The Californian & The New Yorker | J. D. Bentley.
I’m greatly disappointed that the web allows mediocrity to be so easily distributed, but I should not overlook the fact that it also offers this cheap, worldwide distribution to the thoughtful and the talented. If you work hard to learn a craft and even harder to master it, if you put great thought into what you say and who you want to say it to, then there’s no better place to be published than on a website you yourself own.
I wish I could give you a full and accurate account of how many days I think to myself that I should stop publishing anything I write online. That, perhaps, it would be better to pour all of these essays into a book and release a new one whenever I felt I had compiled enough of them.
Or that, despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback and kind regards from readers, no one is actually reading or, even worse, that my words are simply scanned and forgotten. Then there is also the fact that so much of my work is in places I don’t really own or control.
Then, I’m reminded of the fact that my work, no matter the quality, has the privilege to be in the same vast library of data as a writer of J.D. Bentley’s caliber. It is then that I can see few better reasons to press “publish”.