I started First Impressions in January of 1993 in response to a request from my cousin, Rich Everett, to let him know a little bit about what I had been reading lately. I thought if he was interested, others might be, and I sent out email invitations to friends and family to let them know First Impressions was available. I didn't realize at the time that what I was writing--a reading diary--had a long and glorious history; instead, maybe because I was sending it out on this new technology (to be quickly followed up by its own Web page, one of the earliest book review sites on the World Wide Web), I thought I had invented something new and wonderful. That sustained me for fifty "monthly" installments, a string that was broken for about a year when I took on a position as book review columnist for a grandiose scheme called the Internet Daily News, as well as occasionally just due to the viccissitudes of life.
For over five years, the web version of First Impressions was hosted by the wonderful people who put together SF Site, and they maintained an archive of the installments when I placed First Impressions on hiatus in 1999. I had entered graduate school in creative writing in 1998 and discovered that most of my reading was unpublished work of my peers and that most of my writing time was spent commenting directly on their work and creating my own fiction. Shortly before I placed First Impressions on hiatus, though, I played with changing the monthly format of it to an irregularly updated one through an early Weblog tool called GrokSoup.
After graduation and re-entry into the normal working world, I debated restarting First Impressions. The days of email commentary were long gone, smothered under the mass of spam, and one of the pleasures I had found of keeping the diary online had been the feedback I received from readers. Then, at work, my boss installed MovableType on a test server to see if we could use the Weblog format to enable cross-department communication. That's when I rediscovered the world of blogs, and determined to start my own, using the name I first conceived of back in 1999 for GrokSoup: immediacy. As I was doing this, I received a notice from SF Site that they could no longer maintain the First Impressions archive for free. I resolved then to convert all the First Impressions commentary into entries in the blog, as well as all those other bits and pieces I had been posting to the Web since 1990.
So, while the format is different, all of the content of First Impressions remains online, in an easy to search form, as well as new comments, praise, and brickbats for the books that I'm reading. You can follow it all, along with commentary on life, music, politics, and other things at immediacy, or you can just catch up by looking at the text category.
As always, I thank you for reading.