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 this is what makes reading and writing 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 opened 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 have also 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 almost anything goes. Read, write, applaud, boo, annotate, comment, imagine, eat, and drink--one stop shopping! (It is interesting, for example, 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 protestant parliament in London, and he knew that the playful, semi-pagan "cleanly-wantonnesse" of his poems would be disapproved in the city that he had returned to after sixteen years of living on the verge of wild Dartmoor. A London pub and bookseller may thus have 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 to bon mot. Subject matter will be limited only by a sense of common decency. If it's fun enough to say decently, it's fun enough for reading and remarking at Rocinante's Windmill!
Of course, the pub's functionality is not yet coded, but this is where AI should come to the rescue! God help us.
The Veil of Lunacy, a fantastical tale by Boyd Barnes, PhD, is available to be read at Rocinante's Windmill, online.