly become expensive. And then I will have a new set of problems - how to defray costs. The site cannot take ads (it would compromise our articles, given the kinds of ads we'd get), member-supported sites Simply Do Not Work, and any other ideas (such as selling T-shirts) would require too much additional infrastructure. This is the overhead of success. - - - The Thinking Aloud webring is gone. If you want to see the list of sites in the ring, try Nibelung - most of them are in my personal ring, which I check daily. Thinking Aloud was a bad idea. A glorious bad idea, but bad nonetheless. Thinking Aloud was what you might call a "vanity webring" - a webring whose only criterion was my personal taste. It's one thing to proclaim The List Of Journals Columbine Likes. It's another to force all the sites in that list to put your own ring code on their pages - essentially sporting a banner that says "Hey! Columbine reads this site every day!" What kind of hubris is that? The fact that a handful of other people liked reading those sites is not relevant. There are better mechanisms if you want to see and experience my taste in websites. Nibelung was developed for exactly that reason - so people could share their own tastes with each other. It amazed me - and worried me, I have to admit - that Thinking Aloud took on a life of its own. Even though I said it was just a piddly little vanity ring, even though I said it was closed, I got three to five sites a week wanting to be in it. I hate saying "no" to these people. I hate saying no to anyone, but in this case it was made worse by the need to choke down my impulse to say "Hey, don't you know there are real webrings - webrings that mean something? Webrings that say, 'I've got good design' or 'I've got amusing writing' or 'I am a member of this demographic/group/clan' or whatever? All my webring says is 'Columbine reads me!' - which counts for very little." Besides, I couldn't add them to the ring and have even the last claim be true. I have reached journal saturation. There are plenty of good journals I don't read. I can't. I read too many already, and I also have a full-time job and a lot of fiction projects to do. And, as I said on my old links page ... sometimes I just stop reading sites for no good reason whatsoever. It may not mean they're bad; it may not even mean I've grown tired of them. But as long as Thinking Aloud wasn't just mine, as long as people had a stake in it besides me, it would have been very difficult to add or drop sites whimsically as I sometimes do. I don't want to hurt people. The project had become not just mine, but a lot of other people's as well. And that, I suppose, is the ultimate overhead of success that I dread. Loss of control. Once you succeed with it, other people start having their own expectations for it. And the more people see it, the surer it is that you will disappoint some of them. Of course, the counterpoint of that is that if I don't show you anything you can't be disappointed in it, but that's clearly no fun for either you or me. I am still trying to find the line between blackout and fishbowl.
© columbine |
