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what is this, then?

immediacy is the personal weblog of Glen Engel-Cox, focusing on all the forms of media with immediate (or nearly so, in the grand scheme of things) comments post-consumption. Because media does not exist in a vacuum (although there's a question about Roger Water's Music from the Body), immediacy also details the rest of the ephemeral environment, including personal opinions and comments by Glen and anyone who feels the need to post a follow-up. From 2008-2011, Glen and his spouse lived in Malaysia, so many entries also concern expat life.

who is this, then?

Glen is a forty-something communications professional living in Columbus, Ohio. He grew up in Texas and has also lived in Los Angeles, Colorado, Washington State, Washington, DC, and Kuala Lumpur. Glen also likes to talk about himself in the third person.

Glen has been involved in two highly praised small press science fiction magazines. For NOVA Express, he wrote reviews and critical articles on fantasy and science fiction and also served as Managing Editor for two years. Glen also wrote a book review column for the last issues of New Pathways, and also saw his first piece of fiction, "Abraham's Bosom," published there. His fiction has also appeared in the mass market paperback, Alternate Presidents (Alternate Anthologies) (ed. by Mike Resnick) and as a limited edition chapbook from the World Fantasy Award-winning Roadkill Press. He's been a member of both the Turkey City Writer's Workshop in Austin, Texas and the Northern Colorado Writer's Workshop. Glen's reading diary, "First Impressions," was one of the first book review sites on the web. He completed an MFA in Creative Writing (and his first novel) at American University in 2001 (Got Publisher?) and currently works for Battelle Memorial Insitute.

who did this, then?

Most of the work on this site is Glen's, although a large part of the design and graphics were contracted from Quixotic Pixels.

first impressions?

Glen started First Impressions in January of 1993 in response to a request from his cousin, Rich Everett, to let him know a little bit about what Glen had been reading lately. Glen thought if Rich was interested, others might be, and so sent out email invitations to friends and family to let them know First Impressions was available, not realizing at the time that he was writing--a reading diary--a format with a long and glorious history. Perhaps because he 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), Glen thought he had invented something new and wonderful. First Impressions lasted for fifty "monthly" installments, a string that was broken for about a year when Glen 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 vicissitudes 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 Glen placed First Impressions on hiatus in 1999. Glen had entered graduate school in creative writing in 1998 and discovered that most of his reading was unpublished work of his peers and that most of my writing time was spent commenting directly on their work and creating his own fiction. Shortly before he placed First Impressions on hiatus, though, Glen 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, Glen debated restarting First Impressions. The days of email commentary were long gone, smothered under the mass of spam, and one of the pleasures Glen had found of keeping the diary online had been the feedback received from readers. However, at his new job his boss installed MovableType on a test server to see if we could use the Weblog format to enable cross-department communication. That's when Glen rediscovered the world of blogs, and determined to start his own, using the name first conceived of back in 1999 for GrokSoup: immediacy. As he was doing this, Glen received a notice from SF Site that they could no longer maintain the First Impressions archive for free. Glen converted all the First Impressions commentary into entries in the blog, as well as all those other bits and pieces he 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 Glen's read since. 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.

holiday letters?

At the end of every year for the last several years, we write a letter to send out to family and friends updating them on our lives. Since we never do anything quite normal, each letter is written in a different style, typically related to something that had happened in the year. Here's an archive of past letters.