So I’ve been writing this story for about…twenty years, and at least fifteen of those years have involved the internet.  I know that number specifically because I made my original website back in 1998, and it’s still there.

That’s the problem.

I probably should have done this a while back — or at least when I published Book 1 — but I didn’t think of it at the time, so now I’m doing some scrambling.  Not that there’s anything bad on the old website (beside my terrible college stories and poetry), but I haven’t updated most of that stuff in a while, so it no longer accurately reflects the story-world.  In fact, it exposes some of the awkward underpinnings — the stuff I started out with, that I’ve now painted over with my own colors but that I’d still rather not show in its skeletal form.

Add that to the fact that I’ve played several of my characters in various MMOs, and a lot of my story-based keywords are now scattered throughout the web in forms I can’t control.  Not that I mind the EverQuest and WoW profiles, et cetera, but I’d prefer searches to funnel the searcher toward the stories, not my somewhat ridiculous gaming past.

But I don’t want to delete my old website wholesale.  I still have access to it, and some of my old friends have found me again through it — and, well, it’s a piece of my history.  I’ve downloaded the whole site but deleting it just feels….sad.

I really enjoyed making it.  Heck, I did a whole Choose Your Own Adventure deal with it.  There was a standard site-map for those who didn’t want to explore, but for those who did, I had (have) pages upon pages of CYOA story-options designed to lead the reader through parts of the City.

But that’s all so dated.  Even the City is a past-project (though it exists in Halci’s future).  For a little while I had considered doing a Choose Your Own Bahlaer thing to go along with the publication of book 1 — basically the same thing with the website but to parallel a few chapters of The Light of Kerrindryr, meeting some of the factions while the story’s characters move around in the background.  I might still do something like that, but it takes a fair amount of effort that I should instead dedicate to writing book 3.

Anyway…  This is mostly a ramble, and a recommendation to anyone else who’s spread their characters far and wide that trimming them down — bringing them home — might be a good idea before you get published.

And if you use any of your characters’ names for accounts of a dubious nature, go change that shit.  Right now.