Between 2000 and 2018, I had multiple mailing lists under multiple identities. Instead of detailing all, I'll focus on the first and most popular: Victory Shag.
In late 1999, I posited to a friend that if a stranger finds you funny, they're likely to trust you. My friend, who lacked a sense of humor, thought this theory ridiculous. We wondered if there was any way to test this without simply asking people, which of course would come loaded with biases.
I was a web designer and had built mailing lists for corporate clients to blast out press releases and other info. I used that knowledge to build a mailing list hosted at victoryshag.com, a domain for a record label I had considered starting.
I put up a quick web page with a single text box and the options "sign me up to shag" and "forget that i exist":
That was it. No explanation or subscription details. Because I hadn't sent anything yet — no archives.
In the pre-spam filter days (hell, pre-Gmail), you didn't give out your email address easily, so I considered someone submitting theirs as a form of trust. Now, I just had to anonymously lure them to the site with my sparkling sense of humor.
There were few dating sites to choose from back then. The most popular was Nerve. When you created an account, you answered a series of questions that served to fill out your dating profile.
One of the questions was, "_____ is sexy. _____ is sexier."
I filled in the blanks with Nerve's [erotic] photo of the day and victoryshag.com. Then, I made the rest of my profile as funny and charming as possible. After that, I waited.
Within a few hours, I had my first subscriber. By the next morning, there were 5. I felt I had proven my point about humor leading to trust.
I presented my evidence to my friend, and he asked, "What are you going to do with those email addresses?" I had not thought this far ahead. Even I, it seemed, didn't know what they'd subscribed to. I thought about it overnight, and the next day there were 8 more subscribers. Since I'd posted my profile in the "men seeking women" section of Nerve, I assumed my subscribers were straight women.
I wrote a love letter to the woman I lost my virginity to 10+ years earlier. I hadn't seen her in almost as long. For reasons I can't recall, I wrote it as if I was still in the time about which I was writing. So, in the context of the letter, we hadn't slept together 10+ years ago, but the previous night. I signed it with a fake name: Dobbs, which was Humphrey Bogart's character's name in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Then, I typed it into my mailing list's data field and clicked SEND.
The next morning, I had 20 subscribers. I wrote another letter to another former lover, using the same concept of transporting myself to "the now," and sent it.
I did this repeatedly, hundreds of times over the years, with the subscribers eventually numbering in the thousands. Some women appeared in dozens of letters; others in just one or two.
Readers could reply to the emails, and one woman said it felt like finding a box of love letters and opening one each morning. "The best way to start my day!"
Other readers wrote that they were "rooting for" a specific lover or didn't understand why I was "no longer with ____, as you are clearly right for one another." Many women propositioned me and some became addressees of future letters. Occasionally, I'd write from a lover's point of view and send that out.
I never revealed my age or race and never posted a photo of myself (this was pre-Smart Phone / Selfie). I declined press requests requiring a photo and accepted those that didn't. I never used my real name.
This became a problem when I started meeting subscribers. I continued using the name Dobbs because I was afraid my true identity would get revealed. Not once was I asked "What the hell kind of name is that!?" or for a surname. Still, it felt deceitful, even though, technically, it's not that big of a deal. (I've known people for decades who use a nickname or middle name instead of their "real" name.)
I didn’t reveal my real identity until 2014, about 10 years after I killed Victory Shag, during an interview about the project for Strangers, one of KCRW Santa Monica’s podcasts.
After Victory Shag, I had several mailing lists. Some were under the Dobbs name and others under different heteronyms I'd used over the years. None were under my own name or tied to each other, so each list under a new name started with zero subscribers. Some were for letters, others for poetry, two novellas, one screenplay, and one for photography where I sent out a different photo of the same two buildings daily for 364 consecutive days.
I'm still in touch with my High School English teacher. She was one of the few who knew I was the one doing these projects. Every few years we'd meet to catch up and she'd always ask, "Did you ever figure out how to monetize your writing?" Nope. I never made a dime off any of it, despite more than a hundred thousand words and thousands of subscribers.
I started a new Dobbs project around 2016 or '17 during recovery from a small stroke. It was called Burning the Days, and it was where I shared poetry. I also tried to create an archive of all past Dobbsian projects on this site, but it was difficult because I hadn't maintained a record outside of my email's "Sent" folder. Readers responded by sending in past emails they'd kept, which was lovely. However, due to multiple devices and life complications, most of those pieces were lost. That's why you've got this summation, rather than a proper archive.
Plus, a good friend suggested it was time to move on. She's right.