The Archive Impulse

The first blog I truly followed belonged to Neil Gaiman, when he added the American Gods dairy to his website back in 2001. It was quickly followed by Caitlin Kiernan’s Low Red Moon journal, which quickly metamorphosed into her Livejournal (and has stayed there, even now, after Livejournal has become an archaic thing occupied by Russians and die-hards refusing to walk away).

I’m not sure when, exactly, I started my own web presence. The first site I owned was coded by my friend Sean and set up on a friend’s server, a place to flag gaming things. It was quickly followed by a Livejournal, where I didn’t need to know HTML or ask friends for help to make an update.

This blog, which turned ten in November last year, was a grudging concession to the idea that I needed a site I controlled more than I needed Livejournal’s friend’s feature.

When I was young, you’d occasionally find books full of writer’s letters or notebooks. Compilations of things they’d written that offered a glimpse behind the curtain.

These days, you can trace a writers history by going to their site and scrolling back. Those first posts I followed are still out there, archived on Gaiman’s site, a glimpse into a younger writer and the beginning of an ongoing chronicle that evolves with Gaiman’s career. Kiernan’s Low Red Moon Journal is still live, waiting for those interested in her history as a writer to find their way there. Every now and then I’ll go back and read the archives of writers I love, tracking the way projects evolved as they talked about them, picking up the little details that only seem significant in hindsight.

One of the things that makes me sad about the shift to social media is the way these archives get lost, or at least transformed into something it’s a huge pain in the arse to try and find.