A Bit of an Update

It’s been about three months since I put a real post up here. That’s a long time, even for me. You know what my track record is like: I go for a few months, my work at MCNY piles up, and I stop posting for a while. A month, sometimes two. Three is a little unusual and having had some time to think about it, I believe I know why: I’ve been in mourning over the blog entries I lost when ThirdScribe crashed.

For what it’s worth, I was and remain in love with ThirdScribe as a content platform. Alpha-testing it was like sifting through sand on the beach to see what neat stuff was available for the taking. I got used to its format, discovered new features, and eventually made it it my primary communication tool.

So after a year or so, I was posting a couple of times a week, almost every week. I was good about it. I was proud of myself. I was hot.

Then the server crashed and took 8 years of posts with it, and that was the end of that.

We recovered some of it. All the book-related content. Useful bits from September and October. And I can re-load most of what I have on the old RS site from 2008 on, but there are significant holes.

Mostly, I was really upset of having lost the tracking data for the posts I’d put up here. That tracking data shows me how many shares which posts and the numbers are valuable to  me. Those numbers, for example, tell me that my all time best shared posts were my review of The Hunger Games (190+ shares), a discussion of Brave New World (195+ shares), my obituary of Donald Sobol (135+ shares) and an apology to fans of The Great Brain books (116+ shares).

Then, real life intruded (as it does). We got through finals at MCNY and dealt with the retirement of a very long-time co-worker here. There were graduations, and holiday parties, and birthdays. And there was writing. A fair amount of it, actually: three short stories submitted to editors, a complete plan to re-write Book 2 of the Blockade series, and entry to a number of writing contests on Wattpad (no wins, but an honorable mention). And there was a ton of posts on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter (well . . . not so much Twitter).

So . . . a lot of writing. Just not here.

And illness: a 3 week bout with bronchitis that I’m only now finally squeezing out of my system.

Here’s my confession: I still like ThirdScribe and I’m still using it. Now I need to export what older material from the RogueScholar blog I can and bring it here, which is a long term proposition. I’m still rewriting Blockade book 2 (and writing book 3) and those are still going to be released in 2015 one way or another. And I’m still a librarian, so library posts as often as I can manage.

Here I go . . .