The idea of a web presence troubles me, which is my official excuse for not having had much of one despite studying and teaching about webbish things for many years. Web presence of the sort I mean goes beyond passive mentions on the odd site connected to professional and personal endeavors, and it goes stale in far less time than has passed since I last maintained my own sites. This troublesome presence involves active participation in the communities and lives maintained both in connection to offline doings and in the absence of such connections, i.e., in pure virtuality, whatever that means.I don’t object to an existence that diverges from the physical while still implicating it. The trouble is one of intellectual real estate. Real presence, or immaterial presence that matters, seems to call for a partitioning of the brain, a dedication of space for which I seem to be at a loss. In other words, web presence is just one more thing to obsess over, and do I really need more obsessions? Probably.

By Andrew

L. Andrew Cooper specializes in the provocative, scary, and strange. His current project, The Middle Reaches, is a serialized epic of weird horror and dark fantasy on Amazon Kindle Vella. His latest release, Records of the Hightower Massacre, an LGBTQ+ horror novella co-authored with Maeva Wunn, imagines a near-future dystopia where anti-queer hate runs a program to "correct" deviants. Stains of Atrocity, his newest collection of stories, goes to uncomfortable psychological and visceral extremes. His latest novel, Crazy Time, combines literary horror and dark fantasy in a contemporary quest to undo what may be a divine curse. Other published works include novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines; short story collections Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum; poetry collection The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick; non-fiction Gothic Realities and Dario Argento; co-edited fiction anthologies Imagination Reimagined and Reel Dark; and the co-edited textbook Monsters. He has also written more than 30 award-winning screenplays. After studying literature and film at Harvard and Princeton, he used his Ph.D. to teach about favorite topics from coast to coast in the United States. He now focuses on writing and lives in North Hollywood, California.

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