Ardath Rekha: Frequently Asked Questions

So who the heck are you, really?
Ardath Rekha is a pen name. As for who I “really” am, well, I play that close to the chest. If you write erotica, there are a lot of people in your day-to-day life that you probably don’t want knowing about it. And I had a few bad experiences with “fans” of my work that also made it clear to me that I don’t necessarily want fans being able to “follow me home.” Please respect my desire for privacy. 🙂

Why was the site offline for a few years?
I went back to college and got a few degrees! The demands of academia meant that, for several years, I no longer had the free time to maintain sites I had run tech on before then… and that meant that the software running on those sites (including mine) went out-of-date. This wasn’t intentional, but by the time the sites went offline, little to no activity had occurred on any of them for quite a while anyway. AoVD and RGFC will be relaunching in the (hopefully) near future as well, but this site, as the smallest, was the easiest to bring back first.

Why don’t you have any of your Roleplaying Log titles here?
RPs are, of course, collaborative efforts. While I am still in contact with some of my RP partners, I’ve lost contact with others and would have no way of actually getting their permission to include the works they had co-authored. It would be inappropriate to archive those works here without their permission, and only having a partial archive of the RPs felt inappropriate, too. Many of them will be in the RGFC archives when those come back online, and all of them will be in the AoVD archives when it relaunches, so hopefully you won’t have long to wait until you can read them again.

What’s up with your unfinished stories?
If you leave out the RPs, there aren’t nearly as many unfinished stories as people seem to think. Exactly nine of the works in this archive are “Incomplete,” and none of them are likely to stay that way. My intention, with the relaunch, is to continue these stories in the months to come if possible. The complete explanation of each story and its incomplete status is as follows:

Agatha Lively: I wrote the first two chapters in early 2003, shortly before Even Lions Have Their Pride swept me up into its embrace and didn’t let go. I do have a plot worked out for it, so I will be dusting it off and returning to it in the near future.
Even Lions Have Their Pride: This was a casualty of, of all things, life starting to imitate art a little too closely. A planned plot-point in future chapters began actually occurring in my real life (you’ll understand when I get to those chapters) and it was more than a little uncomfortable to try to fictionalize. I had to set the story aside until that was over and the discomfort was gone… at which point I was deep in academia and didn’t have the time to return to it.
Falling Angels: The most recent chapter was posted shortly before I was sucked into writing Forbidden Gifts, and right before I had to set aside all of my non-academic writing to work on my Master’s Thesis and then embark on my doctoral program. Now that those adventures are behind me, it’s something I plan to return to in the very near future.
Forbidden Gifts: This ambushed me out of nowhere after I watched Prometheus, and dominated my free time for several months until I had to set it aside to focus on my Master’s Thesis. I never intended to just stop writing it… but the chapters were so intense and immersive that I didn’t have the time or energy for it while I was enrolled in my doctoral program (and I had a mere two-week break between my Thesis Defense and the start of that program). I love this story immensely, though, and will be picking it back up soon.
Identity Theft: In early 2006, a friend and I began co-writing a story that was completely original and outside of fandom, and I almost completely stopped writing anything fandom-related for about two years while we worked on it. But I still know exactly how Identity Theft was going to play out, and I even had plans for a sequel called “Song of Many ‘Verses,” which I hope to write in the future, too. The next chapter is forthcoming, hopefully fairly soon.
One Rule: Stay in the Light: This was a difficult one for me. The first chapter got plagiarized right as I was in the process of writing the second chapter and plotting out the whole story, which resulted in my having to discard some of my plans and replot the story arc and also resulted in an ugly flame war when the plagiarist (having been ruled against by the admins of several fan sites and Fanfiction.net) decided to publicize the incident and play the “poor me!” card. As much as I loved the story, all of that left such a bad taste in my mouth that each chapter took a long time to work up to. Identity Theft took over my life while I was still working on Chapter 5, but I have the partially-written chapter and all of my plans for future chapters… and I will be getting back to it soon. It should hopefully be a lot easier to write now.
Prey: This was an idea that had come to me out of the blue in early 2004, while I was settling into an online life on RGFC rather than AoVD. I’m not quite sure where I intended to go with this, exactly, but it didn’t spark much interest in readers so I moved on to other things. But it’s a fun start, and I’ve had a few ideas of where I might take it, so I plan to take it somewhere soon.
The Slow Burn: This was my first-ever foray into writing fan fiction, and the only work starring an OFC that I ever wrote… and once I found my real métier, I never really looked back. Fiona wasn’t intended to be a self-insert of any kind, but she did come across as a Mary Sue. I had set it aside and honestly had no plans to continue it, but a crazy thing happened while I was getting everything ready for upload. I was rereading chapter 3 and found myself saying “this won’t do at all” and next thing I knew, I had rewritten it, rewritten chapter 4, and added a new chapter after chapter 4 that previously hadn’t existed. So the no ebook is currently available while I figure out just what’s going on with it, but I have begun posting revised chapters to my Works-In-Progress blog, because apparently I’m not actually done with it after all. 🤦🏽‍♀️
Three Sisters: The first two chapters of this were written shortly before it was time for me to pack up and move. But that move, and the many upheavals that accompanied it, were only part of what stopped me from continuing the story; I hadn’t actually worked out how I was going to proceed with the “storm the Underverse to rescue Kyra” arc that was central to the plot. The logistics of moving to another state and rebuilding my life took precedent over working out those logistics, and I never got back to it. I’m toying with possibilities now, though, and will put out another chapter as soon as I work them out.

The story of nine stories...

Mysteries solved?

So are you going pro?
Hopefully soon! I have a complex idea that came out of the LJRP era — some heavy-duty sci-fi/fantasy — but which was tabled while I was chasing degrees, and I’m working with it now. If I can make it all work (balancing it against a day job and all of that), I hope to launch the first in a six-book cycle sometime next year. Fingers crossed!

I’m looking at the site on my phone and the formatting is a little weird. What gives?
There is, unfortunately, only so much optimizing you can do to make things look good on a really small screen. If you use an iPhone or iPad to view the site, the background image is going to scroll (instead of staying put and letting elements float over it) no matter what you do, because Apple thinks it’s 1998. 🙄 And while WordPress does a wonderful job of resizing images to fit a really small screen, there’s a certain point where that smallness will break any layout. I tested the layout using my iPhone 7 (which has the smallest screen size currently still sold by Apple) and while LaraRebooted was able to debug most elements, there were a few that just looked off no matter what she did. My main suggestion: don’t look at the site holding your phone vertically. Turn it horizontal so that there’s more width than length to the “page,” and things will balance out much better. Everything (aside from the background image— thank you so much for that, Apple!) displays exactly as it should when I do that, and my phone is elderly.

What’s the deal with the different download formats?
See, this was one of the most important aspects of the relaunch, and it’s why it will be a bit longer before RGFC or AoVD relaunch. With the sites going offline for several years (or, anyway, with the actual content inaccessible behind server errors) it became important to me, and to the other RGFC/AoVD staffers I’ve been working with, to bring back the stories in a way that would keep them in circulation no matter what happens in the future. We hit on the idea of making all of them into eBooks because one of my friends, who could only browse websites via her phone, worried about readability issues.

So in addition to being able to read the stories online, you have the option to download them in four different formats depending on your preferences. Two of the formats, .epub and .mobi, are intended to be imported into an ebook reader, while the remaining two — both .pdf format — are intended for people who want to print the stories out as physical copies. So it all depends on how you’re most comfortable reading the texts. The guidelines below will explain a little about which download format is best for you:

eBook Formats

.ePub Format

ePub is the “gold standard” of ebook formats. Most ebook readers can parse it, some better than others. If you use the Books app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, this is definitely the one for you. All you need to do is download the file to your device and open it, and your OS will automatically open it in Books and add it to your library. This is also the format of choice for the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, and the Pandigital Novel tablet; the Kobo eReader supports both .epub and .mobi equally well.

.mobi Format

.mobi, originally the Mobipocket ebook format, is the second big standard in ebook formats. It’s somewhat less portable than .epub, as fewer devices now use it. This is because Amazon bought the rights to the format several years ago, cutting off other manufacturers of ebook readers from its use, and then developed its .azw3 format from it. While some independent platforms such as the Kobo eReader do support it, it’s most useful if you want to read the eBook using a Kindle or the Kindle app. Unfortunately, Kindle doesn’t allow you to just open an item into it; you will need to download the .mobi file and then email it to the email address that Amazon assigned your Kindle. Once you have emailed it to your Kindle, it should open automatically. A friend of mine tested both .mobi and .epub with her Kindle and found that the .epub formatting ended up being distorted in the transfer, so if you’re using Kindle, definitely go with .mobi.

Everything you need to know about eBooks

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Printable PDFs

While ebook devices, and ebook apps on phones and tablets, have caught on in a big way recently, many people are still much more comfortable reading hard copies of documents. PDF — Portable Document Format — has been around for three decades. It’s one of the best standards in existence and virtually any computer (and most eReaders) can read it. However, it has a few major drawbacks. It’s a static format; you can’t change the size of the lettering or the pagination, so if the lettering is too large or too small, you’re kind of stuck. What it’s great for, though, is storing a file that you’d like to print out. The two formats below are designed to accommodate your printer, using the two most common standards.

A4 PDF

This particular PDF is sized using the ISO standards; A4 (297mm x 210mm) is the most commonly-used paper size in the world. About the only people who don’t use it are us crazy North Americans.

LTR PDF

This particular PDF is sized using North American Letter (8.5″ x 11″) standards, which is the most commonly-used paper size in the United States and Canada.

Everything you need to know about PDFs

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