Last week I experienced a disaster, a literary disaster, from which I am barely recovered. Upon advice from a fellow author, I decided to move my adairsanders domain from another hosting site to this one. Unfortunately, no one - electronic or otherwise - told me that I would have to “cut and paste” the content on my old hosting site to this one PRIOR to moving the domain itself.
And, because I didn’t know about the cut and paste deal, I LOST 100% OF THE CONTENT OF MY WEBSITE!!!!!! Eight years of essays and other posts GONE. It was all I could do not to cry.
But, I am nothing if not resilient, and I also began to have a sneaking feeling as the days passed that perhaps, just perhaps, this gut-wrenching loss might not be as bad as it had originally seemed. When I created my website in 2011, all I intended to do was publish essays which were really blogs. I was prolific in this endeavor for three years, but when I published the first book in the Allison Parker Mystery series I began to lose interest in maintaining my website via new essays. Recently I had been semi-struggling with whether to continue a website presence - and then VOILA - it was all gone. Had the decision been made for me?
As I thought about what happened, my attitude began to change. I don’t write that many essays any longer and I had already published my favorites last summer in Out of the Ashes, A Collection of Essays. With Wolf, the fifth book in the Allison Parker Mystery series being published in the fall of 2018, I felt the series had reached a logical conclusion. Although I had started a sixth book in the series - my fans insisted as did one of the characters - it just wasn’t working.
What was happening was a significant amount of interest by TV and film production companies in Biologically Bankrupt, As Sick As Our Secrets, and Wolf. Two friends with experience in the industry encouraged me to select one of the books and work on a screenplay adaptation. They felt the existence of a screenplay might just be the ticket for an offer.
So, as I write this first blog on my “new and improved” website I also begin the steep learning curve of how to write a screenplay. Wish me luck. Just thinking about it gives me a headache. I’ll post along the way, and share progress reports, angst, and whatever else comes to mind. I hope you’ll stick around for the journey.