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How Me Three Came to Be By Sarah Stodola --------------------------------------- Putting Me Three together was not a seemless process (so it was seemful?), to say the least. Today is February 28, 2003. Just five weeks ago, I posted content on this site for the first time. There are still kinks to be worked out, but to my delight, it actually looks like a webpage. And that, my friends, is more than good enough for me. Sometime during the summer of 2001, the idea that would one day become Me Three was born. I don’t know the exact location, but I can confidently state that it was at night and it was over drinks. Lindsay Robertson, Amanda Wells, and myself had all moved to New York City within the past year, and we all wanted to write, and none of us knew anyone who would publish us. So in true grass-roots spirit, we said What the Hell? - We have great taste in writing. We should be the editors - not those philistines who sent me my collection of rejection letters!! We had our first meeting at the Greenpoint Tavern in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You can get 32-ounce Styrofoam cups of Bud Light there for $3.50. So we did. Then we sat down at a booth and opened up a notebook. There was a lot to figure out. We needed a name, we needed content, we needed a web designer, we needed to agree on the tone this thing would take. Lindsay and Amanda wanted a lot of humor in the content. I wanted it to be more serious. This was the first time we butted heads. The second time was over the name. The first one we choose was Brookliterati, because we all lived in and loved Brooklyn, and hell, couldn’t we be considered the borough’s literati? Lindsay and I loved it. Amanda thought it sounded too pretentious. Or was it me who thought it sounded too pretentious? We eventually shortened the name to Brooklit, before discarding it altogether. Once we almost named it G train, after the subway line that runs across Brooklyn, but that never took off either, I think because there was a character on some television show named G train, and we wanted to be original. Then Lindsay suggested Me Three. When she thought of it, she was thinking it sounded like a good name for a band, but we didn’t have a band, so we gave the name to our brand new online literary magazine. By the time we settled on the name Me Three, it was Winter 2002. We bought the domain name for two years for $25. The next time anyone mentioned Me Three was in the fall of that same year. I finally procured access to Dreamweaver, and I had a long break between semesters in grad school, so I decided that I would use that time to design the site. I was not only going to be a writer, but a web designer to boot. I got online and went through a Dreamweaver tutorial, then spent probably 100 or so hours tweaking the site, playing with different layouts, messing things up, and having a surprisingly pleasant time with it all. Sometime before we bought the domain name, Lindsay dropped out of the project altogether. So I only called Amanda and told her that the dream of Me Three would soon become a reality, and did she still want to do it. She said yes, she did. And so we had an editorial staff. Then one night while drinking at this place called Camp Bowery (which sounds like some kind of military fortress, but it’s really just an apartment on the Bowery in Manhattan), the subject of Me Three came up. Lindsay was present, and she quickly asserted that she wanted to rejoin the project. I said okay, that’s great. The editorial staff was growing, and we didn’t even have anything to edit yet. And right after this it happened that some conflicts arose. It was no one’s fault, of course, it was just a lot of miscommunications and misunderstandings, the typical outcome of mixing business and friendship. But I don’t want to reveal all the trouble we went through to get this thing up. That will be saved for our unauthorized biographies someday. One product of all the trouble, though, is that Lindsay has once again left the project. And although we will miss having her as a fellow editor, we thank her for coming up with the name and for envisioning the whole thing in the first place. Another result is that Amanda is really upset with me for spending $60 for a year of web hosting without consulting her first. But another result is that we finally have found someone who wants to publish us. It’s about time. --------------------------------------- Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted at [email protected]. © 2003 Me Three |