Welcome

I had been under the impression over the last several years that blogging was something people did in the first decade of the 21st century, and then it had died out. Back then I did most of my blogging on a site named Spymac, and some of you in the Mac community may remember it; some of you may even have been there.

Back in the dim, dark days of the early internet, when sites like Facebook and YouTube were still in their infancy, people were still trying to figure out what this thing called 'the web' might be used for. The early message boards, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), as well as sites like Friends Reunited and Myspace, all suggested that the technology might be best used to build communities for increasingly more and more niche special interests.

I know people who met online, got married and had children because of the early internet. Now that is so commonplace that nobody really thinks about it as unusual, and the monolithic social media platforms have mechanised the act of bringing people together.

So where does this leave blogging? I am heartened to discover that Wordpress is still going and that many bloggers have continued to refine the art over the years, though to me the idea of writing a blog again feels more like an act of historical reenactment.

I stopped blogging for several reasons, mainly because the site I mentioned, Spymac, was taken over and 'corporatised' to the point that all the really interesting people left and joined Facebook and Twitter. Another reason was that I was aware that I was starting to take experiences from my own life to use as material for the purposes of entertainment, and that seemed more like the job of a novelist. So I decided to take all the time and energy I had previously been putting into blogging and use it to create a novel, and here it is.

The Quanta-B Tales is the result of about 15 years' of writing, on and off (mostly off) and there were many occassions when I doubted I would ever get to the end. The 'Tales' were written in the order they appear in the book, and as a result I didn't have to work very hard to make each subsequent tale seem like it was a response to the teller of the previous tale. When I had finished four of the tales I called it volume one, and published it briefly as a book while I wrote the next volume. Early on in the process I stumbled onto the idea of framing everything with the traditional Canterbury Tales format, which then gave me the character of the narrator or the traveller. Once I had the second volume complete, and had seeded a lot of the ideas for the final part, I began shaping the entire book into one big arc. It has been a wild ride, which is soon to come to a very satisfying conclusion with the launch of the book, this coming Saturday.

I heard Brian Eno say in an interview that he liked the idea of 'releasing' something because the word didn't just mean putting something out for people to buy, but it also meant setting it free and letting it go. Once the book is finally out I can stop editing it, and thinking about it as something I am still creating. It will be finished, out there for people to read and enjoy (or otherwise), and I can start working on the next thing.

Will keep this blog up to date over the coming months and years as I develop new projects? If you are reading this a few years from now you will already know the answer to this, but either way, welcome to the Quanta-B Tales and may there be many more to come.