I Need a Noun

On that first chairlift ride they ask me what I do the rest of the time and I tell them I'm a writer and they ask me what I write and I tell about them my various projects including that I publish every day on my website and they say, "So it's a blog?" and I tell them that though I publish online every day it's not a blog.

By this time I have already demonstrated some expertise as an instructor, so I have garnered some trust and established some authority and so they tend to accept that answer, or at least not object to it. Perhaps they figure that the person they're trusting to keep them safe while teaching them skiing might take offense and then "accidentally" take them down some black diamond ice sheet and laugh diabolically while they desperately try to pizza their way to a stop before they careen off into the trees to their deaths. But telling them Free Refills is not a blog, while true, lacks any real explanatory power. It's just kind of lame. I mean, Free Refills is also not an elephant nor a plate of spaghetti and while it might be amusing to list all the things Free Refills is not (a five-liter glass bottle of isopropyl alcohol; a coverless mid-90s issue of Newsweek; Donald Trump's pocket square), it doesn't really get us any closer to understanding what Free Refills is.

I guess I could start to explain about how it all started with a great idea, but that's a lengthy explanation and the lift ride is only so long.

And were they to check out Free Refills, I'm not sure they'd be persuaded. As I've had to admit many times, it certainly looks like a blog.

I need a noun. I need some concrete way of describing what this is. (And, while accurate, "The Greatest Website in the History of the Internet" might not be immediately believable.)

And as much as I think a noun might help them understand, at least as important is that it might help me. A solid, concrete noun would make it easier for me to understand what I'm doing, and why, and how the writing and the website itself should communicate it.

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