Websites of old

Way back in the day, I used to have a website. In fact, I still have one, but I have not even messed with it in years. But my old one got a lot of use. Particularly when it came to my gaming and hobbies.

But, back in 2004 or so, tragedy struck. My (then, now ex) girlfriend’s niece was in a horrific car accident. She was in a coma for months, and came out severely handicapped. Last I heard, she was still in a wheelchair, and probably would be for many years, if not life. She was 19.

The family was understandably distraught. Especially my GF. So, not having any other way to help, I built a page on my site for the niece. I showed my GF how to update it, and it became her blog (before we discovered blog sites like Xanga). After a while, one page wasn’t enough. So, I built it up to an entire site, including a picture gallery, setting up a CafePress store to raise money, and even a message board. Eventually, I just turned over the entire domain to my GF’s sister, and she ran it from there. Some time later there were legal issues (that I have no clue about) that caused her to take down the entire thing.

But, in the meantime, I lost a lot of good content based on my RPGs and stuff. I don’t regret my decision to turn over the whole thing. It helped fill a need for a family in turmoil. I just wish I had had the foresight to move all of those files and pages to my new site. Or at least save them somewhere. They are probably on the old hard drive that I still have from my dead computer. But I have no way of getting to them now.

So, how does that relate to the stuff I usually talk about? Well, now that I have published my third story on Kindle, I came to the conclusion that I would like to move beyond the genre of Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery, at least for a bit. And some of the stuff I had on that site would make great seeds for stories in other genres. Especially the Firefly-esque Dragonstar game I ran (Dragonstar is, quite literally, “D&D in space”).

I can probably reconstruct most of it from memory. But it would have been nice to have some of the notes and narratives, and even the illustrations I did, for reference. I know there had to be some cool stuff in there that I am not remembering. Ah, well. I will make do. It’s not like there’s a shortage of ideas in my head already. I just need to pick one and go with it.

I’m thinking military sci-fi right now…