So I wanted to explain the project that is this site.
Waking up today, 3-18-2023 aka 2-4-3189(YOLD) - I realized what I was going to do for my Level 3 Improv class at the Nest Theater - the thing we have always wanted to do but for some reason hesitated to do, out of fear or discomfort or whatever.
Up until this point I sort of had settled on the idea of editing my unfinished and unnamed novel I wrote for Nanowrimo in November 2019. That is a project I have indeed started working on some 3 1/2 years later. But this morning as a dream faded from my consciousness involving being in a race by a river and getting left behind because I felt the need to ride my bike and lock it up. I had a moment of clarity or an impulse towards sharing that is overriding my tendency towards feeling like whatever creative personal projects I have are not worthy of promoting.
Essentially I decided that I would allow myself to exist on the Internet as Robbt Erisbright - and that I would finally create robbt.net a place to share the unedited fragments of creative writing, AI art, weird music, thoughts, reviews or whatever else I decide to put out there.
You see although I am a web developer by trade I have hesitated to create a strictly personal website for many years. I am someone with a strong critique of social media and parasitic surveillance capitalism it enables. I also desire a level of privacy or separation of my public persona from the legalistic bureaucracy of the world we are required to inhabit to pay bills, taxes and otherwise exist. This is probably because I have been a self-espoused radical and understand the political and/or social repression people can experience for being outspoken. There is also perhaps a tinge of cowardice/caution/paranoia that many people can go into this world without worrying about for one reason or another.
I have also been hamstrung by my own inner critic that tells me whatever I create is unoriginal, poorly or unedited and incomplete. This will definitely be true about most of the fiction I will share on here. I was a prolific writer who would write a page or two of a scene for a while in the early 2000s and I never felt confident enough to share my writing. I also felt like my pieces tended to lack a plot and were instead just fragmentary views of worlds that ceased to exist after I walked away from the page.
But doing taking classes and doing improv theater at the Nest and reading “ImprovNation” has lead me to realize that sharing our creative spark with others is a great source of joy. For many years I have just been a supporter of other people’s creative efforts building webpages for other people, while I let whatever expression I might share with the world stay hidden.
So this is my project. I plan to publish a bunch of “flash fiction” – short pieces that sit somewhere in the realm between a short story and stream of consciousness poetry. Many of them I’m reading for the first time in decades. I might also create some kind of “supporter” level that hides things behind a pay wall or friends-only website similar to “patreon” or ko-fi but I will host myself. This isn’t so much an income scheme at this point as allowing a level of intimacy and privacy and a way to experiment creatively without feeling exposed to the entire world.
As I revise, edit and share writings and other forms of multi-media content I will adapt try to deploy the IndieWeb philosophy of create once publish everywhere at some point allowing stuff to be re-adopted on the social webs, print, film or whatever while maintaining this virtual presence- robbt.net
At this point it merely exists as a vacant registration and a locally hosted Drupal site. By the time anyone is reading this I hope to have the site a little bit more public.
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