According to WordPress, as of today I’ve been blogging here at the House of Vines for a full decade. (Which means Nysa Press is almost as old.) I was at Livejournal for a number of years before that (until the Russians scared everyone off) and previously maintained websites at Winterscapes, Bravenet, Angelfire and AOL. Before that there were the e-mail lists where I first met and started talking with other Hellenic polytheists, which eventually got absorbed by Yahoo Groups and then were largely killed off by Web 2.0 and social media. Prior to that I’d get out of junior high and hike over to my mom’s school, signing on via dial-up in the empty science lab next door while she taught art and history night classes to a bunch of juvenile delinquents. I spent my time looking up poetry and fanfic archives, which I printed out and later read at home while listening to Moby and Joy Division. Back then my greatest ambition was to finish my novel about a tragic werewolf shaman who was part of a mercenary team called the Riders on the Storm. Later I even dropped out of college to work on it, but it never got past 220 pages, most of which consisted of artsy monologues, extremely graphic sex and battle scenes, and long, random digressions on the political, cultural and religious institutions of the various populations I’d filled my world with. (I even invented a couple languages for them.) Before that Karl Edward Wagner, Robert E. Howard, Chris Claremont and Allen Ginsberg made me dream of one day becoming a writer myself. But it all began with my mother, reading me stories (everything from The Blackboard Bear to Dracula) and creating her own books for me, which she hand-wrote and illustrated, such as The Dragon Energy Powered Farm (about a single mom facing foreclosure until her son finds an egg which turns everything around; it was picked up and published by a small feminist press, though I haven’t been able to track down a copy) and The Monkey Did It (about my imaginary friend, Monkey, whom I blamed all my shenanigans on.)