Original Content!

I’ve just put what are intended to be, but most likely won’t be in the long run, finishing touches on Everybody Knows Everybody Here, the second (chronological) story set in Wilson, Wisconsin.

I’ll be honest – it’s not my best work. That said, I hated YGTFIJF pretty badly when I first wrote it and it’s taken time for me to warm up to it. EKEH, on the other hand, feels like it’s not totally completed, though it does most of what I wanted it to do and in that regard I’m willing to call it a success. It just lacks the… emotional impact of the other two Wilson stories, methinks. As far as illustrating that yes, everyone in this town is a bit crazy, I think it succeeds. But it’s a Chapter Two. No story ever has a truly exhilarating Chapter Two. We’ll wait and see what other people think.

Because this website is in part a project for class, I’m thinking that I may need to pretend that it’s a serious website for the sake of exercising what I’d do if I was actually an acclaimed author and maintaining a page like this. This doesn’t mean I’ll pretend to have a publisher breathing down my neck, but it does mean I’m considering doing more things that would make sense if this was an active, busy website – a Twitter widget in the sidebar, a ‘recent comment’ section, things like that whose utility is dependent on my pageviews, or people caring what I have to say.

Stop it, Taylor. The irony is that talking about how no one reads this won’t make people need it. I need to have content to get pageviews, not the weblog equivalent of cutting my wrists for attention. I’ll act like a writer, dammit, not Gerard Way.

P.S.: Since my last post, I’ve noticed that boostup.org‘s major sponsors are the Ad Council and the U.S. Army. The Ad Council makes perfect sense, but the only reason the army would want people to graduate high school is in an attempt to keep them off the streets and within range of recruiters’ ears, which would make this sponsorship tactic almost incalculably dark.