Wednesday, February 15, 2006

The 33 Magazine March '05 Quarterly Report!

Three months into the experiment, March and my first quarter as a publishing magnate are in their closing hour.

It continues to amaze and perplex me how hard it is to write well. I've put down a lot of things here already that I am less than satisfied with, and there would be even more of it if I were less restrictive with what I actually do let get put down on the page. I can take a positive view of this, that I'm pushing myself into more difficult, tackling things I'm unsure of how to handle. It's too easy to rant about politics, religion, and philosophy (at least it is for me) and though I have been happiest with the writing I've done relating events from my personal life, my goal here is not to write a journal. From there it's exactly one step to becoming something horrible that rhymes with "frog" and must never be mentioned again.

Unholy neologisms based on irregular contractions (do you call a hat rack a track? A boat hook a thook? Gah, don't get me started) aside, I think I am working towards more personal account and more fiction in the coming issues. The former because I'm practicing here and you gotta write what you know, the latter because it is where I most want to develop. I've got a dogged streak of the essayist in me, and when you decide to mostly exclude religion, politics and philosophy from the table that's a tenuous basis for composition. I'll continue to hold forth, no doubt, but I want to push into uncharted territory.

I'm not going to dissemble, as a financial experiment it's almost a disaster, though I'll certainly come out ahead and I am having fun with the NO LONGER AVAILABLE benefits... but it just isn't particularly sustainable. Ah well, first and foremost you gotta do it for love anyway, though I am having to devote less attention to the writings for this and more to other options, and the volume of writing over the first three months has reflected this shift. My main reaction is still surprise and gratification at the great generosity of a number of my friends and family, so I can't call it a dissapointment.

I'm still hoping more people will get into REPLACED 33 ASSOCIATES LINK (SOON TO BE DEFUNCT). What could be easier, you email me whatever you like, boom, it's online in a couple days. Maybe judging everyone else's thirst to have their text available for all the world to read has led me to an exaggerated view of the attractiveness of this option. Comments are also sort of a bust, I never would have thought it would be easier to get people to pay than to respond, but there it is. I've got more patrons than comments, and half the comments are mine. The failure of the interactive? Maybe I just need to be more provocative. Any comments? Ha ha.

More to come.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

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