Matthew Wayne Selznick

Over at mattselznick.com, I’ve been writing about consolidation. With friends, I’ve been discussing obligation, and habit, and best practices, right action, and how all those things shift and change with circumstance, energy, and self-knowledge.

Over here, I’ve been wondering if I’m putting too many barriers up — barriers between users and content, and barriers between me and my creativity.

I’ve been asking myself the question: what’s best for my creativity? How do I work?

Well, honestly, at ‘pert near forty, I’m still figuring that out (forty is the new twenty five.) Writing in 2006 and the first half of 2007 has shown me that some things work, and some things don’t. This “open novel” experiment isn’t working.

I don’t have a problem with the concept of sharing the rough draft, the raw spewings of “Pilgrimage.” I certainly don’t have a problem with sharing my thoughts and observations as I write. It’s the platform. It’s the extra steps in the flow, and the extra steps that will be necessary down the line when I try to translate a manuscript from WordPress or MediaWiki into a word processor or text file. Line breaks. Paragraph indents. Stuff like that.

Plus, let’s face facts: Over 100 people have registered to see the “semi-public” portions of this site, but the interaction I was hoping for comes from a very small handful of stalwart folks — the same folks who are kind enough to comment consistently on all my sites. I love you folks (you know who you are) and I’m confident you’ll go where I go — confident, and grateful.

So. Here’s what’s happening:

• I’m gonna write Pilgrimage in Open Office, or a text file, or something normal like that, with an outliner or spreadsheet to help out. Like I wrote “Brave Men Run.” Like I wrote “Reggie vs. Kaiju Storm Chimera Wolf.” It works.
• Pilgrimagenovel.com will redirect to a Pilgrimage category at my personal site, mattselznick.com — this is part of the Great Consolidation. I’ll continue to post about the process of writing this book, and I continue to encourage you to comment. This will happen probably before the first of July 2007.
• Naturally, the need to register will disappear. If you want to keep up with my life and times, as always, you can subscribe to the newsletter — and I hope you have, or do.

I feel a little weird turning my back on the original deal — writing in public. Still, I gotta hope that what you all really want is for me to finish the book. That’s the goal here, right? So thanks for bearing with me while we tried this out, and thanks for understanding now that I’ve realized it was a misstep on the rocky road of Matt’s Productivity.

The Great Consolidation continues!