Time to start sharing the first stories

Over a decade ago, I joined in the masses in creating a personal webpage at GeoCities, a free webhosting site that had just popped up on the scene of the still-new World Wide Web. I didn’t know why I did it, except that it was a popular thing to do. In those early days, GeoCities was organized into Neighbourhoods, which were meant to be themed sub-addresses of the whole GeoCities concept. There wasn’t such a wide selection at first, and my natural interests led me to an Area51 address.

I was stumped when I first sat down to “design” my website. I didn’t know what I wanted to put up, so I went along with my interests. I wrote something about games, both PC games and RPG’s, and had some links. A couple of years later, though, I put my site to another use. By this time GeoCities was already declining in popularity. And of course, I didn’t have an audience for my website. But it felt good to share. To put something out there.

So when I wrote, naturally, I shared. I posted my short stories on my website. Later, I would proudly point acquaintances to my website, not to show off any design skills, but just to say, “Hey, I have a website, and I’ve shared some of my writing there.” There weren’t many stories, since I didn’t nurture that side of me, but they were there.

Yahoo! is now closing GeoCities, a relic of the old Internet. People have moved on to cheap web hosting, self hosting, or – as I have – blogs.

I still feel that need. It doesn’t matter if I have an audience. I’ve always written just for me.

So here we go.