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”.