Dipping my toe in with web dev

So after a year of working more or less full-time on my own project at marginalie.eu with regular interruptions and some cash-in-hand work that didn't make too many demands on my mental resources, I have come around to trying to take the tech side of things seriously and see what I can't do to build something. Plume or something similar could be a good fit of some of what I am trying to do, so it could be I could take some of the pressure of myself to throw some kind of Flask web app together, but it has got to the time that my conception of what I want from Marginálie is so tight in its conception that I want to at least start to failing better towards it.

For the first several months of Marginálie, I was working on a creative commons "dirty realist" dystopia, Call Them Soldiers. This was something I had carried around with me for many years since I began to work on it back in around 2008 when I saw a lot of people around me in the crafts-based college for young adults with neurodevelopmental conditions I was working at, getting sucked into Facebook. From 2013, working in Education in Prague and by now newly diagnosed (in my 30s) with ADHD and Asperger's syndrome, I got to obsessively researching mass surveillance, corporate data mining, and the condition of the condition we were in. Call Them Soldiers was originally set in Manchester (albeit a Manchester set in the 2050s, and one which was a palimpsest of a tech dystopian fork of Prague of the Stalinist Normalisation of the 1970s). Since the atmosphere was as bleak and claustrophobic as Prague was for most in that period, that made sense, but as the months wore on and day after day I fell into perseverating through the internet's latest takes on Trump, Brexit, Syria, and the V4 countries including The Czech Republic sliding into authoritarianism to the evident indifference of too many people around me, I began to conceptualise a narrative frame, an introduction that could make sense of the state Manchester had found itself in and speak of the world outside. I hesitated to work on this as it involved a road trip with the Choctaw Nation during and after a new Trail of Tears, and what the hell did I know about that?! But compulsion is as compulsion does and I began, in November, to work on what would now be the first book of Call Them Soldiers, History is on the Make. Draft, further draft. Failing. Failing (slightly) better. I was living it, but I didn't have the time and people were starting to breathe down my neck.

I parked up what would, I thought, be serialised, perhaps developed as open source literature, leaving the git repo behind for a while, and took to working on Marginálie itself. This did not prove much easier, as I began to document in a number of videos. I began with a piece that was little more than a handful of notes in an old git repo, a writer's notebook called Radical Transparency I hosted on-line for a spell. It looked over the work of European / Czechoslovakian writer Bohumil Hrabal, reflected on my experiences of reading and translating him (I am not a published translator but once entered for a competition), and also the accusation levelled at him by a magazine here a few years back that he had been controlled by the communist regime. The article had irritated me when it came out on Hrabal's centenary in 2014. Looking back and judging those who were faced with the moral choices of generations ago was all well and good so long as you did it well, but what about the moral choices facing us now? The article, which became an extended essay, has proved to be challenging in the extreme, not only because it has forced me to confront many of the more difficult experiences of my life, a life of being consistently marginal, of letting people down, of letting myself down, sometimes by trying to be something I am now, but it sure as hell had me tighten up what it is I want from Marginálie.

Right now, I have a number of pieces I would like to publish, and the most pressing thing I can do with my time now that I have a month or so of relative peace and quiet (except from myself and my own head), to work on putting the back end together and trying to show the world what I have been working on.

All of which is terrifying. I am not sure I can do any of it. Maybe all of the work of the last year or so will come to nothing. Maybe everybody around me who is looking and hoping that I fail will have the last laugh. I don't know yet. But I owe it to myself to try to believe in what I am doing and press on. Meanwhile, I'll put a little of it here where three, four people may appreciate it.