MCA Hogarth’s post about her new wiki got me thinking again about the story-related info I have scattered all over the place. I’ve attempted to collect some of it in my private wiki, but that’s not exactly been a great success because, well, college. And I’m not very good at wiki design, especially not when it’s just for myself and I can obsess over organizational hierarchies to the exclusion of adding new info. I’ve thought about getting back to the wiki when I graduate (you know, along with the five million other things I’m going to somehow find time for when I graduate).

But wiki thoughts raise for me the question of publicity, which ties to larger questions. Most of my info is for stories that are either unwritten, partially-written, or written but unreleased into the wild (and mostly no longer in fit shape for release, ahem). That, to me, is a major complicating factor. Would putting so much story info together in a public wiki diminish reader interest in the stories themselves? I have this same concern about my blog archives, actually, which is what makes it an urgent question at all. Periodically I feel the urge to purge, because the weight of all that info I blithely revealed in image descriptions troubles me. Partly because maybe I’ve given too much away, maybe no one is interested in the stories now (although then again, my experience has been that people are not very careful readers of my posts and tend not to remember all the plot stuff I blathered two years ago). Partly also I feel trapped by a lot of stuff I’ve committed to “in public” that has turned out not to work.

Or is this another iteration of my continual desire to wipe out my Internet traces in the unrealistic hope of somehow “starting fresh” and THIS time I’ll know what I’m doing and do it right? This is all too likely. I’ve left a trail of deleted blogs and emptied archives in my wake over the years, and I am an ace at editing my past without any clear sense of what good the exercise actually does.

I don’t know.

Maybe I need to get some (non-Marigold Woman*) stories into shape and get them out into the wild (a whole ‘nother can of worms) before I’m ready to answer this question.

I’d appreciate your thoughts, readers and fellow writers and general peoples. In fact, that’s precisely why I’m sharing these worries, because I don’t know which end is up and I’d appreciate other perspectives.

* Meaning that the Marigold Woman is less of an issue because I feel no need to give any information about that, even though maybe I should. But it started as a prose experiment to which plot was secondary, and I like keeping it on that footing even if it has grown a plot by accident.