Introducing the Wonder That Is Me.

Hi. Andrew Foley here. As the title implies, I write things, including, with this post, a blog on Blogger.

How did this happen?

I had an interesting discussion a couple weeks back, over a couple (and then a couple more) beers with a Successful Comic Artist, about, among other things, the importance of a web presence for professional comic creators in this highly virtual day and age.

I've had something in the way of a presence for a couple years now, on an irregularly, but fairly frequently, updated LiveJournal account. When someone roped me into joining MySpace, I started cross-posting there, too. "Good enough," thought I, at least when MySpace wasn't being frustratingly slow to allow me access.

The Artist was not convinced this was sound from a business perspective. If I recall correctly (and there's every chance I don't), he believed Blogger was the best online journal system for comic folk, from a professional standpoint. LiveJournal was for family and friends, MySpace was for people looking for dates, but Blogger was a respectable system for a professional, without the PR baggage and relatively easy to post images on.

Of course, my online presence consisting of LiveJournal and MySpace wasn't what really horrified the Artist about my public relations strategy (if something that doesn't in any real sense exist could be said to be a strategy). What really threw him (and several of my friends and professional acquaintances) for a loop was that I didn't differentiate my business self from my self self, and posted pretty much anything I felt like posting about pretty much anything I felt like posting about with minimal editing for content (spelling and grammar is another story--I waste a stupid amount of time trying to ensure that I'm saying what I want to say in the most effective way possible. "The most effective way possible", in my case, too often means "at tedious length." I've tried to change this tendency, but it's never stuck and doesn't seem likely to any time soon.)

This tendency has earned me a bit of a reputation in the comic industry (at least with those two to four people within it who can be bothered to keep track of the likes of me) as someone who doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut, and sometimes offers his thoughts when he really ought to just shut the hell up. To paraphrase the Artist, "If I didn't present myself different publicly than privately, I'd end up in a fistfight." Which might be true in his case, and may someday be true in mine, I suppose. God knows I inadvertently ended up in some pretty hot water early on in the LJ years.

Still, I don't much care for being spun, and I don't really care to do a lot of spinning, in real life or online. I try to maintain a "what you see is what you get" policy, if only because I'm too lazy to bother doing otherwise. I don't believe in online anonymity and think it's almost destroyed any hope the net has of being the communications tool it might have been; I've never posted anything under an alias; and have only once deleted my own statements when it became apparent I was inadvertently harming a friend. If my online personality differs from my real one in any substantial way, it's because I'm not a particularly fast thinker when I'm uncomfortable, and I'm generally uncomfortable around people I don't know. Or, to put it another way, I tend to be more verbose when I'm typing, and I don't mumble or stutter nearly as much then as I do when I'm actually speaking to someone.

So. Blogger. After fifteen minutes typing I can tell I like this thing much more than LJ and MS on a technical level--it's easier for a luddite like myself to handle, which is always a big plus. So I suspect I will be using it for something. I just don't really know what it is, yet.
It seems weird to simply cut and paste my regular posts to yet another location, but it may come to that, as it also seems weirdly arbitrary to separate posts of a business, personal, and humourous nature to me. That doesn't mean I won't give it a shot, though, just to test the waters.

In the meantime, here's where I can be found online:

LiveJournal

MySpace

Messageboard

Website - Coming Soonish.

I'm also on ComicSpace but have yet to do anything reasonably useful with it.

So that's me.

Next: Things I Write, or Have Written

Foley