For the people who aren’t receiving on the wavelengths of the more inspirational descriptions, here is a relatively down-to-earth and prosaic definition of Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Fundamentally, we’re a few mad bastards who have seen a need and figured we’d make a wild stab at filling it.

The Internet is smack-full of textual output. Most is utterly uninteresting to any given person. Most is also poorly voiced and badly written. There is true holy fire and creative genius out there, but it’s utterly drowned in an immense tidal wave of vacuous drivel, making the task of finding it a veritable search for a nano-needle in a manure-saturated haystack.

There are sites for topical reviews, news, archives, speculations and fanaticism. Many try to profit from people’s need to express themselves and the prospect of being noticed. There are sites for nearly every conceivable subject and purpose, but there are very few focal points for the actual voices of writing, out there.

Big Rock Candy Mountain aims to be such a focal point. We won’t claim to be the only one. We won’t pretend to be the Alpha and Omega of the concept. We will, however, claim to be something real and living, something full-bodied and rich in character - something worth finding and coming back to.

In a way, this site is a social experiment - an attempt to fuse several concepts together, making something that stands out in the cacaphony of online life. Here, we make a stand for writing as a craft and as free expression - uncensored and undiminished - and hope that others stand with us.

Also, instead of skimming money off others’ desire for acknowledgement, we aim to actually pay our contributors as money comes in. While we won’t make any guarantees, we will do our best to give the writers something for their work. That also means that as a reader, you should keep in mind that you have the option to give something back. The money may be impersonal, but it means a lot to the authors - most of whom, at this point, are not at all well-off.

Here, you will find pieces on a multitude of topics. Not seldom will they be impudent and outright, frank and subjective. Always will they be distinctive and original. You won’t find fiction or poetry, nor soul-less recounts of recent events. There are other places for that. At the Mountain, we try to provide pieces worth reading for their own benefit, not just because they tell you something you wanted to know.

First and last and always, The Mountain is about Voices.