A true note

I called this website ‘Notes from the Peninsula’ with the intention of posting personal thoughts and mixing in reports from a character on a quixotic quest on the coast of an imagined peninsula. The latter hasn’t happened. Instead, I’ve continued to post mini reviews of horror films under the guise of my Dario Argento project and the made up social media challenge 31 Days of Black Xmas.

That’s partly because I don’t want to publish fiction in the same loosey-goosey way I post about my life and the films I’ve seen. I consider blog posts and Twitter Bluesky to be ephemeral. They are a way to process things. They will never get pulled into anything with an ISBN. Stories have more weight to them, at least in my head, because the publishing industry, competitions, submissions, all that, has always considered stories appearing on websites as being published (which is, of course, accurate), and so disqualifying from further attention, even if you threw it up on your website without much thought and nobody has read it.

I still like the idea of using a website as part of the reader’s story experience. It’d be there if people wanted more after finishing the ISBN’d works, it would be useful for marketing before and after publication, and it could even be part of the process of my writing as a whole. I believe Twitter gave The Complex its wings in 2019. Being a persona online is part of the game.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote the short novel Pnin in parallel with Lolita, which came out a year later. He wasn’t afraid of a little literary experimentation. Short stories can be playgrounds for voices, ideas, themes and stylistic choices, and so lay the groundwork for longer pieces. Ideas can pollinate each other. A theme can become more or less interesting over time. That aspect of my writing practice is currently weak.

I work in software, I started as a web designer, and I loved blogs when they took off, so it’s a natural extension for me to imagine a website, social media, blog posts, story fragments, short stories and novels as part of a creative ecosystem. That doesn’t mean it’ll work, it could very easily become a distraction from writing, but I haven’t given up on the idea yet.