It’s funny, almost everyone who knows me knows I’m a writer, and almost no one has read anything substantive I’ve written. This, I’ve decided, is stupid and untenable, so I’m going to be posting more and more stuff here.

Then there’s the whole “omg u need teh password lolz” thing. I password protect my writing for a variety of reasons. There are people out there who steal writing and pass it off as their own. Big deal, kind of, because I’m so jaded and bitter about the publishing industry that I’m not sure I’d ever try traditional channels to get my writing published (if you’re interested, let me know, but I can go on and on to a boring degree about why the publishing industry sucks). And “self published” is an appellation like “community theater,” as far as I’m concerned. Most self published things suck, and I don’t want to be in that club. No offense to community theater folks, but if you’re honest, you know what I mean. Most guys running off copies of their shit on office copiers after work are doing it because that’s the only option they have.

But there are other reasons to password protect shit. The stuff I post is usually first or second draft, and raw, and I don’t necessarily want strangers coming along and sticking their fingers in my uncooked cake batter and then cunting off to me about how it tastes like eggs and sugar.

I also occasionally write about things I don’t necessarily want family to find—for instance, I’ve got a couple of sex scenes in some novels I’m writing that I could use feedback on, and I don’t think I could handle a conversation with my parents about “that first blow job scene in the Oak Island novel.” There are also questions. If I write about a character who smoked heroin in his twenties, all of a sudden I’ve got concerned siblings and cousins sending me email or something, right?

If you’re family and you’re reading this, I love you, but I think it’s important for writers to have boundaries of accountability in their writing. I can’t necessarily be a good writer and a good son or brother in the same breath, and there’s some shit I write that may make one or both of us uncomfortable. If you really want to read my stuff, get a free hotmail account and lie about who you are—say you found my livejournal account and you’d like to read my writing. I’ll send you the password and maybe you’ll be horrified and concerned, but we’ll never talk about it, and that’s kind of what I’m after. If I ever publishing anything major, we’ll have to deal with these issues then, but while stuff is still incubating, I can’t have the additional distraction of worrying about upsetting my mom with my subject matter.

That said, and here’s the important part, I realize the whole password thing is a huge pain in the ass. I realize it’s a big boundary to getting my stuff read by the people I know, and by the people I don’t know, and just in general. You have no reason to jump through this hoop to get to my writing, and I don’t expect you to tolerate what is probably just my neurotic bullshit. I’ll make it as easy for you as possible—just reply to this post, or any other I might make mentioning protected writing, and I’ll email you the password. It’s best to list your email address as like “kris at menace dot com” to avoid getting spam, and you don’t need to register to make comments now (note to all you shitmouthed spammers: I do have comment moderation turned on, so your ads for shitty websites and fake viagra will never be seen by anyone but me, and every time I mark your shit for deletion, I hate you).

I’m posting, in a few minutes, an excerpt from a novel I’ve mentioned (I think) called Ice Fishing. It’s more or less about a guy who becomes convinced that the serial recurring dreams he has are really just another reality, and the people there are doing the same thing—dreaming the same dreams. There are a lot of other issues, but that’s probably enough of an introduction to the writing I’ll be posting.

I’ll be writing more about this project and some possible influences it may have in the next few days.

(Postscript: it’s a few minutes later, here’s the link to the writing.)