Readers and writers blog

Well, we finally got the damned thing up. So welcome to Readers and writers blog.

This combination weblog-and-website has been under construction since November, and when I say ‘we,’ I mostly mean Brett Langston, an all-around computer guru who put up the initial site, and Keith Hitlin, a website wunderkind who spent months doing blog renovations in the FrontPage-WordPress workshop, joined later by Brett again. To stretch a pun or two, it would be only binarily logical to give the two of them the old college cheer — Boole-a, Boole-a. (Not my college, by the way. I just stuck that in there to see if the unmathematical George, allegedly a Yale graduate and our president, would get it.) (Well, I also hoped some of you boolean wizards would appreciate it, too.)

But enough silliness. Here was the whole idea: Amid the explosion of websites and weblogs in recent years, much of it dedicated to the type of personal chatter you hear on cellphones these days, it occurred to me that someone should put up a website dedicated to that passion so many of us bear — the passion to write, along with its corollary, the curiosity to read what others are writing — that would be free and unlimited. To be fair, there are many fine sites and blogs dedicated to the free part, but very few to the unlimited. Well, Readers and writers blog is unlimited. If you don’t believe it, check out its first offering — my book in the nonfiction section, ‘Adrift in America,’ which in paperback runs 334 pages. That’s 102,000 words.

The website domain originally was Readers-and-writers.com. The domain I really wanted was an unhyphenated one, Readersandwriters.com, but it had been held since 2004, unused, by a British outfit that was asking $13,500 for it. (I told them all I could afford was 50 bucks, and I never heard from them again.) But in my search of the Internet, I also found out that the domain had been created in 1998 by another idealist who admittedly was as naive as me — a gentleman named David Guest who lives in Somers, N.Y., a small downstate town in the heart of IBM country not far from where I live.

Guest, a pioneer in Internet development, offered a free site for fiction writers to publish their works, including poetry, short stories, novels, plays and screenplays. To his dismay, “the site never took off,” he said. “Writers all seemed to want to earn money from their efforts and were afraid to put their works in the public domain. In addition, few people ever went to the site. In all the years it was up, I only got one email about my novel … but I do think someone stole the plot of my one-act that I had published.

“I just let the site sort of die …. I always said I would rather have a thousand readers than a thousand dollars … but I wound up with neither …”

Of course, that was almost 10 years ago, a long time in cyber terms — Google was just being born in a California garage and the Internet was still an intimidating novelty for many people. I’m hoping it’s different now.

So, writers, send in those works, published or unpublished, long or short. We’ll post excerpts in this space and run the entire work in the ‘Works’ section at the right. As examples, below this entry, I’ve run some excerpts from “Adrift in America.”

And, readers, offer your comments. Even if it’s as simple as “That sucked.” Even if it was my book.

– Sid Leavitt