Cold Open

I think myself and I might agree more often if we spent more time together, but only one of us ever seems to be around. I keep finding his documents which, when he wrote them, he thought were excessively fun and witty. But maybe wittiness has a half-life; when I find these documents and read them two days later, he often just comes off as a jackass.

That’s exactly what happened to the original “first post” I wrote for this site. Having read through page after page of advice on creating an author’s website, most of which seems less than applicable for first time writers — “Be sure to include a page that lists all the speaking engagements you don’t have for the books you haven’t published yet.” — I wrote what I thought was a sparklingly clever lampoon of the situation segueing into an intriguing preview of my plans for the site.

I reread that draft today. “You wrote this,” I said to myself. “You jackass.”

The problem comes down to this: I am unused to talking about me. I’ve always believed that talking about yourself is the fastest way to bore your audience because nobody is as fascinating to others as they are to themselves. Moreover, I have a range of interests and involvements that those who know me have called eclectic, and it can be surprisingly difficult to cross-pollinate between activities. For example, if you find someone who shares your interest in, say, technology — a fellow software engineer at Microsoft, perhaps — then the two of you can happily talk tech all day long. But if you tell that person that you’re also writing a book, the interaction immediately gets weird: if they even believe you at all, they’ll probably assume that your book is not very good, just for fun, the kind of pipe dream carried over from youth which will slowly be swallowed by the cares of adulthood. The more eclectic your interests, the more awkward these kinds of conversations become. Eventually, the awkwardness overshadows the conversations completely, so you just stop trying: you talk to people about what matters to them, find other people for other topics, and assume that never the twain shall meet.

That is a sensibility that I have to get over.

Awkward as I find it, creating an author’s website means creating a meta-document that is fundamentally about me. I hope that someday this space will be filled with information about books that I’ve written and worlds that I’ve shared, and the information about me as a person will be little more than seasoning on the much more meaty substance. But I haven’t written any published books yet, and my worlds aren’t shared beyond a few dozen people, yet I still have to put something on this website. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: as a step toward publication, I have to create a website in the style of an already-published author, but without any of the credentials or content.

So, in the meantime, what should I put here? From what I understand, literary agents, in addition to looking for interesting manuscripts, are also specifically looking for interesting authors; and since I shouldn’t publicly post information about the unpublished book (though that would be interesting), the only sensible thing to do with this space is to make the case for why I’m interesting. As mentioned above, this isn’t a task that I find very familiar or comfortable. But then again, that’s never stopped me before.

So, in advance, I apologize if this website goes through phases of being clumsy, or uninteresting, or ugly, or obnoxious. It will become better — that is my never-ending commitment — but I’m learning as I go, and I have a lot to learn. As I said, though, that’s never stopped me before. In fact, that’s one of the greatest things about having eclectic interests in the first place: there’s always a lot to learn.

Welcome to my website. Someday it will be about my books (which will be interestingly eclectic in their own right); but at least in the beginning, I will post about anything and everything I find interesting, particularly as it pertains to my writing. I’ll start by speaking broadly about the Demiurge project, a tool I created to help me study the world in which my debut novel is set.

But that will be the subject of another post.

–Murray