The Genesis: I started this site as a one-off blog. It was to host pieces that I would not be penning anywhere else. I would not be writing these elsewhere because publishers may have vehemently disagreed with what I might have articulated. Or, they might have agreed with me in principle, but would have been more inclined not to rub their patrons and advertisers the wrong way.
I started the "a critique of the times" as a sort of anonymous blog, based on a nick I used for chatting earlier. The blog ended up being neither here nor there. It was anonymous only to the extent of it not carrying my name. But there were scores of people who knew I used the nick "write2kill" on chat sites. So much for anonymity.
The Relaunch: If you care to browse through the archives, you will know how much I happened to write here. The idea of writing anonymously never appealed to me, and the blog, therefore, was doomed to be a non-starter. It was not that I craved for a name, but because I had always loathed anonymous blogs and their bloggers who took advantage of the anonymity offered by the Net to indulge in cheapshot shadow-boxing. I am an ardent advocate of the right to free expression, and anonymous expressions have never appealed to me.
The site, if it had to continue, had to be under my own name. And so it is now. For more about I, me, myself, see click on the "About the writer" link on the left panel. For more about the "write2kill" nick, follow the link on the same panel.
The New Site: This site incorporates the other blogs that I had been publishing elsewhere — primarily Media Culpa, The Expressionist, and Human Nature Online. Maintaining a blog regularly is not a joke. The joke is certainly on you, if you try running more than one — all the blogs suffer. So it did. It was a better idea to assimilate my other blogs into this site, which now includes other new sections — First Person, needless to say, would be first-hand accounts.
Over the last 16 years or so, I must have had a few thousand published pieces. I don't remember when I stopped keeping track of what I wrote. I don't maintain my clippings as diligently and methodically as I did, say, in the first 5-6 years of my writing career. Neither do I bookmark/print what is published online. The site will now help me keep track of whatever I write.
write2kill is a nickname that I used on Rediff Chat, and also on chat clients. That would have been around 2000. I still use write2kill as my nicks on MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger (easy way to catch me, that).
I have many other nicknames in real life, but for a website this is the one that seemed most appropriate. So write2kill.in it is.
May 14, 2007