Wednesday, August 20, 2003
During a panel at a recent convention, I was asked if I thought the internet had played a significant role in my success as an author, perhaps more of a role than for some other authors. Indeed, it was suggested that I had a "cult" following online. I replied that yes, I suspected I'd benefited enormously from the web. Now, however, in the thirteen days since Gothic.Net lost server access and my website, blogger, and forum went down with it, I've seen just how difficult it can be to maintain the web presence that I've come to take for granted. Daily hits on the blogger are down by something like 150 hits a day compared to daily totals from before the site went down, and traffic on the new forum is a small fraction of the traffic immediately before The Event (insert dramatic music by James Horner here). And it seems to be very difficult to effectively spread the word that there's a new URL for the website (Google still lists caitlin-r-kiernan.com, though we have submitted the new URL) and blogger, and a new forum. Hardly anyone reads Usenet anymore (and who the hezmana can blame them), so it's of very limited use. So, I'm figuring we'll be several more weeks, at least, recovering from August 8th. And all I can say to that is sigh and frell and phooey.
Also, you may have noticed that the promised eBay auction didn't begin last night. Again, blame August 8th. We discovered that pretty much all the eBay images, which were stored in the same files as my website, weren't backed up and everything has to be scanned anew. We may or may not have time for that before Dragon*Con. Also, at the request of Subterranean Press, I won't be selling copies of The Five of Cups on eBay for the foreseeable future. If you'd like a copy and haven't pre-ordered from Bill or from Amazon, or from some other source, you should order now. This volume will sell out, like From Weird and Distant Shores and Waycross before it. Those last two we will be offerring on eBay, as soon as we can offer anything on eBay again. This disaster has taught me, the hard way, not to put all my e-eggs in one e-basket. So, now we have the main website at one server, the forum on another, the blogger backed up at Blogspot, and everything backed up on two computers, and soon we'll have the old URL as a mirror on yet another server. Never again will the failure of a single site take out everything that way.
Thanks to the wonders of wormwood and biochemistry, yesterday was an exemplary writing day. I wrote 1,597 words on Chapter Seven of Murder of Angels. If I can do as well today, I'll finish the chapter, though I expect I'll finish it tomorrow. Then I'll proceed immediately to Chapter Eight (do not pass GO, do not collect $200). This book and I might have come to an agreement, a truce between creator and that which she is creating. I'm beginning to see ways to make it work as a whole, though I know that, no matter what, this one's going to throw the critics for a loop. It's a shame that critics and readers expect anything more from authors than good writing. Ah, well. That's why human beings are endowed with the capacity for Disappointment. Who am I to argue with the nonconscious wisdom a million years of hominid evolution?
All that matters is that I finish this book, so I can write the next book, and so on. The rest is Distraction, as we know about Distraction, don't we?
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