David M. Keyes. That's me folks, you either like it or you don't.

It is hard to believe that it has been nearly nine years since I have been publishing written material online, even harder to believe that I still manage to find the time and patience to put so much work into something that is nothing more than a giant hobby. The desire was to always be a writer in life, and moreso than that it became important for me to be able to write about the things that I loved, such as the movies. But society has not created the image of the starving artist for nothing; seeking a career in this professionally proved to be a lot more daunting a task that I expected it would be. As a result, I have turned my creative energies into making a living either in graphic arts and web development, and amidst all of it I can flex my writing muscles in this format. Total satisfaction, you might say, at least until the day that I get off my ass and finish one of the countless novels I have in the pipeline.

I've loved movies as far back as I remember seeing them. They were escapist, they were visionary, they were about so much more than just what you saw on the screen. They were about coming to life. I can distinctly remember the first two movies I ever fell in love with -- "Pinocchio" and "The Wizard of Oz" -- and thinking just how imaginative and wild they must have seemed in the days when film was still a relatively new concept to modern culture. My imagination soared at the prospect of being able to create something like that. Only later did I realize that the format for which I could channel that creativity would be writing.

I wrote short stories throughout school and kept rough outlines of all kinds of ideas I could use in writing a book. I made my first attempt at the latter at age 10, but when you're that young, how much do you really know about things in order to write something coherent? Good literature (or, for that matter, any good product) comes not just from talent but from life experience, and I was too far away from realizing that for my early work to be anything more than just examples of seeds sprouting an occassional blossom.

My first movie reviews were written in the summer of 1997, when I was just 15 years old, on notepad paper that I kept in the top drawer of my desk. When I joined the school newspaper that fall, I was encouraged by my advisor that I should apply it towards something professional, something which at the time seemed entirely foreign and out of the question. Why? Perhaps because I never saw myself as writing for critical or journalistic purposes; I always expected it to be creative. As it turns out, the format was an ideal platform to test my writing strengths and develop on them. Articles that are written at a fast and constant pace allow much more room for trial and error than a book or a story does, and I felt more comfortable knowing that, if I wrote a piece that was not up to standard, there were many periodic chances to learn and grow with each new endeavor.

The age of the Internet made it possible for me to expand my audience to just more than a high school reader; I wanted people elsewhere to be able to read what I wrote, offer insight, create discussion points, etc. I thrive at the opportunity to engage someone mentally with ideas that I or he/she brings for through writing. It was this attitude that finally encouraged me to take the plunge and take my writing to the web. It also proved to be an ideal format in the sense that my work was not limited to instructor assignments or length restrictions.

Since August of 1998, the site which encompasses all of my movie-related written material has changed shape, evolved and grown into something that I never expected it to: a full-blown activity that takes not just time and effort, but committment. Such notions proved to be rather difficult to handle by mid-2005 however, and because life decided it needed my energy in other ways at the time, my first internet brain-child had to be put on the shelf.

After a nearly two-year hiatus, I finally decided that writing (and the movies) were still important enough a fixture in my life to keep this place on legs, so rather than just close up shop and move to the next creative endeavor, I got myself working non-stop hours on completely reconfiguring the structure, look and interface of it. Cinemaphile.org launched again, for what I hope is the final major transformation, on July 1st 2007. No one was told it was coming, few were anticipating it to ever be updated again. But I didn't invest nearly nine years in something just so I could watch it finally end. I wasn't ready for it to end, and I'm not ready to give up the things that I have continually loved doing for nearly a decade. So here we are.