Twenty years, eighty-three labels, and four old friends

I spent a chunk of July doing something I'd been avoiding, reading my own blog.

Not all of it. But enough. I'd been meaning to assess things and tidy the place up for over a year, and cleaning means going back through, and going back through means thinking, considering, and making decisions. I’ve been keeping this blog for over twenty years, so, yeah, a lot to think about and go through.

I got to work. I deleted posts that no longer serve anyone: contests that closed a decade ago, giveaways for books that have since gone out of print, announcements about events that came and went while some of you were off living your best life elsewhere. Nobody needs a link to enter a drawing that ended in 2009. Or do they… No, they don’t.

Next up, the labels. If you'd clicked one before, or looked at them, you might have found a mess. I had eighty-three of them. There were labels used once. There were three different ways of saying the same thing. I got them down to twenty-three, so now when you click "cocktails" or "horror" or "pin-ups," you actually land somewhere with a whole shelf waiting. Cheers to that.

Here's what I didn't expect: reading your own archive is a strange experience. There's the version of me who was brand new and terrified. The one who wrote about a signing like it was a moon landing. Posts about publishers that no longer exist. Whole years where I was clearly figuring something out in public without knowing it.

And a lot of Ellora's Cave.

If you were reading erotic romance in that era, you know what I mean. EC books had their own culture. Can I define it? For one thing, less careful than a lot of what came after. They weren't trying to be respectable or mainstream. That was rather the point.

Which brings me to what's next.

Back in March at BookLoversCon in Vegas, I kept meeting readers who were hunting for those old titles. Not politely curious. Actually looking. Talking about how they were different and why. It turns out there's an appetite for that particular vibe that never went away, and the books have been sitting quietly out of reach.

That got me thinking about the four EC stories of mine that were just languishing on my hard drive, feet up, cocktail in hand, but alone.

After I unpacked from BLC, I dug them out, dusted them off, and started making plans to get them back out into the world.

More on which ones, and when, very soon. In the meantime, the blog is tidier than it's been in two decades — have a look around, click a label, see what turns up. Twenty years is a lot of cocktails, zombies, and pin-ups.