Yes, it was one year ago that I took Carel the IT god’s advice and started this here blog. Can’t have a website without one, he said. Everybody’s doing it, doing it. Those of you who are still reading it, I salute you.

It’s been useful for me, anyway. Gave me a place to vent when The Great American Desert was all snafu’d up in software and printer hells. Forced me to think more thoroughly through my notions of what constitutes art. Reminded me how difficult it is to say something in a small amount of space.

It also gave me something to work out on after Desert was finished and before Big Rock Candy Mountain got going.

One of my readers has urged me to sift all the junk from the past year and come up with a realio, trulio theory of esthetics. I’m not sure I’m enough of a systemetizer. Or not systematic enough. Here, at any rate, are some notions:

Fiction should concern itself with real people in the real world.

The most real, the most normal, the most universal; those are the things that are most interesting.

What matters is not the story, but how the story is told, or better yet, shown.