Getting my journal off of the old site was an incredible pain. 178 months of writing and the site insisted on me pulling each month out one at a time, kicking me off as often as letting me successfully download. The amount of time it took was ludicrous and ticked me off royally. It's why that site shall remain nameless for me from now onwards.
See, I'm truly ticked that the site was taken down on such short notice. It wasn't even the two weeks the front page promised. Now I know that the decision to pull the plug didn't happen overnight. Given the amount of time and emotion so many people had invested, more warning could have been given. After fifteen years, it would have been nice to simply leave up a signpost page to direct stragglers, those who, for one reason or another, didn't check in the last days before the site folded, to help people find each other when the site disappeared. A simple memorial to what had actually been a great place would not have been a lot to ask.
I was on a writing and reading hiatus myself, for reasons I may go into later (or not). If Bina hadn't dropped me an email to let me know what was happening, I would probably have been checking in about now to find absolutely nothing there - no friends, no journal, nothing. (By the way, thank you Bina. I don't think I said that before and I should have.) As it was, I barely got my stuff off in time. At least I think I got everything off. I didn't really have a lot of time to check it as I kept getting kicked off the site and the clock kept ticking.
So, no, I won't be mentioning the place by name again and, now that I've pried my journal out, I probably won't even speak of it namelessly. Honey, I've cut ties with people I loved over smaller betrayals. I can walk away from there easy without a backward glance as long as I got what's mine out.
So now I've got a new dilemma. What do I do with all those files full of yester-me? They're all crammed onto a flash drive in a text only unformatted jumble. What a mess. All sorts of extraneous characters that must have been formatting code make things almost unreadable.
It's not like I spend a whole lot of time rereading myself, but now and again I do like to look back. I don't keep photographs of myself but I have these word portraits for remembrance of things I might otherwise forget. And, too, there is the writing aspect, the fact that sometimes l use the events of my life as a writing exercise to see if I can imbue meaning and maybe a small bit of worth into a very small, otherwise unobserved life. Sometimes I like my writing but more often not.
I have decided to work with the files I have, slowly cleaning them up and repost many of them here for my own sense of continuity. I want to have one place for me to be able to riffle back and forth at will.
My problem in this is the semi-private nature of this medium. If I post an old entry in my Archaic section, alerts go out - Oh look, she's thrown a bunch of words on the screen. She wants you to just tap yourselves over and read her exhibitionistic self. So go, go, go! Go note the little note-whore. She's begging for it.
Except, really, I'm not. I've just never made much of my journal private. I've always rather thought that was the point, especially since I've tried so hard to remain anonymous.
Anyway, all this is to say that I'm going to be tossing up (much like furballs) a bunch of older entries. The plan now is for most to reside in the Archaic book, though I think I may sort out some to put into a book of boystories.
It's all open to rethink on the fly. Plus I'm notoriously slow and sporadic at epic tasks, so who knows what will happen.
My apologies in advance if this "new entry" alert system bothers anyone by saying I've got something new to say when I'm just basically cleaning house. I swear I'm not walking nekkid down the middle of the road hoping someone will wolf-whistle.
(Oh yeah. Like that is even a possibility.)
(Oh wait. I think I just took myself literally there. Ew! Bad visual!)
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