Signing Off For Awhile - 03.29.99

When I first started this site back about one year and 8 months ago, I figured that it would be sort of an experiment that would grow and change with me, as well as giving me an outlet for some of my writing and/or design ideas. What it became was almost a job (albeit, a job that I really enjoyed).

When I put up that first piece of writing, I had just moved into my first apartment about a month earlier. I was out on my own and I started to realize that after I got off work and got home, I actually had time on my hands to do something. Having done a website in college, I figured that I would sort of leap into things headfirst and see what would happen. I was really pumped-up about it and within the first week or so, I had updated the site three times, with quite a few pieces of new writing.

As the first few months progressed, I kept the edge to me and stayed hyped up about the whole process. I was updating the site 2 times a week (on Mondays and Fridays) with one new piece per section per update. It was almost one piece of writing for every day of the week and I was feeling decent about myself. The site was never anything to really look at, but I writing things at a prolific rate and hoping that people out on the web would somehow come across my site and find something interesting.

After awhile, though, because of some reason or a combination of several, I slowed down a bit and finally made the decision to only update the site once per week, with one new piece in the whatever section per week. I let my movie and music reviews lag behind, but always managed to get at least one thing up a week. On occassion I would get an e-mail from someone who had read something and identified with it or just thought to send me something for encouragement. It was a lot of fun and I went ahead and installed a guestbook for people to leave their mark.

At this point, I somehow felt the need to again post more writing than I had been and forced myself (whether I really felt like it or not) to write at least one new piece for each section every week. Although there weren't that many people signing the guestbook and I wasn't getting that many e-mails, there were enough people for me to try just a little bit harder.

The site started as something for myself, and although I wanted to get as much writing out as possible for others, the writing that I did was never really directed towards anyone else. I wrote my pieces as if they were directed towards someone (anyone), but it was still the actual writing process (just as it is now) that was what I was really after.

It was really hard for me to sit down and write some weeks, but I found that when I had finished typing something out, I feel a little more accomplished than I did before I had started. Even if the writing was really bad (and many times I had the feeling that it really was), it felt good to sit down and get those words out there to a possible invisible audience. It was part therapy, part routine, and partially some desire to have some unknown person out across the web read something of mine and find something in it that they enjoyed.

Now I'm at a point, however, where I feel like the best thing to do is stop. It's not going to be forever, but I really can't put a due-date on when something new is going to be up. It's not that I'm burnt-out on writing, but it has to do more with technology than anything else. I've just purchased a new computer and there are about 50 million different things that I want to try on it before I move on. One of the first things I'm planning on is a re-design of this site (or at least parts of it) and moving it to a different place (no offense to Geocities) where it has the chance to be seen a bit more. I've spent a lot of time writing over the course of the past 1.75 years, but now I want to try some different things.

And so I bid a farewell to the trusty Macintosh Performa 450 that I've used to type every original piece of writing on this site before sliding it into HTML and loading it up onto the site from wherever was handy. I'm moving into the realm of PCs and the next step is to get all the cool ideas out of my head and into a medium where they can be shown to others.

As I always manage to say in my About section, I thank you if you've read anything on the site and felt anything towards it at all (positive or negative). If you're bored, check out some of the older things I've written, and be sure to check back sometime in the future. Thanks again.

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