The purpose of this blog

Blogging is fun.

No, that's not the whole reason why I've started a second blog, although obviously I wouldn't be doing so if I absolutely hated blogging. But the fact that blogging is fun leads into the main reason for this new blog, which is this:

Security.

Let me explain.

Blogging is fun, and things which are fun to create often also have some quality. Well, I like to think so, anyway. I enjoy creating my blog posts and I'm [usually] also quite pleased with the output. If any of my posts, even the smallest and silliest of them, were to randomly disappear, then I guess I'd be pretty upset about that. Not, like, sobbingly upset, but a bit unhappy, yeah.

With Blogger this is not a realistic concern. They've been pretty reliable so far and I trust them to look after all my precious posts. However, as you know if you've paid attention to the blog description at litblog, Blogger isn't my only repository of thoughts about books. What I've come to refer to as "the original litblog" has 68 old posts - get that, sixty eight, I never thought I'd been all that productive - and they're all stored over on the Angelfire servers.

To put it bluntly, I don't trust the Angelfire servers. They've eaten my data before and they could do it again. What is more, Angelfire has introduced an obscene number of ads and popups to their free pages since I last published anything over there. The original litblog is not nice to look at any more. Well, okay, it was never all that nice, but now it's just unnecessarily awful.

Obviously some sort of rescue action has been required for some time now. Archiving the old posts on my hard drive is one solution [and I've done that now, just in case], but I also wanted to have them available online. Not just available, but available with the sort of permanence and reliability that only a big blogging service can provide, and preferably without being surrounded by brightly-coloured flashing exhortations to sign up with some dodgy online dating site.

What to do? Integrate the old posts with the current litblog? That didn't seem like a good idea, and not just for reasons of chronological continuity [better known as "you can't teach an old post new layouts", or something like that]. There was also the small question of style. Y'see, I'm not all that happy with some of the old posts. I wrote them all when I was in my late teens, and frankly, some of them just sound like the whingings of a dumb teenager. Still, they are part of the history of the current litblog, and I don't like to destroy history - but it wouldn't be right to incorporate that smelly old stuff with my witty, sparkling, brilliantly written [ahem] new posts.

It wasn't until last week that the answer finally came, and it came not from the greater universe, but from my wonderful boyfriend [thanks sweetie!]. "Why don't you," he said, "start a second blog and quote the old posts, then comment on them? That way you can archive the old posts, but continue to write brilliant, witty, sparkling prose so people will understand how clever you really are." Well, those may not have been his exact words. But I'm sure that was what he meant.

So I have indeed started a second blog, and here I will quote the old posts, and then comment on them. Wittily, I hope. I'm going to do it in chronological order and tag each post with the original categories I was using at Angelfire - novels, anthologies, non-fiction, short stories, poems, films. I may also make use of a few of the tags I'm using at the current litblog. In the original, each post had an image at the top, usually a scanned part of the cover of the book in question - but I'm not going to bother with archiving the images, because I don't feel they add much to the content.

There will be, obviously, 68 "real" posts [maybe 70 if I do the three parts of Fantasia Mathematica separately], and I'll post whenever I feel like it. After the archive is complete I'll stop updating this blog and leave it here for posterity.

Normal updates will, of course, continue at litblog during the course of this project.