Sometimes you get a notion in your head, and you know intuitively it’s a good one, but it’s a bit big and too smart for your current state of being. Well, that’s what Storytrade is. As a name, as a place. As a concept.
It’s hard for me to write about real things. To talk about the things that worry me, or the ideas that hit me, about stories, about politics, about friends and family and life, it’s a foreign thing to me. Like most people, I think: “who cares what I have to say?”
But Joan Didion wrote, on keeping a notebook:
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
So that’s what this place is. I see everything as a narrative, as interlocking, cross-diverting narratives. Right now mine have to do with historical fencing (see the HEMA and Destreza entries) and interactive narrative, less as an academic examination and more as a philosophical lens layered over vocation. Storytrade is where I mark down the narratives that strike me as important at the time. Maybe they’ll still be important in the weeks or years to come, or maybe not. But if they guidepost who I am, and even more importantly, shed a little light for others along the way, then the time will be well spent.