Hey, what happened?

Many, many apologies to those of you who have been trying to trawl the famous Author! Author! archives over the last few weeks, campers — for reasons completely beyond my control (and largely beyond my understanding), my website’s host simply threw out my site. In other news, that host has since gone out of business.

Thanks to the semi-heroic efforts of the new hosting entity, Author! Author! is once again back online, as you may see, all ready to chat about your burning writing-related questions and publishing-concerned anxieties. Back, at least, are the posts from prior to June of 2013, the last date upon which the old hosts evidently made a system-wide backup.

What does that mean for you fine people’s use and enjoyment of my blog’s contents? Well, first off, it’s going to take me a while to repost the last ten months’ worth of our interactions here. That may take a little while. I’m told, though, that — brace yourselves — it may never be possible for me to restore the comments on individual posts from that period; I gather that would require my searching more recent screenshots and retyping each comment into the current system, one by one. As sad as I am to lose all of that good feedback, since 90% of blog readers don’t read the comments, I’m not entirely convinced that recreating my readers’ original voices by proxy will necessarily do the trick here.

Readers did ask a tremendous number of intriguing and thought-provoking questions during the now-lost period, however, and you’ll be delighted to hear that one of the Muses habitually taps me on the shoulder each time I read a question that really does deserve an entire post to itself. I saved quite a few of them, question and answer both, in separate files, in anticipation of the happy day upon which I would have time to spin my observations at my trademarked greater length. Rather than recreating those exchanges in the comments, then, I shall be revisiting them as posts over the next couple of months.

Less easy to rectify: the newly-restored backup seems still to be infected with spatters of obnoxious additional code throughout old posts, the residua of a former upgrade that — wait for it — my old host may not have handled entirely exquisitely. I had been spending off moments for much of the last year trying to clear up these maddening distractions; evidently, most of my efforts to that end are no longer visible.

So again, my apologies. I wish I had an army of minions to sweep in and clear up problems like this in an hour or two, but blogging is, alas, a solitary activity. And, at least for the next little while, a fairly time-consumptive one.

I appreciate your patience and good thoughts throughout this trying period. Please feel free to keep posting questions in the interim — in the comments on the most recent post is fine, Gary, in response to your now-defunct recent comment — and as always, keep up the good work!