Relaunching My Website

Mon Feb 15 2016

I launched the first version of my website way back in the early months of 2009, after the company I was at nearly collapsed during the Great Recession and laid off most of its workforce in order to survive.

I wrote a lot of blog posts in getting my business off the ground, back when I did not have very many clients. At the time, I decided to focus on character development rather than having Yet Another Generic Writing Blog.

How a Website Falls Apart

But time went by and business picked up (my waiting list is regularly several months long lately) and I didn’t have so much time to write articles anymore. Days turned into weeks and months. The frequency of my blogging fell off the proverbial cliff.

Technology problems--a stolen laptop, a dead hard drive, fighting with comment spammers, and other forms of bit-rot--eventually killed it. The old site was so broken you couldn’t even see my old content, which is a pretty pathetic state of affairs.

The site itself limped along well enough to keep my schedule full, but my poor blog has been dead for too long. And my website wasn’t looking so hot by modern standards either.

All in all, it’s time for a reboot.

New Site

With this post, I am officially tearing the whole thing down and starting over. Hey, if Star Trek can do it, so can I.

It’s a new website, with all new content, re-built using technology that will be easier to maintain and that will make writing new blog posts much easier than on my old site. Highlights include:

Books

My Novels. Back when I started this website, I didn’t have any of my own works in print. Now, I have three. My old site didn’t have a place to show them off, but the new one does!
My Clients’ Novels. The same goes for my clients. And I am quite happy to say that between the lot of them they’ve gotten far more than three books into print.

Resources

Writing Craft resources. My old site had a page with links to a few craft books I often recommend, but as with everything on my old site, it was too cumbersome to keep it updated, so I never did. That’s fixed now.
Community of Writers. When I started writing I was utterly unaware of the vibrant community of other writers out there, both online and off, and how helpful that community can be. These resources are here to help you connect with other writers.
Self-Publishing. Back when I started editing, most clients were still aiming for traditional publishing. Now, most people seem to expect to publish on their own. It’s wonderful that they can do that these days. These resources are here to help you do it right.

If you have any additional resources you’d like to suggest, please contact me and I’ll be happy to give them a look.

Everything Old is New Again

The hardest decision in relaunching my website has been what to do with all my old blog content. I don’t just want to let it go, but porting it directly from a dead system into a live one built on all new technology, with the added complexity of maintaining all the old links, is just too much.

I can explain it all better now anyway. I’ve learned a lot--both about the craft and about teaching the craft--over the past several years.

So instead of trying to preserve my old content, fixed for all time like it always was, I’m going to re-write my archives. I’ll be going through that material hopefully once or twice a week, polishing it up, giving it new life, and sharing it with you. Reruns? Yes. But I hope to make them reruns with better value than the originals.

I’ll be more relaxed about what I write about, too. The truth is, I don’t always want to write about character development. There’s a lot to be said about many other aspects of novel-craft. I’ve learned a lot about those things over the years, too, and I’d like to share it.