The Book Lady

It’s been a year since I’ve blogged new content with anything resembling regularity. At that time I was happily ensconced in another domain, running both a photoblog (Photoplay) and a regular blog (Novelist in Training). I had commenters and archives and an exhaustive blogroll. I had templates to tweak any time I couldn’t think of what to write next (which was entirely too often).

Not that all was perfect. I’d taken on a new job and begun taking two night classes each week, so things were hectic. My posting rate slowed. I committed mass absenteeism from all the blogs I used to frequent. And then one day I mustered up the words for a post, only to discover that my host — and my domain right along with it — had been sold out from under me. No warning. No chance to inform my readers, set up site redirections, double-check my backups, take a snapshot of the template, or find a new host. My blogs, along with all the contents, feeds, and information on all my commenters, had been hijacked even as I tried to think of what to write about next.

I’d like to say I took it calmly, and at first I really did. But soon the emotions crowded in: anger at the violation of having my sites yanked out from under me without warning, frustration and despair at the prospect of having to begin all over again, sadness over the posts and comments that had vanished and, most of all, embarrassment that subscribers and visitors to my site would be confronted with ads instead of blog posts. They would think I’d abandoned them, given up without a word. The thought made me cringe.

In the ensuing year many of those who had linked to my sites discovered my abrupt departure and removed the links. Some bloggers have gained a wide audience and are now out of my league, while others have folded. Many, I’m sure, have forgotten me — after all, what’s one more blog, especially from one who proved to be so unreliable (even if unintentionally so)?

But I’ve had this time to recover, to miss blogging enough to make it worth the tedium of setting up a brand new site and re-building everything from scratch. And so I am back. My blog backups, which I had made so religiously, were corrupted (yet more fuel to feed all that anger and despair), but I was able to salvage some of the posts nonetheless. Lest they be lost in the abyss forever, I will be integrating those old posts with new as I build this site, selecting only what I feel are the best and/or most appropriate at the time. Most of the entries (such as this one) will be new.

With time, I hope that those who were hurt by my sudden disappearance will trust me again and begin to visit this new blog; I know that I will be visiting their sites again. I will take it slowly, deliberately, but with any luck this time I will be in it for the long haul.

Yes, it really is good to be back, even on a nearly-blank blog with (as of this point) no readers. And so I will send this post out into the wilds and continue to build anew. Wish me luck, gentle reader.