Despite the heady excitement of registering a domain name ("YES! No one has taken it yet!" Hose remembers saying upon checking for availability), nothing occurred for awhile. The whole thing seemed to be ready to fall apart when it became apparent that Kevin didn't show any additional interest in producing work, and for awhile, Blue Maggot Towel was nothing but a paper name.
Salvation came in the form of a strange and obnoxious girl named Maia. Despite her somewhat original moniker and attitude, Hose doubted everything about her after their first meeting - at a reading where she read part of a story. He claimed that she had successfully managed to combine the worst of a Lovecraft first draft and a Gatorade ad. There was no love lost when she finished reading her yarn at the Heartland Café on the north side of Chicago. As she left the mic and the next reader readied himself on stage, Hose managed to quickly disparage her narrative by pointing out no less than 17 examples of inaccuracy, convoluted imagery, and awkward phrasing. His friend across the table only nodded, then gave a bit of a nod to his left. Maia, as fate always dictates in situations such as this, had been sitting directly behind Hose, and had heard every single comment. She ending up pulling a chair up and sitting at their table.
From what she tell us these days, she wasn't mad... but when Hose came back from his own reading, she treated his piece the same. if not worse. They've been close friends ever since then.
But what does this have to do with BMT? Simple. Maia had mentioned that she had a blog... and that it was the dumbest, most inane thing she had ever done in her life. Prompted by another friend who was very enthusiastic about the idea, she had reluctantly signed up. Unfortunately, Maia never grew to like the idea of a blog; according to her, the audience was both random and completely self-absorbed, the communities that people fostered often led to severely restricted subject matters, and eventually, they all seemed to end up turning into nothing but bad-habit reinforcement vehicles.
Hose had known a few people who had blogs, but similarly did not have much of an interest until he read Maia's. Although he noticed things she had glossed over, or events she had written about that lent themselves to natural plot arcs, he reached the same conclusion. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he called Maia and asked if he could write her next entry. She agreed that it might make for an interesting entry and didn't even give it a second thought; a few minutes later, Hose signed in under her name and began writing.
At first, he prefaced the entire entry with a sentence that this wasn't Maia writing, but someone else, and he wrote it from a third person point of view. When he finished, he read it over... and decided it was lame. While the entry came off as a fun little spin on the usual, it lacked anything new or even remotely insightful, and the third person perspective made the whole thing even more removed from the personal.
He never posted it. Instead, he got up and made himself a cup of Darjeeling (this was before the whole Chamomile revolution). Armed with a steaming cup and a Murakami book in a comfortable reading chair, he promptly forgot about the entry.