Do you use your real name in your diary?
NO! The whole idea is to find my voice. I spend 10 hours a day speaking with a politically aware corporate voice. A thousand people are influenced by and react to that voice. The last thing I need is to have them monitoring my experiments in self-expression. And with my family, I'd like to preserve their illusion that I'm always 100% happy and well-adjusted.
Do you censor yourself in your diary?
Yes. I'm not such a fool to think my anonymity is secure. I can tolerate (barely) the idea of people being furious with me, but I don't want Armageddon. I avoid revealing secrets that could be devastating -- at least within my own personally defined statute of limitations, which is about 20 years.
Do you ever use fiction techniques such
as imaginary dialogue?
Not at this point. I'm studying how to create better scenes without making my entries too long. Unfortunately, my fictional bias is toward novels not short stories, so I have a lot to learn.
Do you ever significantly edit/rewrite past entries?
Not yet. When I do, instead of changing the archived entry (who reads through all those archives, anyway?), I'll pull an entry forward from the past and rewrite it from a new angle.
Would you describe your diary as traditional, essay, novel, rant, letter to someone, a theme journal, or something different?
A life emerging
As an online diarist do you consider yourself a Web celebrity, an exhibitionist, a public figure, a writer, an innovator, or something different?
An explorer of a new form, but a blended "syncretic" form. You've got a venerable history of diaries and memoirs and storytelling and scrapbooks and snapshot photography. When you transfer it to a hyperlinked, real-time medium — wow, new art happens.
How do you tackle the mechanics of Web design and how do you deal with your frustrations when you can't do what you envision.
I use FrontPage98 on a server that can handle it. Click, published. (Learning HTML can't be avoided. Hand-coding it is self-flagellation.)
Figuring out how to tame bitmap graphics has been a titanic battle. My original method: click - undo - click - undo, till something interesting happened. Now I'm a little more in control, starting to get effects I visualize in advance, using Corel Photo-Paint. Got a digital camera, but didn't realize I was supposed to post photos as .jpgs, not as .gifs. It's the hell of being over 50 and figuring it all out on your own. I'm envious of young people who just start picking it up from each other because they're totally immersed in internet culture. When I'm frustrated, I can usually figure out a simpler quick-fix to get the product out. But when the frustration won't go away… that's when my best learning occurs.
Why do you think people are interested in what you have to say?
I don't know that they are. When my homepage hit counter started creeping up, I envisioned all these folks pouring over my fascinating entries. Then I read my site stats. People were bouncing away from my homepage without reading much of anything.
What compels you to design beautiful pages and to write from the heart (beyond just the usual question of "why an online journal")?
The journal and its evocative pages establish a relationship with the world, all the more intense for being anonymous. I don't know who YOU are so I can't manipulate my art to please you, I can't fool you or be phony toward you. I have to assume that there is a piece of me in you and that ONLY by finding new ways of revealing the real me will I connect with you. At the outset, I thought it would be great fun to create a fictional persona, to make up the kind of drama I did when I was writing novels. I wanted to be outrageous. But the project took hold of me and pushed me the other way: to explore and appreciate the layers of myself.