My Online Rehab Continues

My poor domain's getting dragged left, right, and everywhere else as I try to find a cozy little nest for myself that isn't a walled garden. So this is an experiment for me in that I'd like this place to be my main online space free of influencers, algorithms, AI bullshittery, and whatever else. It's a drastic withdrawal from everything I've grown used to over the years because I'm basically just posting in the void, and it's a matter of adjusting my expectations when it comes to discoverability. 

I shouldn't expect it. Not when my blog's completely detached from any social media platform. But it does enjoy the benefit of an open comment system as well a pretty flexible platform that'll allow me to turn it into a static website if I were to decide that it'd be best for me to limit my blogging updates to just release announcements. I can see that happening down the line since I work full-time at my dayjob, and it's not as if I hate my job and hope to write full-time someday. I'm open to adjustments as I go along, playing it by ear all the way and not guaranteeing anything (a character flaw of mine that I need to improve on).

Parking my domain to this site is easy since it's a Google domain, and Blogger's owned by Google. Now it's a matter of making sure this site stays updated and relatively active with new content but without the pressure of performing or looking clever because I'm not clever by any stretch and would just like to share things I love without the dogpiling or the passive-aggressive shaming that I've experienced elsewhere.*

So, yeah. Let's see what happens from this point on. 

* Now you all know why I've been reticent when it comes to talking myself up elsewhere.

Now Available: 'Primavera'

My newest story in my Grostesqueries collection is finally out! As with the other long novellas preceding this one, it tops out at exactly 50,000 words (always a target length for me and good news for readers, price-wise. It's available in e-book (99 cents) and print ($9.00) at different online stores.

Click the cover art to go to the book page

Here be the blurb:

Coming out to his parents may have burdened him with unfortunate difficulties, but nineteen-year-old Adam Sheridan didn't expect a sudden flood of nightmares and fragmented dreams to ruin his nights and threaten his mental health. But there's a reason for these dreams, these baffling images of people and moments from a time and place that have never once crossed Adam's mind. As these grow more and more insistent, triggered by harmless little things in his day-to-day movements such as a co-worker's whistling, a framed print of an old painting, and even a quick escape in an old church, Adam realizes these are really memories surfacing.

Memories from someone who lived three hundred years ago, in fact. A young man such as himself who once harbored hopes and dreams—all of which were lovingly recorded in a journal—who fell in love with another, and whose life was cut tragically short. But for what reason? And how? As Adam navigates through the murky and risky waters of living in a household bent on stifling his nature, his dreams call him back to the old church again and again. It's there, in a small and silent side chapel dedicated to the Virgin, where the answers lie. Answers guarded closely by the mournful specter of a man who has known Adam through the centuries.

This book started out as smutty short story which then got expanded into a short novella, and I decided to overhaul it completely into this current and final form. New side characters are introduced, almost all of the original content save for the climactic chapter in the church and the erotic epilogue are gone and replaced with a more developed story for Adam.

And that's it -- if you do check it out, I hope you enjoy it, and please do leave a review if you can. It'll help me greatly. Onward!

Out With the New, In With the Old

This article went viral over at Mastodon recently: BRING BACK PERSONAL BLOGGING (THE VERGE)  

And there's been some really good conversation over there regarding personal blogs, which got me thinking about my online space and how I use social media -- which I now, sadly, loathe with a couple of obvious exceptions: Mastodon and Tumblr.

I've started my "online rehab", so to speak, with Mastodon, and given the article and the exchange happening in reference to those days of yore, I'd like to get my blogging mojo back. As long as I stay as far away as possible from places like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., where influencers rule and self-indulgent theatrics dictate how you spend your time rubbing shoulders with virtual strangers, I'm good.

Lots of important lessons to be learned or even re-learned. Also lots of habits born of years of social media use need to be undone and left behind. A Mastodon user's elegiac post about a writer who just posted his final blog entry because he's dying of a terminal disease really ground a few things home even more where keeping personal blogs is concerned.

I'd love to pick up where I left off but also make sure to do it without algorithms and reblogs and notes in mind. Not being as young as almost everyone here does color my perspectives quite a bit, and I'm ready to unlearn things.