Gore Vidal once said, “I’m not interested in meeting other writers.” A little disingenuous perhaps—so much of his votive anecdotal material being tied to the apron strings of… encountering other writers. At his level, he can afford to be snobby; his cachet benefits from it. For those of us in the coal mines, however, meeting other writers is a profitable experience. And a bit frightening. May I also quote George McFly? What if they told me I wasn’t any good?

I never met any other writers before coming up to Open Salon. Oh, I corresponded with a few professionals: whose terse and uninspired replies set the stage for their presumed elevated relation to peckerwood You, at the same time revealing that they don’t ever offer any insight or daylight unless they are getting paid by the word. To them I would advise: you can overvalue yourself.

And, to be sure, I have many day-to-day friends who have put pen to paper, at least experimentally. Half a handful have shown real flashes of talent; but of course, really writing has the same object as juggling: you have to keep your balls in the air, or at least from coming to rest on a barbed-wire fence. The secret to really writing is consistency; flashes are for summer thunderstorms.

Few of my friends have been supportive of my own writing. As many of you will also note in your own experience, I have often come away feeling that there is a sense of begrudging there, a malicious vector that won’t suffer the one thing I can actually do well.

My friends liked to tell me my writing was too dense to be understood, too obscure, too elliptical, too anything. They liked to assure me that the subjects or point of view I had was too outrageous for publication.

And then there were the pathetic nitpickers who would fix on a word or (most hilariously) comment, “Well, I don’t think you should have used a semicolon there, I’m pretty good with this stuff”— as if writing were a mere excercise of clockwork punctuation.

I was in danger of being the only fish capsized in a small puddle, quickly exhausting the available oxygen of the muddied water.

When I came up to Open Salon, I was amazed at the equitably distributed talent. Not only did I find the readership that wasn’t too “dense” to appreciate my density (I mean, my destiny?), but I felt for the first time ever that there were factually People Like Me. No more café-bothering desperate writer’s groups with their hilarious flailing archetypes and dead-in-the-water wannabes. No, this was the real thing. These were people whom, if they said, “This is a poem about my mother”—I need no longer fear.

These were people who could write.

Open Salon may be self-regulating in this. Although the webmasters most every morning clean out the mercantile debris of spamsters, you don’t here find too many clumsy fucks taking a Bambi step out on the ice. Compare a true horror like Urbis (which should be killed with fire). The high octane here scares away the go-carts. I would disagree with those who suggest there is some paucity of talent at OS: the local atmospheric pressure being fatal to half-formed egos.

At the same time, we here all have Olympian angst. None of us are as sure as we pretend to be. We are like Dogtown skaters, mentally stoking for an afternoon of tricks, ready to present them in our specific styles, and hoping we don’t land on our asses with a tailboning snap. The mental penalties for a failed trick are awesome, and not to be long considered. We are here, after all, to perform while others watch.

The differences between ourselves and skaters is painfully obvious. Skaters instinctively grok spezzatura, know quiet cool. Make it look easy. But writers are different. They expose their doubts and tics, cry for help, ever question their worth. This is not the way you play it cool in the Dogbowl, but it is essential itself in writing. Writing is the act of pulling your pants down. Writers, like wolves, offer their throats to one another in social experiment; but as with wolves, it is unwise to assert yourself by trying then to bite.

Today, as often, I see the traditional concerns of writers on OS. There is the “I do not get on the Front Page, what am I doing wrong?” And there is the “I do not get enough readers, what am I doing wrong?” These are really the same question: How can I be read?

We are encouraged to value both Official Reward (the knighting touch of the Editor) and capitalist currency (if I don’t have 70 hits, I’ll just die). Disposing of the former is easy to me: the Front Page is a false idol. I’ve been there before (before the blacklist, the paranoia screeches), and on none of those occasions did I see a real bump in readership. Increased readership is all I desire. An honorarium that has no payoff is worthless.

Readership is the ocean in which the writer swims. I am not one of the top read. I have seen YouTube videos—reposted somebody-else’s-efforts—soar past my heartfelt little squiggles on the human condition. Yes, we have all seen The Coming of the Kittens. And we have seen the popular television report. And all the safe regurgitations of things you’ve already read earlier on The Huffington Post.

How do these compare with the soul-baring essays so many of us gravitate to, the self-analysis of our wicked lives and the even wickeder forces that take arms against us? Well, let’s face it: rock, paper, scissors. My cute cat takes your abusive parent every time. Cute kittens will always win; it is a matter of demographics.

Abusive fathers seem our common denominator. Just as the previous generations of world lit figures all seem to have lost their fathers at age eleven (read the biographies some day), most of us have the worst of both worlds. The father was there, but emotionally inaccessible, emotionally unreachable, stretching his private hell into our personal real estate. Many of our mothers were ineffectual and crystalline in their narcissism. Our best childhood memories were outdoors, catching fireflies or playing tag—a group activity, at once both social and faceless. Rather like writing online.

Interestingly, few OS writers ever much comment on the romances of their lives. Sexual polarities are much discussed, but lovers are not, except in the most general way. This may have something to do with the hookup nature of the Internet—be careful who you talk about, for like the Devil, he or she may appear.

Childhood friends are routinely discussed (I have made a cottage industry of this). There is an attractive disposition here, of being able to tell those friends what they really meant to you (or what you really thought of them). Part of the nature of writing—especially autobiographically—is making a case for yourself. Part of it is tying up loose ends—I won’t use the term closure. I would rather like most of my subjects to read my words about themselves, both for the purposes of vendetta, and for their own self-edification. I would like to read their reactions. Maybe they can still my fangs. Nothing soothes so much—or wounds so much—than to find that twenty years have been misunderstood.

Open Salon doesn’t do fiction. Here and there are sample chapters and sketches, but at an oasis ratio. Fiction is a less steady step than reportage. Fiction by its very definition is less honest. Fiction is easier to casually critique, to savage. And fiction is never as highly rated. (I also think we may be saving the fiction for profit.)

Overall, OS writers make confessions to things that they would never want to reach the ear of their coworkers. Hence the profusion of avatars and double-identities. There are more masks on Open Salon than over at the Justice League of America. It frees us in a way that Gore Vidal could never exactly be freed. We can, speculatively, inform on our friends and lovers and not break those friendships. We can form shadow plays of our darkest moments and the only case presented is our own. “Give a man a mask,” to Oscar Wilde is attributed, “and he will tell the truth.”

Well, maybe. He certainly will tell whatever he tells with more oomph. Likewise, it was Virgil R. Plants who observed that “writers are the kleptomaniacs of lives.” It is not wise to tell one too much: you’ll end up somehow in print, digested, as the writer digests himself. The only salvation from this, having now met other writers, is to write it first yourself.