First words…

Pete Culler always said, "Experience starts when you begin…"

I've written for thirty plus years – not counting school – and most of that time, I've written for myself, or a single correspondent. My first foray beyond that was writing Designer & Client. It has had a limited run, and has perhaps, as part of my "career" as a boat designer, confused as many people as it has enlightened. Neither the book, nor the career, was about what its ostensible subject implied. They were instead ways for me to interrogate the world, and learn how to be effective in it. I used the realm of design, specifically boat design, as a theater of operations. In it, one is within the realm of free choice, at least as much as is possible in this world of contingency; while in its practice one can find traction for the widest net of inquiry, from the hardest of sciences to the most ephemeral of subjective experiences.

Unlike Fine Arts, where I began – perhaps more accurately the other pole of a lifelong juggling act between engagement in action, and engagement in reflection and subjective response – designing boats, pleasure boats that people don't have to have, but want; was a way to explore the links between desires and wishes, and all that the cruel hard world can throw in their way. Within it, I found, rather quickly, that the biggest limitations were not the physical, or even the economic realities that impinge on such projects, but the lack of imagination endemic within the overall enterprise as it is currently performed.

People, even after they have made the hard decisions necessary to embark on having a new boat, find themselves so tied to conventional expectations, not only of the narrow parameters of how and what, that are so contingent on outside forces; but most significantly by their own most private and subjective sense of why. I discovered, and was then ultimately frustrated, by the way we all tend to jump from a hard earned freedom of operation, a place where we can own our choices, and make of them what we will, to close ourselves into stultifying traps of conformity – even in such a space of "play" – simply because we view the navigation of free choice as too daunting, too uncomfortable; to sustain ourselves in that uncertainty long enough to arrive at a more fulfilling destination.

Relatively recently, I've begun to write fiction. On a visit to my hometown of Provincetown (there is only one, look it up!) in 2002, at the height of the deepest national hysteria since my childhood fifty odd years ago; I saw something there, a quiet abiding tolerance, long familiar within a community of self-exile from a world with little patience for this virtue. That was the germ of my first novel, Shoal Hope. In a way it would be convenient to say its writing was "channeled" through me, certainly parts of it felt that way, but any muse that takes six years to "dictate" some four hundred pages could be considered quite stingy.

Writing Shoal Hope was work. Long work and a study in priorities. It's difficult to set aside the time and energy required to inhabit the world of creating a fiction. Still, this was for me a great awakening. Finding a stride and a voice I didn't know I had in me. I'm now at work on a second novel – in that original germ of a notion, the idea came as a trilogy that would span the twentieth century as it was reflected in that place – the second book, half done now, is Hope Extended, Hope Denied. The third one, is still untitled, and not yet begun.

Having found the "long form," and then beginning to find a path to publication – first an enthusiastic supporter within the New York publishing world, and then quite quickly, an agent in New York; has not, as of yet, taken me to the outlet I was looking for. On top of the perennial problems of breaking out a new voice into such a hierarchical and conservative field as traditional publishing has always been – a bittersweet complaint, so much of the draw comes precisely from finding acceptance in a rarefied sphere that is so difficult to get into – there is an added twist, the inconvenience brought about by the collapse of business-as-usual across so many fields of endeavor at this same moment in time. This mini-Tolstoyian moment in my own life's trajectory "doesn't amount to a hill of beans…" in the wider scope of things. But for me, it has added another layer of creative tension, that I recognize so well, even as I may not welcome its return, yet again.

Once again, I've found the need to re-orient myself, and find a way around a major obstacle. As much as it would be nice to avoid this, it has been a recurring theme throughout my life, and it has always brought greater rewards than those it has closed me off from. This time, I've looked in two new directions. First, I've explored the dynamics behind the blockages I've found; looking for root causes, and points of effective action. This has led me to PathTree. For the moment let's leave that hanging. Secondly, and in increasing alignment with the first, I've been looking into Web 2.0 and its potentials and pitfalls, both as it applies to my own goals, and now also to PathTree's.

This isn't the first time I've changed course, and seemingly back tracked to accommodate a new technology and its implications, nor am I unique in this, it has become a basic fact of life over the last few decades. Back then, in the late eighties, it was CAD. It was a stretch to learn a new technology, and at the same time attempt to sway its internal habits and ticks – the kinds of things that lead to the generic and clichéd sameness whenever a new technique is taken on uncritically. I wanted it to meet my sensibility, one that had already been formed using manual techniques. In that circumstance, as in this one, there were the advocates for the old, and the advocates for the new. Each held the other in contempt, and only saw benefits on their side. I disagreed. I disagreed then, and disagree now.

This has been a long winded introduction, but this is what's led me, in this year of 2009, to take up the blog, and take up the other tools available in Web 2.0, and take my first splashes into these foreign waters. Unlike my earlier forays, this one is, at least potentially, very public. I cannot do this alone at a keyboard or with a notepad or drafting table or easel, accumulating output without a conduit for its dissemination. In this medium I am working on content and dissemination at the same time. It's the kind of alignment I'm finding more and more frequently, and that I see as a compass needle pointing towards a better direction.

Writing may be writing, but each form shapes how it is done, and what its significance will be. There is a lot I recognize in this form; the missive, the short essay, even the polemic all seem ready models for what this kind of writing can be. But, it is, or can potentially be, needs to be, something different; if it is to have significance beyond a mere activity. There is a freedom here that puts the relative and contingent strewn freedom of a designer & client into the category of the heavily constrained. Yet unlike fine art produced in a garret, it is a public act from start to finish. It doesn't have the long rhythms of inhalation and exhalation found in the long form. It's not journalism, or any sort of periodical writing in the traditional sense; there are no gatekeepers, no editors, no publishers, no deadlines.

Curiously, and happily, I'm discovering more and more that this is the kind of place I both want to be in, and find more and more to be the kind of place we perforce have to inhabit today. I welcome the struggles with accommodation and the carving of distinctions my involvement in this activity will bring.

Welcome my virtual – that is potential – and however disembodied, real readers.

"If not now, when?…"

Somebody once said that too.