Jennifer,

While I know that's true, and while I'm not a quitter, I'm currently trying to figure out what direction is available for my writing 'career.' I've been to several conventions and have sat in on dozens of panels, talked to many writers, and discussed the marketplace with many editors.

My goal isn’t just to get a story or two into magazines, my goal is to achieve maximum exposure for my ideas about community, spirituality, and the future. I want people to pause and consider, if for a moment, a view.

That's the reason I Tribe. The internet is evolving, and has been for a decade, into a clearinghouse of communities of choice. I can log in, say something that is important to me, and a hundred or a thousand people will see and read my words and some of them will ponder the novelty.

Alternatively I can write a story, polish it, and send it through the submission cycle for six months, a year, two years or more. Maybe it'll see print and eventually be read. It might win recognition and be mentioned in trade publications. It might be reprinted. The question remains: For whom am I writing? Myself, my peers, or a distinct sci-fi community?

Readership is decreasing yearly. That's true of novels, periodicals, and newspapers. But, it is not to say that less people are reading. On the contrary, more people are reading, but they are reading on-line in a graphically-enhanced flash format. I suspect that the while the average person reads more words per year than ever before, that traditional printed media accounts for a rapidly diminishing percentage of that consumption.

Where am I going with this?

Aeon intrigues me because Marti and Bridget are actively seeking to take advantage of the community-building that the internet affords. I'm reading the first three issues now - specifically because they have made this effort. I rarely read newsstand issues of short-fiction any longer, instead waiting for compendiums, audio, or on-line versions of award-nominated stories.

So, Aeon intrigues me because of this effort. It's the next step, I believe, from mere on-line magazine formats. New Horizons, Sci-Fiction, etc. put their stories on the internet but treat them in much the same way that a regular magazine does - buy/print/sell/forget.

I think the next movement in writing will be writers creating their own audiences and for those audiences to follow the writer to markets, rather than the other way 'round. Look at Cory Doctorow. He's a good writer with novel ideas and a great voice, but the biggest draw is that he is read daily by a quarter-million people on Boing Boing and because they like him there, they'll go to wherever he has a fiction story and purchase. He brings instant sales with him. John Scalzi developed an audience by putting Old Man's War on the Internet first, in a blog, and that audience followed him right to the print copy when TOR bought it.

So, the traditional break-through cycle of short-fiction as a grueling right of passage for authors is competing with instant audience exposure available in the new communities of choice.

I love writing and will never stop - - my question is: what should I spend my writing time creating?