Things to Come

In the next few weeks I’ll be making some changes to my website. There aren’t any hard and fast rules about how often a website should be changed and updated, but it’s often glaringly obvious when one needs help. I’ve had three websites in the past nine years, each with a major design change. This time around, it’s not so much the site and navigation that needs updating, but the author.

The author would be me.

If you look at the above header, it has a picture of me and the tagline: “Writing from the Dark Side.” Let’s ignore the picture of me right now (I love it, but I should probably get a new one of those, too), and think about the tagline. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

When I put together the site a few years ago, I was worried a lot about branding myself. It’s a good idea for anyone whose job involves being marketed to people to have connected visual cues: a specific set of colors, phrases, or a logo and particular fonts. It makes sense. When you pick up a Lee Child book, you can pretty much tell it’s one of his books without seeing his name or photo. The same with J.K. Rowling. Or Stephen King. Or Lisa Gardner or Nora Roberts. Or at least you know what type of book it is. All of those writers write particular, identifiable types of books (which is why J.K. Rowling’s Robert Galbraith books look so different from her others).

For most of my career I wanted to only write dark, supernatural stories. I think that’s what the tagline implies. Dark. Supernatural. And, yep. Most of my work is pretty dark. But not all of it. My mystery short stories aren’t so dark. My blogs and essays aren’t dark. I have ideas for books and stories that aren’t so dark at all and don’t contain a moment of the supernatural in them. But I feel like I’ve rather put myself in a dark corner all these years.

Redefining myself and my work is a difficult process, but I wanted to share this part with you. If you’re reading this, then I’m guessing you’re curious. I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts, my new ideas. My new site will navigate almost exactly as the old one did, and the structure won’t be so different. But it’s lighter, and won’t have a theme. It will just be me. And that will be, I hope, enough.

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Tonight (Wednesday) I’ll be live at the Authors on the Air podcast, chatting about my work with host Pam Stack. She’ll interview me, but she’ll also invite listeners to call in and ask me questions. I hope you’ll tune in! Click here for details and to listen live at 9 ET/8 CT/9 MOUNTAIN/6 PT.

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I blog at The Kill Zone every other Wednesday. On Tuesday, PJ Parrish had a great and often funny piece about author photos. Check it out here.

And awkward websites? These are fun, or frightening–one of the two.

 

January 3 Numbers

Journal:  420 words

Long Fiction:  890 words

Short Fiction: 0 words

Non-Fiction: 0 words

Blog: 522 words

Exercise: Nothing to mention. 😞