After several years of having a one-page vanilla website with a few outdated links and updates every other millennium, I decided it was time to get serious about this thing called the intranetwebz. After all, I’m an habitual Facebooker, an avid Tweeter (I refuse to call myself a tweep, dammit), and my iPhone is never out of my hands (speaking of which, it’s hard to type this way…). So why not get a real website? You know, with pictures, and links, and archives, and blogging, and lions and tigers and bears. Oh my.

So when my buddy Nick Setthachayanon, who I’ve known ever since he and my son were young, trouble-making fiddlers-in-arms, offered to set a website up for me, take me by my gnarled and weathered hand, and lead me into the promised land of having a platform (as the recent article in the Authors’ Guild Magazine puts it), how could I say no?

 So here I am, gingerly picking my way through the minefield of WordPress, and thinking that if I write my first blog, just one, then everything else will logically follow. My bibliography will magically plant itself, complete with ravishingly scanned covers, links will pop up to the various publishers bold and visionary enough to publish my work (those who haven’t gone bankrupt, anyway), and announcements of future exciting plans in the fields of fiction, comics, videogames, downloads, and film will sprout like the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la.

It won’t be that fast.

But it’ll come. And it will do so with its massive gallons of self-promotion leavened with a big fat dose of self-deprecation.

You see, children…here, climb up on Uncle’s lap…I come from a generation in which self-promotion was looked on as something beneath most artistes, be they writers, actors, or sculptors of various bodily excretions. Artists were supposed to create, and leave the promotion to those who did it best — publishers and agents.

Well, we’ve all seen how well that worked out.

So we are now at the point where writers must promote themselves. They need their websites and their blogs and their traffic thereon. And writers being freed to promote themselves reveals an interesting truth about writers…and most people who dabble & create with their minds. And that truth is…

We love it.

Writer and actors and bears, oh my, love to talk about their art, but they love to talk about themselves most of all. And it makes sense, since our egos are so huge. After all, they have to be. Who else but people with oversized self-images could imagine that people would want to actually pay money to spend hours inside their heads, playing about with the creations of their minds? These are hours that might be spent in a more worthwhile manner with their friends or family, having sex or walking hand in hand under the trellises with Maud or having sex or gazing into the night sky or having sex. And yet, we know that in bedrooms across the world, the following conversation takes place over and over:

“Dear, would you like to have sex?’

“Oh, not now, darling — I’d just like to finish this chapter.”

And doesn’t your ego grow when you think that there are people in the world who would prefer finishing your chapter to having sex? I know mine does. Not that there is an actual confirmed case of this regarding my work, but one can always dream, can’t one?

At any rate,  writers love nothing more than writing about themselves. I’ve always felt that every character I’ve ever created has some aspect of my own character in him or her. Especially the serial killers. Oh, and the cleverly disguised writers with the initials “C.W.”

So I think blog writing will be fun when it’s not agony. I plan to write at least once a week, and will obnoxiously announce new blogs on Facebook and Twitter (follow me, my darlings: I’m @chetwill, and I only tweet to be funny or angry, never trivial).

I hope you’ll drop back here from time to time and increase my traffic to the point where I have such a magnificent platform that I can sell James Cameron the film rights to my book-length treatise on Venetian cheese art. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a 3-D IMAX version of Michaelangelo’s David carved in Pecorino Romano. Ciao!