MY TAPESTRY OF INTERNET WRITING

There are now several hundred thousand readers engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and the tapestry of writing I have created across the internet. Let me clarify and describe my tapestry of writing in more detail, a tapestry which for millions of internet users is just another form of ‘published’ writing in addition to the traditional forms. The literally hundreds of thousands of readers I have at locations on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 4000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views and sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed my literary products and engage in discussions now with literally hundreds of people, little by little and day by day. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success. The last seven years of internet posting have been immensely rewarding. When one talks one likes to be listened to and when one writes one likes to have readers.

It is almost impossible to carry literary torches as often as I do through a crowd, whether on the internet or in the traditional hard and soft-cover forms, without running into some difficulties. My postings singe the beards of some readers and my own occasionally. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics, of writing, of posting. Much of writing and dialogue in any field of thought derives from the experience each of us has of (a) an intimate sharing of views in some serendipitous fashion or (b) what seems like a fundamental discrepancy between what each of us thinks and what some other person thinks. In some ways, the bridge of dialogue is immensely satisfying; in other ways the gulf is often unbridgeable. When the latter is the case and when a site is troubled by my posts, I usually bow out for I have not come to a site to engage in conflict, to espouse an aggressive proselytism or to spam, a term with as many definitions, it seems, as people who use the word. And so for now, I remain, yours sincerely, Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia.