SilverPen Publishing is a website dedicated to writing for the sake of the art, rather than for profit. Moreover, it is also an experiment in a number of different ways. First, my dream was to do what so many webcomic artists have and give away my content, inspired largely by a simple curiosity whether the same can be done with writing that others do with art. Second, it is a vast departure from how I have done things in the past. I’ve had a website for my writing for many years, but previously everything was on static pages and I felt like the site was rather stagnant. I utilized Mambo almost exclusively, which I didn’t really like, and I was rarely satisfied with SilverPen. After reading an article by Lorelle, however, I asked myself the question, “Why not use blog entries?” What do I need static pages for?
And so version 3 of SilverPen Publishing was born. All of my content goes into blog entries now, search works a lot better, and I’m quite pleased with the results. In addition to this, it means that I can bring additional authors into the project much more easily.
I first began this stage of the experiment using WordPress-MU, which gave me a centralized interface for creating and managing multiple blogs. Unfortunately, a lot of plugins and more advanced things I tried to do with MU simply didn’t work, and its upgrade cycle was significantly behind WordPress. When updates began failing to install, I ditched MU and went back to WordPress.
My hope is to someday establish and/or join a community of online writers, people with the same goals or desires as myself, and that we can enrich and encourage each other through open sharing and collaboration on our work. I am sure that such a community exists in this wide, diverse World Wide Web of ours, I simply haven’t found it yet.
The Author
My name is Matthew Stublefield, and I live in Springfield, Missouri, USA. My days are spent at Missouri State University where I work in Computer Services, and by evening I can often be found wandering around Azeroth as a Draenei Paladin.
I am (still) an undergraduate in the programs of religious studies and creative writing, and I have been involved in college ministry in some capacity since 2003. As of the spring of 2008, I finished a two year internship at First & Calvary Presbyterian Church, the completion of which freed up enough time for me to really invest in this blog.
I write poetry, fantasy fiction and scifi, and a lot of non-fiction, usually in the form of blogging. Fantasy fiction fills at least half of our bookshelves, and I was practically raised by the DragonLance Saga. I don’t read as much theology as I used to, but who knows what the future will hold. I’m currently studying Buddhism, so I’ve recently had a lot more thoughts and theological ramblings.