On being a Reader and becoming a Writer

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To boldly blog?

I’m sitting here in front of my laptop, trying to imagine that I have just opened the first page of a hard-backed journal. It has that new book smell. The pages are smooth and completely blank. The pen in my hand is eager to spread ink across that open space, to possess it, to change it completely.

And yet I hesitate. The book will never have so much potential again. At this moment, it could become almost anything: a playground for my imagination, a prison for my fears, a soapbox for my opinions, a magpie nest for all the fleeting ideas and images that sparkle and capture my attention. But once I write in it, the book will start to become itself, something of which I have specific expectations, a place where certain things can be said and certain others cannot. I will start to develop a concept of what writing in my journal means. This loss of potential is the price any writer pays for saying something. Narrowing potential, resolving the probability to 1 or 0 is part of the process of creating something.

But one of the reasons that I’m sitting at a laptop and not in front of some hard-backed journal is because what I want to create here could turn out to be radically different from the linear, insular, self-referential journal.

The potential of the blog format is fundamentally different from the journal.

The blog introduces the concept of readers. The reader brings meaning to what is read, but each reader brings a different meaning. The tagline on my email reads: “What you read is not what I wrote. I provide the text. You supply the meaning.”

The knowledge that there will be readers changes what a writer writes even when the writer is not aware of it. Particularly when writing in the first person, a writer starts to construct a persona – in this case, the acceptable face of Mike Kimera – to meet their own ego needs and to create a specific relationship with the imagined readers.

The blog allows for comments and so introduces multiple writers and the kind of stilted, serial dialogue that, while it is often frustrating, sometimes produces ideas and images and views that are well beyond the capacity of one voice.

So, I’m sitting at my laptop, fingers poised over the keyboard, and yet I hesitate. It is tempting to give the blog a purpose, a mission, a sound-byte value proposition to market myself across the web; something that differentiates me from the thousands of other voices braying for attention or shyly waiting to be noticed. Except that that would miss the point.

I invented Mike Kimera (meant to be a pun on Chimera – I hadn’t realised that in the US this would be accepted as a real name – so much for humour crossing the Atlantic) five years ago so that I could be someone other than my day to day self when I wrote. I’ve made this blog his and not mine so that I can extend from the fiction that he/I write and into the wider range of things that I think about when I am writing in his name.

So this blog doesn’t have a destination or a target demographic or an over-arching purpose.

Mike Kimera is its starting point. He writes (and sometimes publishes) erotic fiction or at least fiction that tends to look at the impact of sex on people. He has his first book of short stories coming out. He’s learning about writing. He’s living in a foreign country and coming to terms with what that means. He’s heading towards fifty and has no idea of what that means. He’s a science fiction fan and a movie junkie and spends way too much time at work. This blog will be his refuge and his greenhouse.

Feel free to drop by at any time.