A beginning, or perhaps a disclaimer

I've been thinking of doing something like this for over a decade. At first it was going to be a paper 'zine, something about cooking and eating and playing with food, to print on the office photocopier and mail off to random people. Then an online journal, as the phenomenon became popular. But I never have. I've never built a personal webpage either, despite having the space sitting there on my ISP account for years. The only thing vaguely like that I ever did was the homebrew version of the World Tree webpage, and that mostly because people who had seen demos at cons were asking for it, and because we needed a place to drop our shared campaign material.

The vast majority of weblogs I've seen have either been extremely mundane and tedious, or fairly political, or share the author's sex life and fantasies in intimate detail, or rant about various people the author knows, with the names omitted but the identities clear. I've never been very political. I'm not interested in writing about my sex life for an audience for whom it isn't directly relevant (though I will write about sexuality in general). I don't like upsetting my friends by talking about them, and I'd rather take up issues I have with people directly with them.

But recently, several friends who are actually pretty interesting have asked me to read their journals. And I have been. But I'm feeling like the wrong kind of voyeur, a consumer, someone who eats up what other people have to offer without offering something in return. Not something I've ever wanted to be. Therefore this, now. I still have no desire to be tedious, though, and if I become so, I hope you'll tell me.