Most Likely to Take Over the World

Rejected for Tweet the Meat — not sure why, as the one they chose that went up a few hours ago makes no fucking sense what so ever.

Anyway, new submission to Culture Now went out a few hours ago, on the topic of singularity. It started out humorous, but I think I lost the tone somewhere around the talk of humanity driving itself to extinction, and machines basically stepping in only to stop us from taking the rest of the planet (and the machine’s resources) with us. It probably won’t be selected; I’ll post here if it is.

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It’s unseasonably warm today, the sort of sick, sticky humidity that rots your lungs with every breath, weighing down your chest like lead. Nuala, our Birman cat, lays under a chair as the sun slowly moves across the floor; she scowls at the coming sun, then pulls herself from the floor and skulks to another, shadier space. By the end of the day, she’ll be under the sofa.

I’ve been doing some research on zombies, viral and bacterial infections (I think viral is more interesting, and works best with zombies, as rabies — the disease zombism is based upon — is viral) and human reactions to zombie situations. The poll is still open if you want to participate and weigh in on what you’d do in the moral quandary presented.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on some flash fiction, to get back in the habit of writing in general and horror writing in particular. There’s a 50-word story up at Hyper Short Stories and I just sent off a 140 character Twitter story to Tweet the Meat. I like writing flash fiction when I’m getting back into fiction/creative non-fiction because I find having to express so much in so few words is really helpful for self-editing, to get sentences tight and concise (as I’m given to verbosity) without going into terse, Hemingway-style prose.

And now, with my research and brief writing done, it’s time to unplug for a while, kick back with the <i>Secrets of the Dead</i> episode I Netflixed, and then read some Fitzgerald. Oh, and later, to find a gift for my mom. I was thinking of just making a children’s book for her entitled “I Can’t Do Anything Right!” in which little Trisha learns that she, in fact, CAN do things well if she just tries and applies herself rather than just throwing up her hands and screaming “I can’t do anything right!” when something goes wrong, which my mom, Patricia, is given to do.

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I suppose, as is the nature of the internet, that I should make this first post some fumbling attempt to seem challenged by the entire idea of writing online, or about myself, or about myself via a public forum with such immediate feedback as this. Usually, the posts involve some sort of amazed acknowledgement about how incredibly different, novel, fascinating, etc. all of this is, how I’m not sure what I’ll use this blog for, but I’m so glad you stopped by to read it.

The problem with such cliched first posts, for me at any rate, is that I’ve been doing this a long time. Before there were blogs, tweets, and social networking sites, people paid private companies money to host their websites. They downloaded and installed FTP clients, bought books (or downloaded and dissected source code from pre-existing sites), and coded their own websites. Journalers or diarists, as they called themselves, then uploaded their entries using the FTP programs onto their private web hosts’ servers, and voila. Several hours later, their most intimate thoughts were published on the internet. Of course, as the whole purpose of publishing one life so publically is attention, they created newsgroups, webrings, and message boards where they could collaborate and commisserate. There was even an annual conference, JournalCon, to gather us from all parts of the world to discuss what we have done and what this all could mean for the future.

I attended the first JournalCon, in 2000. I was member #40 on the WebRing Online Diaries. In 1995, I was one of a handful of diarists. I had journal on a GeoCities page (and still have a stock certificiate for Yahoo! in my parents’ basement somewhere — a token for early adopters), then a page hosted by my email provider, and when that grew too large, I began paying for my own hosting and in 1998 registered my first domain: bitterfame.com

The idea was that I was going to be a writer, even though fights with the high school editors at my alma matter’s newspaper and literary magazine all but guaranteed my rejection. So, I turned to the faceless masses of the internet for validation of my writing, and I’ve been here ever since. The domain was sold out from under me by my first webhost when I missed a month’s payment. So  I migrated to LiveJournal. Then to my own domain again. In the meantime, I worked on pieces that found their way into online magazines in the early days of internet publishing: milleniumSHIFT, RavenElectrik, and BellaOnline. I was also picked up by a start up publishing house to write a few pieces for anthologies of teen internet writers; the publishing company went out of business in 2003 and the books are out of print, though I do have a copy or two in my living room.

So, being a part of internet writing and publishing from it’s stumbling toddler years, I don’t feel amazed at the new technology — I’ve stopped writing my own HTML code because I never stopped to learn stylesheets, but I’ve kept up-to-date on what technology is out there. I do not feel awkward or faun awkwardness because to do so would be disingenuous to the fact that to nearly 300 daily readers in the 1990s, I exposed my tender, gawky teenage growth spurt and angsty rebellions, of which there were many.

So, instead, I’ve written something of a meta post. There will be more like this, because it is who I am, and how I came of age in the digital age.

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