There’s a lot of pressure on the first blog post. If I post regulary, it will soon be relegated to the murky depths of my archive, but I can’t help feeling that this sets the tone for my whole blog. In fact, I’ve left up the default WordPress “Hello World” post, as well as my own test post, in the hopes that it would take some of the pressure off this post. Rather than jumping right in with fully-formed posts, I could make my blog evolve, like a diagram of prehistoric creatures crawling out of the sea and growing legs. I could even post dozens of test posts, single-celled nouns becoming the land-dwelling quadrupeds of complex sentences, with commas and everything.
But I’m not doing that. I’m jumping in. It’s not so much evolution, but rather something more akin to a toaster being invented, and the next day becoming sentient and taking over the world. This may have been too many metaphors, and they may not have worked. Like when your sentient toaster eats your English muffin and then vengefully electrocutes you because no one ever taught you not to battle your toaster with a piece of metal when it’s plugged in.
That’s never happened to me, by the way. I’m acting like I know what I’m talking about, but in reality, I’m making my blog on a mattress of lies.
Which is actually appropriate, because I write fiction. Specifically, I write sci-fi and fantasy. Speculative fiction, if you want to call it that. I’ve accumulated a collection of promising (to me, anyway), partially finished stories about magicians and travellers, thieves and ghost hunters, park rangers and bards. People who don’t have a handle on basic life stuff, like making telephone calls, or who want to build fires in places where they’re not allowed to, like a space station. And everyone in the world who knows more about writing and publishing than I do says I need to have a blog, if I would like to sell my fiction one day.
That’s not the only reason I’m doing this, though. It may even be just an excuse. I put my first website online in 1999, when I was 14. I devoured all the information I could find on html, ftp uploads, stupid tricks you can do with Javascript, and how to make animated gifs. All this so I could share with the world such gems as new versions of the Pledge of Allegiance (one was to the Republic of Mr. Peanut) and animations about 12 frames long, in which a stupid little character based on my brother’s stupid friend birthed whole from my prodigious imagination basically lived the life of Wile E. Coyote, only without Road Runner. If you think about it, Wile E. Coyote’s life without Road Runner would be kind of pathetic, a string of incidents in which Wile E. orders dangerously malfunctioning items from the ACME catalog, for no reason at all, and never learns his lesson.
Anyway, my first website was something I had a lot of fun with. You’d know this if you saw it, because the whole thing was in Comic Sans. I’ve had a few websites and blogs since then, but they were always halted by my perfectionist tendencies. It would take me weeks to write a post like this. I would agonize over every sentence, which I have clearly not done here, as evidenced by the clumsy metaphors and the fact that I admitted to Comic Sans. Things only grew worse when I learned CSS and some basic Photoshop skills, because then I felt like I had the power to make things REALLY perfect.
I hope to create this website in the spirit of that first one.