Links Pages Updated

September 4, 2007:

I've gone through the links pages and checked them for dead/broken links, and removed the ones I couldn't solve or re-locate. I haven't yet done an exhaustive search for new sites to add, but there don't seem to be too many new sites being created these days. Webrings and topsites appear to be passé, as far as I can tell. The new trends on the 'Net are blogs and social networking sites--e-groups, messageboards, and even plain old, non-interactive websites are becoming the dinosaurs of cyberspace. Or am I just too cynical?

I welcome suggestions for sites to add--if you maintain a website or messageboard you'd like me to list, or know of one, send me an e-mail at gwaetgar [at] net1plus.com.

From Shadowed Shelves Bookstore is Updated for Fall, 2007

September 3, 2007:

I've just completed and put up the Fall update of From Shadowed Shelves. Included is Michelle Belanger's Vampires in Their Own Words.

I have something I want to say about Michelle's book, Vampires in Their Own Words. I'm a little embarrassed about it.

A couple of people have been surprised that I didn't contribute anything to the book. Well, the truth is...Michelle did send me an e-mail asking to include a couple of pieces. I didn't want those pieces published, because I was already planning to write new material that would update and supercede them. I also wasn't quite sure that I wanted to "come out" in a published book, at that time (I guess I'm "coming out" now...but that's now).

Unfortunately, I never actually replied to Michelle to explain this. I just sort of...forgot about it.

Which wasn't very professional of me, to say the least, and now I'm red-faced about it.

So, Michelle, I'll say it in public right here: I apologize. I should have answered you. And by the way, Vampires in Their Own Words is a featured title on the front page of the bookstore. I hope it does well!

Still online and crazy after all these years!

September 1, 2007:

By Light Unseen celebrated its 10th anniversary on August 29, 2007. And what a ride it's been! I went out to dinner and had one of my semi-annual indulgences in an "extra-rare" steak, just for the occasion.

I felt like I deserved to celebrate, because I've finally gotten all the articles that I've been planning for so long written and put up on the site. Some of these pieces have been on the back burner for...I'm not kidding here...nine years. Nine years! Ever since The Living Vampires Home Page went up in December 1998 with the "Human Living Vampires" articles. I intended then to write several more to accompany that--at least, the article about "The Modern Vampire Myth," and the one about non-human living vampiric people. But I just never got to them...and I know why, and I won't bore everybody with the rationales. The "deadline effect" of wanting to get those articles written, at long last, for the site's 10th anniversary finally lit a fire under my tail, so, there they are--some 340 KB worth. I was working on those for nearly two weeks without stopping--that's all I did, aside from obligatory chores and appointments, literally: work on those articles. I could understand why it had taken so long to get to them.

It's interesting to think back on all the unexpected fallout from the website and some of my bright ideas for it. The Real Vampire Classifieds, which were very popular and doing well, until someone e-mailed me in hysterics because her classified came up in an online search and suddenly she was afraid her employers would see it. She excoriated me for "listing her e-mail address with search engines." Of course, I'd done nothing of the sort--but innocent me, I hadn't thought to code the Classifieds pages with noindex, nofollow tags. I decided that the way the Internet was heading, I better take the Classifieds down. It was a shame--one couple wrote to say they'd met and married as a result my Classifieds!

There was the friend who'd first invited me to preach at her Unitarian-Universalist church, who got very worried about my website and said she feared "it would be bad for the church." (My website has had no discernable effect on the church that I know about.) There was the executive director at the agency where I worked in a shelter, who read my page and said only that she didn't want me to link it on the agency's website (which I was paid to design) because my site was "controversial." Evidently she had no worries about me working in the shelter...linking my site on the agency's wouldn't have even occurred to me. Funny what people get concerned about! I honestly think the executive director was ancy that the agency's funding might be jeopardized if we had a "controversial" link on its website. But a vampiric person working in the shelter? Not a problem.

Despite my promises, when I took down the "vampire traits checklists," that I would never create anything like them again--I'm reconsidering. But I'm thinking more about a filtering-and-referral sort of questionaire rather than a "diagnostic" test, and it will be much more sophisticated than the old checklists.

But whatever I come up with (some of which is guaranteed to get me into a lot of trouble, if past history is any gauge...), here's to the next ten years!

By Light Unseen Media Launches Its First Book

August 12, 2007:

I've been very busy getting the first book from By Light Unseen Media launched. No book launch party, alas--no time! I've been mailing out review copies, copies to the Library of Congress (which apparently will be irradiated, for fear of anthrax, or possibly the V-5 Virus), complimentary copies, and review copies.

I'm working on some more interactive content for this site. In the works is a Vampire Self-Assessment Test, among other things. I've been thinking about setting up a forum, but forums seem to get troll-ridden so much of the time. I'd be interested in feedback from readers as to whether a forum would be a good thing. There are a number of large fora operating now, but I'm thinking of one that would be a little less diverse and more tightly focused on vampire-related topics. There's nothing wrong with discussions of psychic development, magic, general news, and so on, but some of the fora end up being spread a bit thin. There's a rule of thumb among internet fora (messageboards and e-lists) that no more than 10% of registered/subscribed users will ever participate at all--90% or more will always be lurkers. Some fora moderators have a policy of deleting lurkers who don't make a substantive post within a certain time frame. I've never checked with any of those moderators to see how that affects the activity in their fora. But it seems to me, especially in the last few years, that the active/lurker ratio is much lower than that in the vampire fora.

BLU~Blooded Blog will be including more news items from the various news filters I have in place, as well as musings of my own.

© 2007 By Light Unseen Media. All Rights Reserved.