Getting into Orbit…

Hi everybody. I didn’t mean to get this quiet for this long. About two weeks after I relaunched my site, my post-COVID employment drought finally ended, and it’s taken me a while to settle back into the demands of working full-time to the point where I can start balancing online activities against it again.

True fact: Long COVID is real, and it sucks. Get your shots, people, because what doesn’t kill you is not as beneficial as that stupid song suggests.

Anyway, things are rolling, albeit still slowly. The big news is that I have begun posting revised chapters of The Slow Burn, one of my nine unfinished works, in my new Works In Progress section of the site. You may notice that the menus have changed a little to reflect this. (If you’re wondering why I have a “Menu Sidebar” link, that’s because while the sidebar is visible as a second column on most desktop/laptop displays and even some tablet displays that are wide enough, it drops to the bottom of the page on narrower tablet displays and phones. So if you’re looking for the rest of the navigation links, it’ll drop you down to them quickly.)

Work on the other sites is progressing, but extremely slowly, as is work on my original fiction. It’s beginning to pick up some steam now that I’m achieving a good work-life balance, but it does mean that most of the things I hoped we could launch before the end of this year are probably pushed back to sometime next year. Fingers crossed, though. Hopefully I can build up a good head of steam and not lose it to another round of the ’Rona.

So that’s all that’s new: Some new menus, a new “Works In Progress” section, and an actual work-in-progress in that section. All of the chapters have been heavily revamped since I first posted them more than 21 years ago — hey, they’re finally old enough to drink in America, so why not give them a makeover? — and hopefully they are much improved over the original versions. Chapter 5, in fact, is completely new. I definitely encourage feedback and criticism, so please leave me comments letting me know what works for you and what feels off. Once they feel solid and I’m back where I left off in ’01, they will begin to move into the archive and be available in downloadable form.

Enjoy!

We Have Liftoff!

Welcome back to my website, after several years of absence. This is such an exhilarating time for me. The process of rebuilding this site has been extraordinary, and dusting off all of my old stories has gotten my creative juices flowing in a big way!

So the biggest news is the eBooks. That’s right, every single work of fanfic I’ve written is now super portable, and can be downloaded to pretty much any eBook reader or app of your choice. They are also available as printable PDFs for anyone who is so inclined. This is to ensure that, no matter how you’re browsing my site, there’s a way for you to comfortably read the stories on it. And if anything ever happens to send me into a years-long hiatus again, whatever stories you felt inclined to download won’t disappear with me and you can revisit them at your convenience.

The next big news is that we’ll be doing the same thing for RGFC and AoVD in the months to come. RGFC has somewhere around 150 stories in its archive, and AoVD’s story count (including a whole lot of materials we were planning to get into the archive but never actually got around to) is nearly 700 works, so the process of converting them to these new formats will take a little longer. But we’re well on our way, and a lot of useful practice (and experimentation!) was conducted with my stories and pages.

What else? Oh, yes! The final bit of big news is that there is one work in my archive that is temporarily unavailable: The Slow Burn. That was the very first piece of fanfic I ever wrote, and became my least favorite because I really hadn’t found my style yet, and I was trying to do a Riddick/OFC piece which turned out to really not be my thing. But when you’re dredging everything out to convert for showcasing on your brand-new archive, sometimes the wackiest muses hit. Or, at the very least, I found myself saying “this will not do” when I took a fresh look at chapter 3… and next thing I knew, I’d rewritten it, rewritten chapter 4, and shoe-horned in a brand new chapter between chapter 4 and what had been chapter 5. Anyway, while I’m tearing it up and messing with it, it will stay offline… but I’m having way too much fun and I suspect it will be back soon— hopefully much improved.

So that’s the situation! More to come soon!

Welcome back to my site!

It’s been several years since this site has been functional, much less active, but things are finally moving again. I’m reviving my fan fiction archive and fan art gallery, and I have many more exciting projects on the way in the months to come. This front page will let me keep everybody up-to-date on exactly what I’m working on. More pages will come online as we go, but I’m excited to be back.

Things are still a work-in-progress on this end. The archive/gallery system is fully functional and I’m excited about its launch. A similar design will, in the next several months, be launching on the Rhiana Griffith Fan Club and the Art of Vin Diesel websites. Since my site houses only my own work and is thus the smallest of the three, it serves as a perfect testing-ground for the design. Please feel free to explore, and to check back periodically.

I lost touch with a lot of people over the years, on the sites and on LiveJournal (which I left in the wake of the whole Strikethrough/Boldthrough fiasco, and which has since become a literal Russian Asset) and I would love to reconnect with friends and readers. So please drop a comment, either here or in the archive, and let’s get back in touch! I’ve missed all of you.

Ardath Rekha