Spring Cleaning

Unless you’re an especially eagle-eyed Threshold reader, you probably haven’t noticed that in addition to adding a link to te Heroic Portraits site over on the right (which you may have noticed), I removed the link to 15,000 Years, the blog I kept as my contribution to National Novel Writing Month back in 2004.
Beyond removing the link, I actually took down the entire blog (I blogged the novel as I wrote it).
Why?  Well, it was my first ever attempt at writing a complete novel, and was, actually, the longest single story I’d ever written, and while it was a success in that I made the word count within the deadline (50,000 words in 30 days), it was decidedly not a success in any meaningful fashion.
Though I was proud of it solely in terms of the accomplishment, my attitude toward the actual content of it was something along the lines of patient indulgence; I was willing to accept its innumerable shortcomings because of the circumstances under which I wrote it.
However, after a year and a half my patient indulgence has worn thin and I’ve begun to hate it because of its shortcomings and can no longer ignore them just because it was written with very little forethought in an extremely short space of time.
I think the fact that it had some amount of potential – potential which I couldn’t bring myself to go back to develop because, after living with it day-in, day-out for a month, I was sick to death of it – is what really made me hate it.
The other thing that started to bother me was that the only people who were going to it (I was tracking its traffic; it didn’t get much) seemed to be people doing a search on the phrase “hands under her blouse,” and then viewing one page and moving on.
Add to that the fact that whenever I looked at it I’d find that it was riddled with typos (I discovered that Chapter Twenty-Six, for example, was actually posted as Chapter Tweny-Six thanks to some Web searcher’s typo) and poorly-constructed sentences, and the end result is that it’s gone.
Done.
Dead.
If you ever had any intention of ever reading it, tough.  I don’t think I’ll ever share it with anyone ever again.
Similarly, though I never did post it, I grew to hate 2005’s entry, though my hatred of it grew much, much more rapidly, and only the two people who have read it (if they ever did read it after I sent it to them) ever will read it.
I also obliterated the blog I’d started for my whole Ideal Queen of Perfection idea, which I started out thinking was funny, but as I kept failing to develop the idea into something other than just an amusing notion I started to have less and less interest in it and find it less and less funny, and since there was nothing actually on the blog, I said, “Fuck it,” and deleted it.
Now if only I could perform this kind of clean up on my life…