"This device serves no purpose."
-- V'ger

What is this? Some kind of CB radio for geeks?

It's not quite clear to me how this works. I already have a place to store my docs, on my machine. And I certainly don't want to share them with anyone, unless they pay first. That's why I am a professional (well, part-time, anyway) writer.

I guess that's why I never got into blogging, and why what I write here is under a pseudonym. It's also why I don't use the Zone to gen publicity for myself.

Last week I received in the mail my courtesy copies of my latest magazine article
(the latest issue of a nature journal). It is my 30th published article since I started writing in 1995. It averages out to about two per year. At that rate, it's a good thing I didn't give up my day job, especially since writing for magazines is not particularly lucrative. In fact,
my entire income from writing over the last 15 years only adds up to a few
month's salary of a municipal bureaucrat's income. And of course, in the case
of this rag, I share my proceeds equally with the artist who illustrates my stories,
Mr Fritz Seegers, whose marvelous seascapes keep my editors (and hopefully, my
readers) very happy.

I've written about a dozen articles for this magazine, mostly wind-and-wave fluff, and contributed about the same to a boating magazine, mostly technical articles like boat
reviews, sailing celebrity profiles and boatyard histories. The rest of the
stuff is pretty eclectic, articles for SETIQuest, the International
UFO Reporter, and submissions to Sky and Telescope, Geoworld, The
Journal of Irreproducible Results (a science humor magazine) and The View from
Here (your basic artsy-fartsy literary rag). And I'm proud to say some of my stuff has been since anthologized (with my permission, of course) in other venues.

Well, it's not exactly what will qualify me, by quality or quantity, as the Dude
of Letters I fancy myself to be, but I'm pretty proud of what I've accomplished.
The worst of the lot is at the very least readable; professionals have sent
me money to write it, and others spent money in order to read it.

But the real trip is not the money, or even the thought you might have a
readership out there that recognizes your byline. No, the real thrill is when
you read your own prose from a piece of mechanically printed, mass-produced
paper. It is now a part, albeit a tiny and insignificant piece, of the
permanent record of your species, the literature of your civilization. It has
gone out to affect and influence other minds, and it will outlast you. It may
even outlast all of us.

Reading your own words is an odd experience, they may sound totally familiar,
but at the same time they leap off the paper as if from some other's effort, as
if someone else had thought and written them. They have a legitimacy they
lacked when you wrote them because now it belongs to the community by virtue of
it having been accepted and propagated by the industry. It must be like the
feeling an architect gets when he looks up at a building and mutters to himself,
"I built that."