The Legacy You Never Expect

So...

When I wrote El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent, I was writing for people fifty years from now. I was trying to do something that hadn't been done and that, if it had gotten any serious press, would have caused people to redefine their conceptions of bilingual texts. Ambitious, a bit cocky, but remember that A) I was only 22-23 and B) really, you couldn't find facing, symmetrical texts in two languages that were not translations but antitheses. I've since seen something approaching that idea, but it's still unique. Any exceptions, please tell me about them.

Almost nobody knows about it.

I'm now writing diluvium, and I want it to last for at least fifty years. I definitely haven't seen anyone combine accessible and difficult and traditional and visual poetries in this way, and I'm actively searching. The closest I can get to what I'm doing visually is Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission, and that's straight-up difficult work.

I fear nobody will know about it.

Which brings me to a creation of mine that I devised in January 2006. A creation which still lives on in name and spirit, having spawned three or four or more message board threads containing literally thousands of posts. Not all of them directly relate to this creation, but the "old-timers" on the boards still talk of it.

I'm talking about Krede the Mighty.

In January 2006, Wizards of the Coast held a dragon-making contest. You, the readers and players, design a dragon. We'll take our x favorites and put them head to head, letting visitors to our website vote for the winner each week. Almost everybody was coming up with really complicated, high-level dragons that nonetheless didn't really spark. There was creation, but not much creativity.

So I decided to introduce a dragon who had been cursed into the form of a duck. I decided that he would always remain in character and, as per one of the grand rules of improv, always play along with what others were doing to him with one exception: he could never actually gain real "power." I determined that this was because the curse was not specifically to turn him into a duck, but to warp magic around him such that it took the most embarrassing form possible. Thus, an attempt to grow him to his normal size resulted in only his butt getting bigger (and launching a remix of Sir-Mix-A-Lot). When somebody happily played along with Krede, imprisoning him in a Forcecage, I began a series of faux-Civil-War-style missives, at which point even more players began writing to and about Krede, inventing factions and skullduggery in the upcoming contest. Someone went so far as to make an entire thread called Krede's Pond wherein the activities could be continued. Then that thread got too big, so we made Krede's Cafe. Then someone opened Krede's Tavern. Which was followed by similar threads (which invoked Krede by name). The Pond and Cafe have been lost to the recesses of the internet, I think, which is actually a pity.

All I'm saying is, it's entirely possible that more people know about Krede the Mighty than about my poetry. The later threads (from Cafe to Tavern and beyond) went hundreds of pages, with dozens of participants (myself participating less and less as others stepped up with interesting personae). There's a part of me that's really amused by that fact. There's a part of me that is telling my dissertation-writing self to just get a dayjob and write fantasy, because obviously I did something right. There's another part of me that's kind of sad. There's a part of me that realizes that Krede's postmodern sense of humor is already part of my poetry. And there's another part of me that just wants to lay the quack down on somebody.

I'll let you know when I decide.