Remembering My Earliest Days Online

Good morning! I just love hanging out atop my Tower! ;-D

This morning I want to share a bit of my past.

In the late summer of 1998 I made my first foray onto internet message boards on THE HOWLING WOLVES board at the now defunct ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY message boards.

I was 6 months old, and we were living in Pomona, Ca..

My first posts were memorable ones, as were Daddy's, and I became much loved, under the user name HOKIE, by all who conversed with me and read my more than 50 posts  ( 22 of them my memoirs ) thru Spring 2000.

How did it begin?

Daddy read a scary story on the message board, that someone had written, and it inspired him to write a response, that we both forget now, but that implied that the story freaked him out, and he was afraid to go to bed.

In the morning I awoke to discover he was not in the apartment, and the sheets on the bed were messed up, and there was a small spot that looked like blood, on the pillow.

I freaked out, ran around the apartment looking for Daddy, and not finding him, did the only thing I could think to do.

I went online and told Daddy's new friends that Daddy was gone, about the "blood", and my fears.

WHERE WAS DADDY!!!!

Well, I no sooner got offline than Daddy walked in the door and, well, you never saw such a happy Cat in all your born days!

I wouldn't leave him alone for hours!

Since he didn't go near his computer again until that night, after work, and I didn't tell him what I did, neither of us were aware of the sensation we had caused among The Howling Wolves.

They were worried about their new member, and trying to figure out just WHAT, or WHO this "Hokie" was posting under Daddy's user name. ;-D

Well, the rest is history, though since the whole Online Community at EW was ended in early Spring 2001, there is no record online that it even existed.

I would occasionally appear, under Daddy's name, leaving entries as Hokie, and had great fun.

The most important thing I did was spend the last year and a half writing my memoirs, and sharing them with the Wolves.

Neither Daddy or I, thought to save them on his computer, much less have someone print them out for us, and we are still kicking ourselves to this day.

Those many Memoir entries, detailing my life from birth, to life in the Humane Society, then finding Daddy, coming home, and meeting my mentor, who died earlier that first summer, were the best writing I've ever done, and losing them put me in a very long funk that Daddy says was a sort of Writer's Block.

Well all was not completely lost.

Daddy had shared my last 2 chapters with family by e-mail, and so something was salvaged after all.

Eventually, I slowly came out of my funk sometime after Daddy took up blogging in 2002, but I could never bring myself to try to rewrite my memoirs.

How could I even come close to duplicating something that was so very, very special?

Daddy, and his friends, say that, yes, the way I wrote the story WAS brilliant, but that even the best authors do rewrites before they are satisfied, and publish the final product, so my starting over would be something similar.

I'm seriously considering giving it a go.