 Ashlands By Nikulina-Helena I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Why write? In an age when people are gawping at tweets and memes and videos and pics, why put ink to paper? Do people actually read anymore, or am I just living in a writer's delusion? I think about this while I write. I think about it while editing and rewriting and going through the rough and the rigour of publishing. It is a lot of work, and quite frankly exhausting after a point, so why bother? I think about it all the time when I'm at my Joe job. I work and I come home and write, and I do all the other things a person must do. Why add to my own strain when it would be so much easier to just do the get-me-by? Why write? What the frack do I get out of it? I mean, it's not made me rich (not even poverty-line if I tried to live off it), and it feels sometimes like writers nowadays were born into a ridiculously illiterate era. So many people, so little interest in the glory and the genius of the written word. Just the clickety-clickety of banality on a web gone stale. Out of ideas, out of spirit, out of nothing more than the queasy urge to consume and steal power in any form. Writers and artists, we aren't interested in those things, save in they afford us enough to keep going, to keep creating, to keep admiring what is wonderful in all acts of creation. I find readers, and writers, and aficionados of the absurd. Then I'm reminded why I write, why I create. If only to cackle as we simmer and screech in Hell. If only to play the trickster one more time. If just for one more chance to weave a spell. For those reasons and so many like it, and for the people out there who are strange and thoughtful and looking for something more, I keep at it. When my resolution to keep at it is exhausted, and I want to give up, resolve myself to the doldrums and the humdrum, I am reminded of what I once heard in my dreams. It is Madness of which Evolution is constructed, not Reason. To Evolve is to Become the Unevolved World's Lunatic. What greater reason could there be to keep creating than that?
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So I was told in rather sweetly understated terms from my publicist that my website needed work.
She wasn't quite so direct nor blunt (her advice was super supportive and constructive), but I read between the lines. I stood back and looked at what I had, and made that "Who farted?" face. It no longer worked for me. I've had this website in its current incarnation for nearly five years, and it was time for it to get a face lift. Plus, given my new novel Screens will be coming out this year, it felt like a good chance to up my game, to bust out a new look and feel for a new adventure in publishing. So I've brushed off the cobwebs, reworked the graphics, and am working diligently to prop up my interactive fiction section just as son as I can. It feels good to get my hands dirty and get this site shining a bit. I'd gotten a wee bit complacent, but my publicist's ever-supportive advice and guidance got me off my duff and back in the game. |
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