The Limit of Art Cannot Be Attained

I have felt the need to share some of my Pan Historia fiction here - but rather that copy and paste I decided to share a link. There is a little history to this selection, and not all the writing is my own.

This was a collaborative fiction novel with its roots in the old role-play site Ancient Sites. On that site you would join up with a name from some period/place in ancient history and that would define you. At the time Ancient Egypt was my bag and all my early collaborative writing pals hail from this period. There was definitely much more of a role-playing element to the site than there is to Pan Historia - for instance I would log in and BE the Pharaoh of Egypt in many of my online conversations. It was fun while it lasted though I certainly have no talent for that anymore. For a while at that site there was a very unified Ancient Egyptian group but over time schisms developed (all human societies/cultures fragment and evolve, even in the ether), and thus was En Intw Djerew Henet created. En Intw Djerew Henet roughly translates out as "the limit of art shall not be attained" and the writers that participated in recreating an alternate history Ancient Egypt were some of the most talented I worked with; both in capturing the drama of their characters and in the depth of their research for the project. My main characters in this fictional narrative are Tjeti and Itet.

So here it is with all the remaining existing posts by the writers that gave their permission to be reprinted and those that still had copies of their work: En Intw Djerew Henet: The Limit of Art Cannot Be Attained.

And for those among you that love Ancient Egypt here is a link to my old web pages: The Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian Religion. Sadly this project remains incomplete, but it still has tons of very useful information in it.

I Care A Lot

I'd like to say I woke up on fire, burning to write. Rather I grabbed my mug and fired up the PC and got to a stream of tweets on my Twitter channel that had me stewing in depression immediately so I unfollowed the guy. I'm sure he's very bright and all, and I'm sure I should be educated about the terrible things going down in our economy right now, but it was more than I could stomach before a full cup of joe, man.

I know that it's shitty out there - banks crashing, fires burning, wars being waged, and I care, I care a lot*.



However there is only so much I can take before I start to spiral down into grey areas. In my psyche there is just no room for monochrome emotions, and I try to avoid the black pits just as often as I can manage. In fact my favorite flavor of therapy is denial. In fact that's probably why I love my escapist entertainments. I'm an artist, man, I need beauty.

So in a quest for beauty I think I'll trip over to my favorite collaborative fiction site and and write about zombies ripping people up. Oh yeah… biker zombies!

Awesome.

(Speaking of music, who the hell stole my CD of the soundtrack from Grosse Point Blank? Give it back)

What Makes Pan Historia Unique

I decided to stop and consider what makes Pan Historia such a great site and why, year after year, I continue to pour time, money, and love into it. Recently I have been wandering around the rest of the internet expanding my horizons and trying to learn to like new things. After all I don’t want to be called an old dog! Some of my little adventures I have posted about here already and I’m not going to go into dissing other sites and interfaces – after all I am a bit of a simpleton when it comes to internet technology. I know a bit of PHP, MySQL, and DHTML, but only enough that I can get creative at my web site and achieve the bells and whistles that I think would be fun.

The point here is to get positive. What I love about Pan Historia is the community and the creativity and the fact that it’s fairly simple to use. The bells and whistles are usually all the same platform and so everything loads nice and fast and I don’t hear my computer start to grind the minute I start to load Pan pages (like I do with MySpace or Facebook or Shelfari). Ok, so that’s the tech side. What is it about Pan that truly makes it unique and special?

• The staff/owners actually participate in the site (yes that’s me mainly but I still like it!)
• The owners/programmers actually seek the opinions of the membership about what they would like to see (yes again, that’s me, but I was raised with the idea of democracy, fair play, cooperation, or simply a benevolent dictatorship).
• There is room for all sorts of creativity without lots of technical know how.
• Such as graphics
• Writing
• Story planning
• Games
• Contests
• Collecting badges and awards
• Learning HTML to create beautiful web pages
• Creating characters, scenarios, and even new worlds
• Fanfic
• Reading all the great stories written by Pan members

As for me I get to work on the site design and construction year after year – tinkering, getting new ideas, making improvements. I get as much joy out of that as I would in constructing a sculpture in my studio. Pan Historia is as much an artwork as anything I have worked on in my life. One of the significant things about this work of art is that it’s alive and interactive and that other people are contributing in significant and unique ways to the whole. It’s not solely my vision, but the collective creativity of an entire community – many of whom have been with Pan Historia since the very beginning in 2000.

I’m still as keen on the site today as when I sat down with the early developers and brainstormed.

Poem

Here I sit, sad and un-sated.

Tried to blog,

But only de-flated.

Shifting Gears - The Author as Geek

Shifting Gears

As a creative artist that seems to have a dual nature (something to do with being a Gemini or on the cusp of Cancer if you're into the whole astrological thing, man), it's often hard for me to shift gears from one activity to another, but I've been learning to do so through the use of arbitrary borders in my day called "hours" or "days". Every Friday (or thereabouts) morning I have been meeting with a fellow artistic type (musician by night) who also shares geeky interests and we have been creating new PHP scripts for my Pan Historia community in my everlasting quest to keep the site fun, usable, and competitive with modern web technology. Sad to say we're probably light years behind, but I find that's ok because a lot of my users are not the super elite web savvy but people like myself that just wanna have fun. It's often just a challenge to get people to click all the handy links.

Anyway the point of this little discourse is that today I start a new, fairly large, project. I'm creating a doppelganger of Pan, or perhaps rather a trimmed sleek brand new version with stripped down functions, for a client. I have done this once before when I created the panerotica.us version of the community, but this is going to be more interesting as I'm customizing a bit. Not so much under the hood but definitely with the fins, hood, and trunk. Whole new paint job. This is being done for the folks at BardicWeb - a very different role-play community from Pan Historia, but one that has much the same origin as our site, birthing from the ashes of the old Ancient Sites community (their direct descendent being AncientWorlds now). I'm sure there are a few other small groups out there that are splinters of that original dot.com causality, but I tend to have a narrow focus, staying with Pan Historia because it's mine, I like it, and if I were to spread myself too thin nothing would get done!

Each of these sites has its own unique flavor and I'm sure proponents of each adore theirs best, and for similar reasons that I love Pan best, but I do think it's going to be fun and fruitful working with the BardicWeb people and helping them to realize their dream of a more smoothly functioning interface where they can act out their creativity. I'm truly flattered that they looked around and decided that the Pan Historia model would be one, with customization, that could work for them. It shows I'm doing something right you see.

Now the problem with this project and the subject of this blog (yes, I ramble), is that I often find it difficult when the middle of construction to shift back to the creative writer and participate adequately in my collaborative fiction projects at Pan. I hope that I have learned to correctly prioritize and schedule tasks so that I can easily shift gears from one part of the day to the other and don't allow one activity languish for the sake of the other.

Oh - and tomorrow my friend and I are creating bulletins for Pan.

Time Does Not Fly, It Crunches

I had occasion to speak with another author yesterday about time management and she had an interesting way of scheduling her day. Besides writing down her activities in her calendar she actually scheduled things according to the goals she hoped to achieve for those hours, rather than the precise activity, thus circumventing the "gosh this is my writing time but I'm totally uninspired, I'll just play a few games of solitaire" moments.

She divided work time in the day between things that earned her money, time that was for her own creativity with concern for remuneration, and time that was for promotion - to make sure that the things she made in the world actually found their way into the audience's hands. Of course some of the things that I schedule into my day straddle different categories making the idea of using this kind of division rather more difficult for me to take up. For instance my participation on Pan Historia has a couple of different functions: one to maintain and keep the site vital with my presence and example; two to indulge my own creativity through my writing and participation in our collaborative role-play novels.

I didn't notice if the afore-mentioned author added recreation time to her calendar, but I did notice that she didn't necessarily tie herself down to a particular event - since she failed to turn up for something I invited her to on last Friday. That's not a recrimination. I think it's very important for people to give themselves permission to change their plans and just stay home, especially busy people. There just isn't time in the day anymore for all the things that we have to do, and sometimes you just have to take the knife to a few things to remain sane.

And that's really the crux of my thoughts this morning. How do I manage time for maximum creativity and maximum efficiency and yet remain a spontaneous and energetic person, rather than a stressed out drone that eventually collapses like an old cart horse in the traces? My author friend makes her living writing. I make my living at the workplace where I'm employed and receive wages. Anything else I do is just the cherry on the whipped cream.

I'd enjoy any comments including what you do for time management. If something particularly works for you - let me know here on the blog so we can all learn something new.
One of my online friends, a fellow denizen of Pan Historia, tweeted at me yesterday, in response to something, I forget, to work better - not harder. Easy to say - so how is it done?

Wyatt's Voyages of Exploration

I feel like an explorer these days, but instead of an explorer that comes from the big civilized world, I'm one that has come from the small still undiscovered country, a little island say, that has set out upon the high seas of the internet to discover the huge vast charted oceans and continents without the chart everyone else has so readily to hand.

My small island is, of course, Pan Historia. It is a land small but full of rich history and brilliant antecedents with a culture uniquely its own. I have spent so long governing this tiny island country in a distant corner of the internet that its quaint culture, unique history, and wondrous ideals are all that I knew of the world - until I boldly decided to stray on its behalf and become an ambassador to the world at large.

My first landfalls outside of my little world (which did include, always, email, ebay.com, amazon.com, and news channels) were Facebook and MySpace. I cannot really talk to the culture I found at Facebook. It was so alien to me in its constraints on my ability to interact in ways that I was familiar with (personalization, seeking out new friends) that I quickly abandoned my hut there. MySpace, born after Pan Historian (which is at least eight years old), was more familiar territory, more allowing of personal freedom and expression. I spent many hours with hammer and nails building up my little domicile and making lots of new and strange friends with the natives. I believe I even was able to get a few of them to make their first trips to my strange little island home. But ultimately MySpace is a frustrating experience for me - I hate it when I have to head over there and listen to the gears inside my tower start to grind as approximately 5 million useless applications start to kick into life. I can't even imagine how many diseases I pick up each time either. Please don't get me wrong - it's not the people, I have met some lovely MySpace denizens, but you have to go through a ton of chaff to get to the sweet kernel there. It's a big crazy indiscriminate place, a great hub where many kinds of cultures intermingle and mix.

Next, after a brief hiatus from my Marco Polo travels, I was directed to the world of blogs and of Twitter. Now I was on sturdier more engaging ground in both cases. Twitter might not be for everyone but it's less like a land of its own and more like a unifying communication net that can straddle all the different regions of the web. I have found myself pulled to all sorts of interesting and different places to find gems and pearls that I can bring back to my own land. My mind and curiosity has been engaged. A word of warning, however, to other travelers: you must choose your channels carefully. It's no good to just 'follow' everyone until your channel becomes cluttered with white noise. Follow those you like and those which interest you and engage when it's appropriate. I have no idea yet if my forays into Twitterdom has yielded visits to my own island kingdom, but it's early days yet. If you find me interesting I invite you to follow me.

Blogging is something different. I have come to blogging relatively late. It's not like I didn't know it was out there. I was isolated, but not deaf, dumb, and blind. It's just that I write fiction and I didn't understand to what possible use I could put a blog to. I even fashioned rudimentary blog boards for my Pan Historia people and watched them be a sort of uneven success at Pan. I understood them as sort of electronic journals or diaries and I was never very good at being a diarist, no matter how often I tried. Even my commitment to dream journals wavers over and over again. My forays into different regions of the more populated web, however, were done with a very definite purpose and that was/is to spread the word of Pan. It became clearer and clearer that I should try this blogging. The challenge was topics.

A strange thing happened on the way to the forum…

As I started to write on various topics, both personal and not so personal, I found that I had plenty of ideas of things to write and it was only a matter of actually remembering what they were when I sat down to the computer!

So in my quest to spread the news about Pan Historia (a unique community for collaborative writers and imaginative people), I have finally become a member of the greater social networking community.

Hello there, World.