In the fall of 2016, I was getting a bit discouraged over the lack of takeoff in my writing career. I had written a number of books for the tabletop gaming industry, I had published about a million words of successful fan-fiction, and I was getting a series of decent non-boilerplate rejection notes from mainstream publishers. I just didn’t seem to be able to get over that last potential-energy barrier to start seeing my work in print.

Then Tuesday, the eighth of November happened.

Suffice it to say that I was strongly motivated to withdraw from public engagement at that point. I shut down my blog, deleted my social-media accounts, and resolved to just concentrate on my family and my day job for a while. I even stopped writing entirely for several months.

Since then, some of the things I feared have come to pass, while others have not (at least not yet). Yet life seems to be going on, and I eventually found myself writing again.

Already, I had set up a new website for static content (Sharrukin’s Archive) although I never generated enough material to populate that. Unfortunately, by the time I thought about emerging from my cave again, the domain name I originally used for my online activity had been captured by a domain squatter. It was being used to advertise cars, I think. So, rather than negotiate with the squatter and possibly end up paying hundreds of dollars to get my domain back, I let the situation lie.

Then, early this year, on an impulse I checked the domain’s registration status. Apparently it had been permitted to lapse again, and would be available for recapture sometime early this year. So I watched, and when the domain was deleted from the Internet registries I grabbed it.

Sharrukin’s Palace is back in business.

My approach to writing has changed a bit over the past couple of years. I’m no longer trying to get short fiction published. Instead, I’m working on some large-scale world-building and developing a couple of full-length novels. When I have material ready, that will go to Amazon for self-publication.

Meanwhile, I plan to try to post some work here at least once a week: reviews of media I find interesting, essays and progress reports on my writing process, world-building material, short excerpts of stories destined for self-publication, and so on. Anything that seems worth preserving as a full-fledged article will also be copied over to the static Sharrukin’s Archive site.

You know the old saying: the devil laughs when we make plans. We’ll see how things go.