09:34, 11/02/2010

Version 6

Hard to believe, but sometime this spring of 2010, it will be 15 years since Miss K first birthed, blinking and confused, onto the Internet. Back in 1995 I was a design junior, first jobbing at one of the UK's very earliest web design companies and, as a trial project during my probation period, did the first "Miss K" web page as an entry for some online beauty contest.

I wasn't called Miss K at the time, so that could only really be considered a prototype, a straw (wo)man as it were. It's long since gone, though I suspect I have it on an archive somewhere. I'm an obsessive digital hoarder and have pretty much everything I ever made on some backup drive.

My gender identity had of course been fluid way before it was given wider permission to roam in '95. I'd been "different" since childhood, in commmon with many in our community that spans the transgendered spectrum. My particular tale is familiar from a million similar stories of childish dressing, discovery, crushes, obsessions, shame, humiliation and adolescent purge cycles followed by some form of acceptance. I won't bore you of it in this piece, but some of the later, teenage experiences inform some of my fictional pieces, so reading those may give you an inkling.

But 1995, fifteen years ago was an important time for me as it really marked a proper widening of my horizons, a full outing as it were. Soon after the first web venture mentioned above, I joined Six Inch Killaz and gave myself the handle "Miss K". It then seemed logical to give that persona a permanent presence on the web, and I designed and built my very first proper webpage, which soon developed into Version 1 of the draGnet with pictures and everything! Version 2 soon followed, starring the short lived cartoon Miss K...

Mutations

Ever since then I've mutated, shifted and morphed alongside successive versions of my web persona. Version 3 of the draGnet, which is where I started picking up a big following online, roughly coincided with the 1999 breakup of the Killaz, as well as the onset of digital photography. I had a radical reboot of my personal image at the same time, ushering in the beginning of the "blonde years" and a much more pornographic style of self-presentation. Some who write to me via my various networks clearly feel that these were my best years, but time marches on and a change is as good as a rest.

So after a brief hiatus, 2004 saw the launch of the more serious, less blonde me, with draGnet v4.0, a scattershot yet very, very popular weblog which regularly got close to 10,000 page impressions a month (I do about a fifth of that now). It was part of the early wave of transgender blogs in the UK, which almost amounted to a movement, with Siobhan Curran's now defunct Tranniefesto and Becky Enverité's still just alive Becky's T-Blog very much leading the way. I always felt pressure to keep up and probably posted too much of too little consequence during the three and a bit years that that blog was alive. Nevertheless it was popular and even got noticed by the normals once or twice.

But eventually v4.0 gave into the fact of its own irrelevance and I shut it down, replacing it a year later in 2008 with the one you're now reading.

v 5.0

Version 5.0 has been, up until now, a sort of "greatest hits" compilation. Just somewhere I wanted to preserve what I consider to be the best of the writing that I've produced over the decades, as well as completing pieces that were left unfinished last time. The draGnet now spans two centuires (and in fact millennia!), three decades, and fifteen years. That not only makes me a very old transgender z-list sleb, but also, theoretically at least, a very wise one, as one of the few original pieces written for v5.0 pointed out. And the wise old tranny in me knows not to expend too much effort when you can repost stuff from the past.

But now, with the completion of the Six Inch Killaz story, I'm pretty much done with the necroposting and I need to look forward again. There are still plenty of things to be written about, and at least one thing that needs finishing. So it never ends.

You'll notice that I've redesigned the site. I guess this marks the end of the looking backward and the start of new writing. It will be irregular, but I hope it will be good. And yes, it will still be interspersed regularly with plugs for Deathline, my band. Plus ça change.

Version 6

By the way, this is still version 5. Version 6 will be something completely different. Oh yes...

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