Scribtotum from Matthew Wayne Selznick

By one measure, my first blog posts under my own name went live on October 3rd, 2003 — twenty years ago today. Some kind of acknowledgement and reflection is warranted, right? Even… expected?

Well, it’s expected by at least a few people, since I asked my mailing list community, my Multiversalist patrons, and my social media friends what I should write about to mark the anniversary… and some folks were kind enough to offer suggestions. Because they showed up… I’ve shown up!

Before the First Post… If It Even Was the First Post!

My first blog post was a very brief announcement that I’d no longer be blogging as the persona of a fake music journalist (Carson Meunetti — a name familiar to some, perhaps…) on behalf of the band I was in.

Since that post (on LiveJournal, which this morning sent me a nice “virtual gift” to celebrate my anniversary on their platform, even though it’s been a looooooong time since I’ve posted there) was more of an announcement than actual “content,” it’s languished as unpublished for most of the last two decades.

My first post as myself that wasn’t me… explaining that I… was myself… went live a few hours later: a brief declaration that, when it came to the upcoming California gubernatorial election, I’d be voting Republican for the first (and only, ever, forever and ever) time in my life. I bet there are people reading this who didn’t even know, or long forgot, that a certain Austrian bodybuilder was governor of the Golden State for a time..!

But that post, or the few faux gig and demo tape reviews for Running Erin I wrote as good ol’ Carson, was far from my first writing on the web.

After all, five years before, in September of 1998, I launched one of the first “webzines,” the shared-world serial fiction magazine Sovereign Serials (ISSN 1520-6157). In addition to most of the stories, I also wrote a little column, which of course I called “The Soapbox,” an unavoidable title for a life-long Marvel Comics fan writing in a storyworld full of super-powered people.

A couple years later, I bought the domain name for MWS Media and set up shop there. For a while, it was written in the third person and featured my creative works, which at the time included solo acoustic shows at various coffeehouses, bars, and book stores, the e-zine Multiverse Magazine, a column or two (I really do need to dig in and recover those, and post ’em here for posterity…) and a software product I’d completely forgotten I’d released into the wild, Animal Factory, which generated animals for your fiction or TTRPG secondary world.

But eventually, in August of 2003, I relaunched that site using the MovableType content management system (it was free back then). Only when researching some of this stuff (thanks to the invaluable Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive) did I realize that my first blog post was actually on… August 20, 2003. (Embarrassingly, you’ll see if you click through, it seems I was also involved in some affiliate marketing scheme called FreeStoreClub, too, which, again, I’d completely forgotten about until I was, as the kids say, today years old.)

Whoops.

I guess that twentieth blogging anniversary came and went without fanfare… although I did post a Sonitotum episode featuring the author and poet Darius Jones three days later, so maybe go check that out…

What Makes a Blog, Anyway?

Soooo… look.  If you dig around on the old MWS Media website via the Wayback Machine, you’ll notice that the oldest article there pre-dates my first “blog post” by several months. So is this my first blog post? Or do we count the first post of the re-launched site (linked in the previous section) after all?

Arguably, a blog — short for, lest we forgot or never knew, web log — is a series of articles written in the first person, usually conversational in style if not personal in content, timestamped, presented in reverse chronological order, published on a web site, and available beyond that site via RSS (really simple syndication).

Additionally, albeit optionally, a blog has a comments section, and a trackback function. These two features turn the endeavor into an instrument of community: a collection of articles into a blog.

By those criteria, I’m gonna count that August 20th, 2003 announcement post as the zero point the next time I have a look-back, which I guess will be in… 2033? Wish me luck.

I’ll tell you what doesn’t make a blog: anything behind a paywall. That’s something different, despite what platforms from Medium to Substack might claim.

Blogs, and the bloggers who write them, are connected because they’re available on the open web and because they’re networked by reciprocal reference and commentary — what Nabil Maynard, I think, called isles of blogging, but I think of as an archipelago.

That element of open connection, of conversation, coupled with a willingness to be at least somewhat vulnerable and, if you’ll allow it, real, is what makes a blog different from a series of articles, or a newsletter that’s oh-by-the-way also available on the web (sorry, Substack, not sorry).

That’s my take, anyway. I figured this was a good time to plant that particular flag.

It’s not really what I’ve been thinking about as I prepared to write this post.

We’re most of the way to nine hundred words. Wanna get real with me? Keep reading.

Marking Twenty Years

Twenty years is a generation.

A lifetime.

I was thirty-six years old in October of 2003, two years married to my second wife and living in the high desert of Southern California in the second house (of two, so far) I’ve owned. We separated in early 2010; divorced a few years later.

Twenty years ago, I was employed by Borders Books and Music as an assistant manager, trainer, and interim general manager at the third of five stores I’d work at, not counting the five I helped open. I would leave Borders for good (save a barely-there six weeks in 2007) on Black Friday in 2005, at the urging of my then-wife, who wanted me to dedicate my time to promoting my first book. I’m grateful to her for that gesture of generosity, faith, and trust; at the time it was more than I deserved. It changed my life, as we’ll see.

Twenty years ago my first podcast episode was a year in the future; my first novel, two. Since then, I’ve recorded and / or produced over fifteen hundred podcast episodes and I have over a dozen titles published. Very intentionally positioning myself at the center of the Venn diagram where podcasting and independent publishing overlap (Brave Men Run was the first novel in history with a simultaneous release in print, e-book, and free podcast editions) set me on a course from which I’ve never wavered.

While I’ve been a freelancer to one degree or another since 2000, in 2003 I was doing mostly occasional developmental editing and critique work around my full-time-plus day job. My freelance career expanded when I left Borders, but I didn’t go full time until the fall of 2011, after I was laid off as a producer and project manager at a boutique digital marketing firm for movies and television, the last full-time “regular” job I will likely ever have.

Over the last twenty years I’ve moved five times, lived with three women; loved four. I’ve been with my current partner for six years; she’s shared her home with me for almost five.

My oldest niece was alive and twelve years old twenty years ago. She was killed by a hit and run driver in 2013 at the age of 22.

All of my parents were alive twenty years ago. My stepfather died in 2018, as did my biological father, who I never knew. I lost my mother in 2019, after many years of being her sole caregiver.

Many of my friends, a few of them collaborators, one I thought of as my brother, have gone in the last twenty years. None from “natural causes.” Cancer and diabetes and alcohol can all fuck right the fuck off.

Twenty years is a long time.

So…

It’s Not About the Blog

Thinking about this blogging anniversary, it’s not blogging on my mind.

I’ve been thinking about the last two decades.

Where I was.

Where I am.

Who I was. Who I am.

When a Writer Barely Writes

Here’s an excerpt of a little something I wrote:

…those characters live within my head, but that’s apparently a magic box, a tesseract with much more space inside it than the external parameters indicate. They have their own lives now, and they live them, albeit with frustration.

I’ve illuminated a portion of their lives, with a strong demarcation where the light begins and a shadowy blur where it ends, but in between is a moving spotlight, flashing, swerving, and teasing…

These characters are waiting for the lights to come on all the way. They’re waiting for me to fill in their memories.

Even now, writing this, I can see them walking around. They’re looking back at me, each in their own way imploring that I finish what I’ve started.

These ghosts want me to put flesh on their bones, fill in their outlines, firm up their footfalls. It’s my responsibility.

All the same… I’m concerned the life I give them won’t be rich as they deserve.

If I leave them in the shadows, there’s no risk… and no fulfillment for anyone.

Let’s drop the metaphors for a moment.

If I don’t write this book, I’m not a writer.

If I’m not a writer, what am I but a pretender, an overly sophisticated daydreamer whose intricate playthings dance in their slotted tracks around the closed infinity of my own head? One day, when that brain of mine stops sparking, those creations will dim, fade, and disappear.

I have an obligation.

Thirty-six-year-old me wrote those words as I was beginning, not for the first time, to write what would become my first novel.

It would take another two years for that book to be written.

My second novel came nine years after that.

It was another six years until my third novel was released.

It’s been three years since then, and the first draft of my fourth novel is less than ten thousand words in.

Now, to be fair to myself, I’ve written close to ninety thousand words of Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights: “How It All Got Started,” my free serial fiction project, since 2009; about half of that since 2015. That’s a whole other novel’s worth of words, and counting.

But to be honest with myself, that’s a whole other novel’s worth of words that’s taken me almost fifteen years to write!

And?

I haven’t written any fiction, for anything, not HDACN, not Shadow of the Outsider, since April of this year.

Why a Writer Barely Writes

Which is all to say that I read that flowery thing from twenty years ago about putting flesh on the ghosts of my imagination before they all fade away forever when I die, and I feel a little sick… but not surprised.

In twenty years, I’ve learned a thing or three about myself.

Such as:

• I’m an introvert, and I have always been an introvert. The signs were there in childhood, when my mother often had to insist I leave my bedroom and the elaborate play-narratives I constructed there with my dinosaur models and my action figures and go the fuck outside (in so many words). I need solitude to hear myself, and the ghosts. My characters and their stories are like the whispering departed that some folks believe can barely be detected in the deafening background noise of a cassette tape recording. They need silence to emerge. If there’s too much… noise… in my life or in my head, I have no space for the people whose stories are pressing against the inside of my skull.
• I’m prone to occasional depression. It manifests as irritability and brain fog, and what I’ve not-even-a-little-bit-jokingly called procrastinaction: seemingly meaningful activity that actually accomplishes nothing or, worse, takes the place of something and leaves me emptier and hungrier and sicker than before, like gorging on a meal of packing peanuts.
• I slip readily into co-dependency, and it’s probably also a way to feed the procrastinaction. “No, I’ll write later. Right now, I need to do that thing I think you need me to do that you didn’t necessarily ask me to do so I feel like I have worth and you know I love you!”

These things, and the many life choices across the last twenty years these things (in part) have wrought, have been a very effective enemy of a productive creative life.

I know this.

Indeed, if I could knock my thirty-six-year-old self upside the head with a sock loaded up with a little of the self-awareness I now possess, I would wind up and swing.

Many people would thank me. Some might even still be talking to me.

And I’d probably have more fiction out there in the world.

What I Think About When I Think About Twenty Years of Blogging

(Apologies to the memory of Raymond Carver for that very diluted paraphrase…)

No, this twenty-year blogging anniversary milestone doesn’t really make me think about blogging.

I’m inclined to look forward.

With not a little regret, and not a little self-loathing, and, characteristically, a good deal of righteous, defiant determination to Do Something Different Now.

As I wrote: I’ve learned a thing or two about myself in two decades; especially in the last.

I know that the bright-eyed, fierce cheerleader in my head is a paper tiger.

The real, actually dangerous and, so, motivational big cat prowling around on this anniversary?

Mortality.

I’ve been writing and podcasting and thinking about mortality a lot more, especially in the last four years.

But the growing inevitability of Death still isn’t enough, I’ve learned.

Not on its own.

The Part of the Retrospective Where I Look Ahead

The distance between thirty-six and fifty-six is, I think, much broader than thirty-six to sixteen. Random lightning strikes, dropped pianos, cars losing fights with trees, and carnivorous cells aside, one has a lot more calendars left to buy at thirty-six than at fifty-six.

Worse — and again, I’ll write for myself — at thirty-six the end of one’s life is barely more than a concept. There is still time.

I’m not so interested in observing another blogging anniversary in twenty years.

I’d rather have more books in the world.

I don’t quite know how to do that.

I don’t have any big announcements to side-load into this post; no back-door pilot to launch at the end of the flashback episode.

I do know that, as a creator, I’m not content. I know I’m deeply, profoundly dissatisfied. It’s been this way for a long time.

I know I’m putting my time and my effort into things that, certainly, bring art into the world or at least shine a light on it… but not only is that not enough for me, it’s starting to feel like the shadow-puppet of a worthwhile endeavor.

Procrastinaction.

Things must change.

Will Blogging Play a Part?

This blog, Scribtotum, is, as it says on the tin, where I “strive to offer my experiences as an independent creator with the perspective of a veteran beginner.” When there’s something to teach or share, I write a post.

There’s no reason to change that. I like writing these posts, difficult as they can be to suss out.

What should change — what must change — is how often I have something to post about.

The Part of the Retrospective Where I Wrap It Up

It’s been a privilege to write online — to blog — from the earliest days of the World Wide Web. Yes, so long ago, we used to capitalize the first letter of each word!

I am both grateful for, and proud of, the fact that I’ve helped make history as a pioneer in not one, but two, online phenomena across the last twenty years. I owe the life I live to indie publishing, to podcasting, and yes, to blogging.

It’s been something. It’s been the better part — and I do mean the better part — of my adult life to date.

Now?

I’m ready for even better.