I’ve posted a new essay, A New Hope, A Different Tack, to the Articles Page. It’s a bit of “where I’ve been” mixed with some “where I am now” and a dash of “where I hope to be soon.” I hope you enjoy it.
Bones of the Ancient Website
Oh, just for giggles, here’s a link to the old Andrew Fox Books website, circa its “glory days” of August, 2004, thanks to the magic of the Internet Wayback Machine. Feast your eyes on the low resolution graphics! Thrill to my book signing schedule in the summer of 2004! Chill to the porn invasion yet to come!
Sparklers
I haven’t bought fireworks since I was a kid. Come to think of it, maybe I never bought fireworks, prior to this past weekend; my dad usually had a little stash of them hidden away that he’d pull out for the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve, stuff that he’d had sitting in a drawer since his bachelor days in an apartment on Miami Beach. Anyway, this past Sunday, my three boys and I drove past a fireworks stand, and I decided to buy them some sparklers. Something non-intimidating and relatively safe to start them off with, since my oldest is only seven and my youngest is four.
The folks manning the stand couldn’t have been friendlier. I asked a sales lady where the sparklers were, and she pointed out an entire assortment of the things. The last time I handled a sparkler, maybe thirty-five years ago, there’d only been one type, so far as I knew — the metal stick kind that stayed good and hot after it burned out, unless you stuck it in water. I asked the sales lady what she would recommend for my little guys, given that none of them had ever handled (or even seen) a sparkler before. She pointed me to much larger, longer wooden sticks wound around with pink and green and orange crepe paper; she said the wooden holding sticks didn’t get hot like traditional sparkers’ sticks do, and rather than shooting sparks out at all angles, which could be frightening for a small child, these behaved more like a torch, shooting a colored fire forward. They came bundled in packs of five. I bought four packs of the new-fangled kind and two boxes of the old-fashioned kind, figuring I’d let the boys use the big ones, while I’d demonstrate the traditional ones myself.
Dara wisely insisted that I also demonstrate the long kind before handing any to the kids. Good thing I did. That little incendiary device could’ve burned Japanese infantry out of caves on Iwo Jima.
The boys were very impressed.
They didn’t get to hold any sparklers this Fourth of July. Maybe next year.
Welcome to My New Online “Den”
Well, well, it’s been a while. . .
Aside from little forays here and there — some interviews, commenting on other folks’ blogs — I’ve been “off the net” for a few years now. My original website, erected in 2003 to coincide with the publication of my first book, Fat White Vampire Blues, died three years later in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. My webmaster owned a beautiful, historic home in the Bywater neighborhood, which ended up covered in seven feet of flood waters after the levees broke. He vanished, and I, distracted by a bazillion post-disaster concerns, allowed my website to languish, failing even to pay the renewal fee on my domain name.
Gentle readers, here’s a hint — don’t let your domain name expire. It will be immediately colonized by a porn site. I began receiving emails from dismayed or bemused readers and friends: “Hey, what’s the deal? Did you go into the porn business???” No, I did not. However, my former domain name, which I will not list here because I have no desire to send more business to the rascals who took over my abandoned property, is now forever associated with bad photography, plain paper wrappings, and men living in their mother’s basements (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I know this for certain because, during my recent exertions putting together this new site, I went to the Internet Wayback Machine in an effort to salvage materials from my old site. I attempted to do this at the office (not wise, but I’ve been eager to get this site up and running). Taxpayers, rest easy — your government has very secure filters to block employees from viewing porn. Even when I directed the Internet Wayback Machine to take me back to 2003, to years before I abandoned my domain name, still the electronic nanny blocked my access and informed me that I had attempted to view porn. There I was, trying to salvage old articles about George Alec Effinger and my obsession of collecting vintage laptop computers, and the censor built into my network was berating me for trying to view porn, porn, PORN. Let that be a lesson to you. Pay your bills in a timely fashion, particularly for your domain name.
After the pornification of my website, I took to blogging at the Night Shades Books message boards, which, in the middle years of the last decade, were a thriving community of hundreds of science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers and fans. I used their boards as an emergency communication tool to reach friends and family during the months my immediate family and I were trapped away from our home in Katrina’s wake, first in Albuquerque and later in Miami, and my posts evolved into an ongoing commentary on being exiled, returning home, and participating in the rebuilding of New Orleans. Unfortunately, an invasion of spambots utterly infested the message boards sometime in 2007, driving out the majority of participants, and eventually Night Shade shut their boards down. The demise of that community was a real shame. Lucius Shepherd, all by himself, had nearly 30,000 posts on his boards and sub-boards by the time the end came. Maybe this August, when the next anniversary of Katrina approaches, I’ll try to salvage some of those old disaster-related posts and provide a sampling here.
Anyway, over the next few weeks, I’ll be unboxing my old knicknacks, touching up their paint, and displaying them on the freshly dusted shelves of my new den here, along with lots of new stuff. Among the new stuff will be an article called “A New Hope, A New Tack,” which explains where I’ve been these past few years, what I’ve been up to, and why I’ve chosen now to get back into the swing of blogging.
Meanwhile, I’ll be doing my darndest to get the hang of WordPress. I’m liking it so far. A lot. Putting up my own site is a much different experience than paying someone to do it for me. Rather than having it updated three or four times a year, I’ll be fiddling with this den of mine constantly, moving the furniture, adjusting the pictures on the walls, and patching drafty spots around the windows. I expect it’ll be a lot of fun.
Category: Big Easy, Slices of Life |
Tags: Fat White Vampire Blues, Hurricane Katrina, porn colonization
