Interview of Julian Egelstaff (cont')

JE: I remember pestering people in March 1997 at work, pestering them about image maps. "How do you create image maps?" I wanted to know. They're pathetically simple really, and this one Java programmer I knew, who was a friend of Christina's, this guy was a co-op student working on the ill-fated Corel Office for Java project. He kept sort of telling me the basics and kind of giving the attitude like "It's simple, go do it already and quit bugging me." That was for the Atlas section.

I kind of consider it a little ironic that after all my concern about computers and keeping up, I've ended up as a technical person in the high tech business!

RG: Interesting. So why did you decide to pursue a Lone Wolf based site, as opposed to something else that you enjoyed?

JE: Well, I liked fan sites, who doesn't. And the thing was there were no Lone Wolf sites. Well, in 1996, and early 1997, heck even back in 1995, before I even knew what HTML meant, everyone could sense that the web was explosive. It was just incredibly powerful. I got that jolt of realization really straight in the face when I saw AltaVista that one day. Like most things, if you get in on the ground floor, you're at an advantage and the web was no exception. In fact, given the incredible pace of expansion it was more important here than anywhere else, to get in on the ground floor. That's why Netscape worked like hell to get Navigator 1.0 out when they did.

So, I wanted to make a Lone Wolf site, 'cause I was a fan and there were no other sites and I knew that a community could form around it, like I had seen with other fan sites. This was still a time when people's personal pages could have a following. Christina, at Corel, her personal site at the time was a very, very popular site. It contained her diary from her high school days, the whole thing, with all the catty, teenage, high school girl angst, and people loved it. She was interviewed on Canadian radio about it! Anything with a little polish and unique content got a lot of attention. So I wanted to create a site about something I liked, that I hoped, given the climate, would have a chance of becoming something of a community. Lone Wolf, since it wasn't there already, was the obvious choice.

RG: So since you have been the online pioneer so to speak of Lone Wolf activity, no doubt every other fan with a Magnamund based page owes you some small debt of gratitude.

JE: Well, I don't know if gratitude is the right word. I'd like to think that every other fan site can look to the Monastery and my approach to the Lone Wolf Online world as a sort of, I don't know, anchor, an example of something that's a good contribution. Whether it is or not, is for other people to decide... I think it's good. I wanted to focus on the books themselves, since I always had a very personal relationship with each book and wanted to document some of my feelings about them. And so I tried to capture that in the Monastery and by doing so, sort of get a cathartic feedback loop going. So I guess I'd like it if other people looked on my site and my contributions as a catalyst. (I also tried to keep something of the feel of Magnamund in the site, by the references to the world and just the approach of it, as a textual version of the Monastery itself, kind of like being there in a small way.)

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