Writers write with the minds of their readers in mind and vice-versa; elaborating the common mind of readers and writers is the purpose of a literary tradition. I believe that this is what makes reading and writing into topics of companionable conversation, and because this great purpose is pertinent no longer to the USA outside of a few specialized academic environments, Rocinante's Windmill is offered as a possibility for its recreation: writing, reading, and commenting done together and in common.
The site is conceived analogously to a public house in early-modern England that might also have served as a bookseller's point of sale. Robert Herrick, for example, advertised the publication of Hesperides this way:
Hesperides: or, the works both human and divine of Robert Herrick Esq., London, Printed for John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, and are to be sold at the Crown and Marygold in Saint Paul's Churchyard. 1648.
I presume that the Crown and Marygold was a pub and am happy to think so, because pubs are happy places where things are not taken too seriously and anything goes. Read, write, applaud, boo, annotate, comment, imagine, eat, and drink--one stop shopping! (It is interesting, you know, to find the Reverend Herrick styling himself an 'esquire. He had been removed in 1647 from his Anglican parrish in Dean's Prior, Dorset, by the newly protestant parliament in London and knew that the semi-pagan (and lovely) "cleanly-wantonnesse" of his lyrical poems would be disapproved in that mercantile and protestant city, which he had returned to live in after sixteen years at the verge of wild Dartmoor. A London pub and bookseller thus have may served Herrick as an Anglo-catholic haven from parliament and puritanism! I like it.)
Nothing will be sold at Rocinante's Windmill. Every post and comment will be free and available to registered users, and the standard post will not be book length but anything from epigram to encyclopedia and back to bon mot. Subject matter will be limited only by a common sense of decency. If it's fun enough to say decently, it's fun enough to read and comment on at Rocinante's Windmill!
Of course, the pub's functionality is not coded yet, but this is where AI should come to the rescue!
The Veil of Lunacy, a novel both historical and fantastical, by Boyd Barnes, PhD, is available to be read at Rocinante's Windmill, online.