A Website of One's Own: Notes on Why This Site Exists

Writing and the internet have been inextricably intertwined for me since I was 13 and learned html tags to post my fan fiction stories on message boards. I drafted everything I wrote in Notepad, adding bold and italic tags as I composed like they were quotation marks or em-dashes.

(I loved em-dashes long before their present viral moment, for the record.)

Fandom gave me a writer’s group that was invested in the characters and relentless about the characterization. It gave me an ear for voice and how to convey it through syntax, grammar and word choice. It allowed me to experiment with form and structure in ways that shaped my sense of my own voice as a writer.

It gave me the desire to keep striving to write better stories, to create something more seamless and immersive, something that the reader could sink into more fully.

It also gave me a model for what sharing creative work could look like. People made things because they wanted those things to exist. They gave them away because they just wanted those things to be seen and enjoyed. Beta readers spent hours on strangers’ drafts for no reason other than wanting to help. Fandom ran on enthusiasm and the collective desire to get better at something that didn’t matter to anyone except us.

Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words and built dozens of fandom websites. In the late 2000s, college taught me to write everything from poetry and song lyrics to literary analysis and memoir to technical documentation and communication. But after college, work took over my life and what little I managed to finish writing, I stopped posting online to try to submit for publication. (An unsuccessful venture doomed from the start by how little time I had to put any real effort into it.)

Traditional publishing wants writers that arrive pre-packaged with engagement data and established social media followers. By the end of 2024, staying on social media started feeling like complicity to me. My photos and words and messages to my friends and family were making money for men who would burn everything to the ground if it meant they got to hold the match. The surveillance infrastructure was strangling. The platforming of fascists was sickening.

In January 2025, the United States imploded. The oligarchs rejoiced. And I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Without endless doomscrolling to occupy my time, I started writing again. A lot. Over the course of 2025, I started 3 novels. I even finished one by the end of the year that I’m working on editing and revising now. I’ve been writing short stories again, experimenting with form and structure and voice in ways that I haven’t since college.

And I have even less time and patience to try to submit things to publishers. (Except for Taco Bell Quarterly, which I’ve still got my fingers crossed about…)

In December 2025, I created my first website layout mockup in 15 years for this site. I dove into the push-and-pull puzzle of tweaking code and breaking it and then changing it back to figure out what went wrong. I built each component by tinkering and adding and breaking and (sort-of) fixing them all.

I wanted a place to put my work that I control.

I wanted a place like my domain blog in 2004: freedom from ads, freedom to install and code every facet of my site from scratch, freedom to experiment and post whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like it. Something part-portfolio, part-drafts folder, and part artistic storyteller’s journal.

Something that doesn’t sit alongside the words of nazis like a Substack. Something that doesn’t belong to a billionaire like the big social media platforms.

This is the result. If you like it, you can follow me on Bluesky for new story and post updates.