The Worst Thing About Blogging For 20+ Years

I did something unusual earlier this month: I got some very special nails done, and I didn’t post them to the Internet.

Here are the nails in question:

Now. If you’re signed up to this newsletter, chances are good you know exactly what those nails represent. That color is #rebeccapurple, the color that was immortalized in the Internet to honor my dead Godchild Rebecca.

Now, it turns out that because #rebeccapurple is one of the listed name colors in the Internet, a lot of companies have just gone down that list and made an item - shoes, backpacks, what have you - in that exact shade. It’s not a particularly creative way to do things, but I imagine it’s pretty easy.

Yet it was a shock when Rebecca’s mother gave me a bottle of #rebeccapurple nail polish for Christmas. Most children don’t get a product named after them, but I mean, my Goddaughter was special. She gets a special afterlife that takes root in obscure corners of the Internet.

So I had my nail tech Ashley whip up a memorial set of nails for me… and those nails made me very happy. They reflected Rebecca’s tiara spirit, her Jewish heritage, her love of bright colors. I wanted to share it with the world.

And I did not - not on FetLife, not on Discord, not on BlueSky - because I could not bear to have someone give me The Response.

“Who’s Rebecca?”

(Or worse: “I’m sorry for your loss,” stated with the clear assumption that the death just happened.)

Look. Last year was her ten-year anniversary. She would have been sixteen (she held out long enough to die on her sixth birthday, so the date is always a little poignant). The memory is worn down enough that it stings only in little moments - though I still visit her grave once a year like clockwork.

And if you too are asking “Who’s Rebecca?”, I can’t blame you. That’s now dusty history in a bunch of long-dormant blog posts. I could say “She was my goddaughter, she died of brain cancer,” and that would get across some of it…

But then I look back to gut-wrenching essays like “Flashlight” written when we were in the middle of her slow demise and yeah, that summary seems mighty hollow.

Thankfully, a lot of you remember Rebecca - it was a huge deal at the time. But for the rest of you, well, my friends, that is what I hated the most about flinging every aspect of my personality across the Internet over the course of two arduous decades:

Realizing people can know me without knowing them.

Even as recently as 2021 - and God, has it been four years since I walked away from blogging? - I had people who would swear they knew me, they were fans of me, they liked me… But they didn’t know Rebecca.

Yet why should they? It’s not like there’s new Rebecca news. Hell, the only reason I’m posting this now is because some company’s business model is based on mass-producing CSS colors created a decade ago. Otherwise, she’s still gone, yep, that absence still yawns endless, stay tuned for no headlines whatsoever.

Then I think of my Uncle Tommy. Now that’s a much deeper cut. Tommy died in the haymaker days of LiveJournal, back in 2003 when having like 5,000 people reading me was, like, obscenely big for a social network. My Uncle Tommy raised me, and he had a story every bit as compelling as Rebecca - he was a hemophiliac, an HIV survivor, yet fearless because hell, what did he have to lose?

Tommy is an axiom of my life. Almost everything you find admirable about me (and, let’s be honest, a few ya probably don’t) had their roots in one Mr. Lucas’ bold spirit of “Live fast, die young.”

Yet if I mentioned Uncle Tommy to, say, FetLife, a place where I have tens of thousands of people who follow me (and many who’d consider themselves fans of mine), I guarantee you the vast majority would be “Who?”

It’s like watching history erased in real time. And yes, I am aware there’s nothing special about that process - hell, I’m fading as we speak, I’m sure there’s folks in polyamory Discords going “Ferrett? What a weird name.” In a decade or two most folks will forgot I ever posted.

I don’t mind that… at least for me. I crave that anonymity, in a way. I was dancing in the spotlight for so long that I feel better huddled in the cool darkness of the backstage theater.

But Tommy and Rebecca, well, that was the one unalloyedly good thing I did as a blogger - I got to introduce two magnificent people to the world, people who could not introduce themselves.

I am accepting of my own death. I have come to understand that eventually I too will be the vast and trunkless legs of stone moldering in the desert, the same fate as the unnamed emperors of old.

That’s okay… for me.

But I want Rebecca and Tommy’s names written in fire on high cliffsides, my grief electron-sharp enough to etch them into indelible history. Yet they will be - they are being - forgotten. And it’s nobody’s fault; I don’t, I can’t, get mad at people who didn’t intersect with me in time to see them. It’s just time gliding past, that infinite strip of rolling sandpaper that grinds everything down.

In time Shakespeare will be gone. Might be when humanity’s gone, but that’s coming. Eventually. Time plays the long game.

So yeah. The worst thing for me as a blogger was referencing a fundamental axis of my life, something so fundamental to me it seems like me itself… and discovering that no, they’ve become a footnote in my ledger. They’re a FAQ. They’re a question on a trivia quiz.

It doesn’t happen much these days.

But I’m glad I no longer have to endure it.

Two brief things:

First, yeah, I write this newsletter partially to sell books. I usually shill The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma, my most recent series… but it seems correct today to reference Flex, my first book, where the lead character is an unapologetic ripoff of Rebecca’s spitfire spirit. The book cover even looks like her, a little:

I probably wouldn’t be a published novelist if it wasn’t for Rebecca being a better personality than I could make up out of my tiny mammalian brain. So thanks, kid.

Second, with regards to my last newsletter, I think I am gonna publish on Royal Road later this year. Don’t worry if you don’t wanna follow me over to a new platform, or read me serially; the feedback was pretty solidly “I like you, Ferrett, but that’s a stretch too far.” But all that means is that you’ll have to wait a while longer for the book, which will eventually be published in an Amazon format.

You’ll get it. Just a little later. And maybe some other people will get a very different experience.

But I’m head-down in writing a book now, so lemme get to a good pause-point before I start thinking business again.

But yeah. I miss you, Rebecca. I miss you, Tommy. That won’t stop until I do.

And in the end, it always comes down to these words, which are carved into my heart:

Rebecca is a miracle. Even if this was all we got, she is a fucking miracle, and I want you to know that.

I just want more.