When I was a working journalist, from time to time I was treated to a drink or a dinner from a Wannabe. Since this was Los Angeles, the Wannabe was most often a Screenwriter or, if a more serious type, perhaps a Novelist. The Wannabe wanted to know how they could get an assignment to write an article for a magzine.

It wasn’t that they had anything of burning interest to write about; they simply saw magazine journalism as an easy way to pay the bills while they wrote the Real Thing that would make their name. ( Anyone who has ever written for a living can tell you that it’s not an easy way to pay the bills.

The assumption that what I had worked so hard to achieve was, in the snap of a finger, easy to learn was aggravating, to say the least. I would drink my drink or eat my dinner and think,”You naive fool. What a jerk you are to assume that simply because you can put pen to paper, you are capable of turning out anything resembling professional work.

Still, nice person (or sucker) that I was, I would give them the basics of getting an assignment from a magazine–demographics research, query, tear sheets, luck, timing–and generally speaking, that was the last I would hear from them.

I’m telling you this because I think perhaps I’m doing the same in assuming I can teach myself enough about coding, etc. to create a decent website. I apologize in advance to everyone who does this for a living and knows I’m being a Naive Fool, not to mention a Wannabe. My only excuse is that I’m fascinated by the stuff. It melds my art background with my writing background and throws in enough technical stuff to satisfy The Engineer’s Daughter that I am.