This is kind of a strange piece to post after last weeks entry about getting too personal, but I feel like I need to respond to a few things that have come up recently. I've said it before a long time ago, but after the piece I wrote a couple weeks ago, I feel that I may need to revisit a point I made and talk about it a little more. The piece in question was one that I wrote in first-person only two weeks ago from today. I was sitting around one afternoon thinking about conversations I'd had and just sort of thinking about relationships in general a little bit and a premise for something to write about came into my head. All of the events seemed so clear to me early on that I had no choice but to sit and type out things from beginning to end.

After I'd posted the story to my site, I got e-mails from several different people about the piece asking me about it further. Wanting to know who the girl was and just what exactly my prospects were. Like I had in the past when I'd done such a thing, I told them the truth; it was fiction.

If you've been reading this section for awhile and didn't know that some of the things I write here aren't true, I'm sorry. It's never my intention to lead anyone on (although there's something slightly fun about fooling a friend of mine into thinking my life is more exciting than it really is), and although I never state which pieces are fiction or truth, I've never felt that it's been something that I need to do. By the very nature of the title of the section alone (and I've also placed this reminder in the section head and other places), the pieces that I write each week are whatever I happen to site down and pound out on the keyboard at any particular time in my life. Sometimes, I feel like catering to a specific audience, while at other times I feel like commenting on the web, or reliving the past.

It's a section that I started with flexibility in mind, and that's part of the reason that I've managed to keep up with writing at least one new piece every week for the past couple years. Although it's been somewhat of a chore at some points, I always feel better after I've finished up a piece and posted it to my site. It's become a strange sort of therapy for me and sometimes I'll end up writing it on the week before I post it, while other times I'll stay up late on a Sunday evening just so I don't break my streak. While the quality of some pieces (although I've never vouched for the quality of any of these pieces) may suffer, it's just part of the whole weekly writing process for me.

Anyway, the question that I was starting to address was whether it was 'ethical' for me to post fictional pieces in the section under the guise that they're real. I always tend to write in first person (unless I'm doing something more experiemental), but that's mainly because it's easier for me to write that way. I've tried writing from a different perspective before, but after I finish and read it, I never seem to think that it captures what I'm feeling (that, or I feel that it just plain sucks).

I guess that what it comes down to is that I think that part of the charm of the section is when it walks that sometimes fine line between truth and fiction. To me, it feels like that ultimate parallel to personal websites in general. Really, the truth is that no matter how much someone writes on their website and how much you read about it, they're still slightly different in real life. I've put hundreds of pages of text onto this website and I've gotten into great discussions with people who have read a great deal of that, but no matter how hard I try to fight it, there are still just two screens connecting our communication.

With that, I'll say that the writing will continue to be the same in this section. I already have what I consider to be more of a journal site (at come to my senses) and this section has always been a playground for whatever is floating through my head during a particular week,even if that happens to be a fictional situation based on a conversation or thought that I was having. As always, if you're absolutely interested in finding out the truth behind a particular piece, all you have to do is e-mail me and ask. If you are upset at inclusion of fiction pieces, let me just say that if I wrote about what my life really entailed all the time, you'd be extremely bored.

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