Okay, so maybe I should be saying ‘Welcome to my new home on the web!’ or something along those lines, and I do welcome you, but I also wanted to take this opportunity to explain why, after so many years, I decided to move to a new site, rather than keep updating booksandtales.com as I had been doing since the dawn of the millennium.
The reason itself is simple enough: in the fourteen years since that site came online the web has changed too much, and booksandtales itself has accrued too much dead wood. The problem is that it’s a kind of dead wood I don’t really want to get rid of, not entirely. There is the print on demand comparison, which is now ridiculously outdated, but which was once a useful starting point for people looking to self-publish, and also my early attempts at writing in the form of fanfiction, plus a tribute to my mother (though that one had been spun into a separate blog already). Anyway, the point is that while those are all things I want to remain available because they mean something to me, I don’t want to be so tightly associated with them any more.
Oh yes, and as if that weren’t enough there was also the issue of my problems with my host, which had made me dread the idea of updating my site for fear of exceeding the resources allocated to my ‘unlimited’ account. There are few things as frustrating as working like crazy to create some buzz, only to have you host take your site offline as a reward.
It was a combination of those factors that led to my decision to leave booksandtales as is as a sort of reminder of the early days of the web, and to create a site that was more in line with where I am now, a site that will remain something of a scatterbrain. It will cover all kinds of issues, from writing and publishing, to e-learning, to my personal concerns, because at the end of the day this remains just that: a personal site.
So welcome to my new home, and pardon the mess, but we are just getting settled, so grab a chair, and a cup of coffee, and here’s hoping that you will find something here that will make you dropping by for a visit worth your while!