Janet's Page

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opening the door

17 August 1993

I turned twenty-five last week, which is a good age for refusing to wait politely. Twenty-one is for saying I am going to be a writer. Twenty-five is for asking why, after several years with a creative writing degree folded into a drawer and a growing pile of respectable rejection slips, I am still behaving as if permission will arrive by post.

So this is Janet's Page. It is plain, because I wrote it myself. It is public, because hiding work in envelopes has begun to feel like a superstition. It is probably a little odd, but oddness is one of the few honest advantages left to a new writer.

I have recently read the excellent guide at /hypertext-markup, which made the process of making a Web page seem less like laboratory work and more like careful punctuation. I do not pretend to understand everything yet. I understand enough to put words on a page, link one page to another, and see what happens when strangers can arrive without asking a bookseller or a postman to intervene.

The plan is simple. I am going to place a couple of stories here for free so that agents and publishers can get a feel for the work without waiting for the right envelope, the right photocopy, the right assistant, or the right afternoon. I still believe in print. I still believe in editors. I also believe that if a new road opens beside the old road, a writer would be foolish not to walk down it at least once.

This is not a confession booth and it is not a diary. I am not here to narrate my breakfast or decorate the screen with sentiment. I want the page to function as a small, serious calling card: proof of voice, proof of nerve, proof that I can finish something and put it where it may be found.

The first story is The Watermark. It is short, spare, and perhaps not quite house-trained. Good. I am interested in fiction that knows how to enter the room slightly sideways.

If you are an agent, editor, publisher, reader, fellow experimenter, or merely someone who has taken a wrong turn through the wires, welcome. The Web may be too new to matter yet. That is one reason I like it.

Janet

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