Welcome, strangers, and those who may have known me before. I have a fractured personality, due mainly to my brain getting stuffed full with useless minutiae. So I'll use this blog as an outlet, and a home base were I can gather together all my fics in one place. Also, fans of my writing occasionally ask me if I'd like to chat or IM, and I'm not really an IM kind of person, so maybe this can be a way that you guys can keep in touch with me, and me with you.
On names, "Cress" is from a favorite book of mine, Crescent Delahanty, when I was an adolescent. Alternately, I was "Miss Roylott" in Sherlockian circles. I chose this nickname, not in error, but to deliberately point out that Holmes is in fact fallible. He mistakenly called Helen Stoner "Miss Roylott" in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band.")
Anyway, I had an old Geocities website years back, about my various interests in religion, Thomas Jefferson, Sherlock Holmes, and more. It was full of old poems, school essays, random trivia, and categorized links, but I found that I never had time to update the site regularly or fix the broken links. It just became more of a hassle as time went on. When I got into slash fanfic, I tried maintaining my Sacrilege! website using a pre-made template, but that became too unwieldy as well.
(Plus I eventually realized that I had become a major control freak, taking the fun out of the fandom for other people. I was hyper-critical and arrogant, even derailing a round-robin story with "suggestions" on what was right. My God, I had the nerve to tell people that their stories were messing up with facts in the canon! When the entire Sherlockian fandom in the first place is based on all the unresolvable mistakes and inconsistencies in Watson's writings!)
But I digress. So what I really needed was a new form of organizable, easily updated website. And lo, blogging and blogging software were so conveniently invented! But I still shied away from both, due to my disinterest in "social networking" crap like MySpace and such. It seemed amateurish, and I didn't want ads stinking up the joint as well. And as I said, I was a control freak, trying to figure out a way that I could program a solution for myself using dynamic webpages. I thought, so naively, that XML would make it easy, and would become the standard to replace HTML. Which has not come true except for corporate websites with lots of server-side programming and such. It seems to me that XML is not really geared for the do-it-yourselfer of tiny personal websites. Plus I can read XML books and understand all about custom tags, and get excited about all the possibilities, but the moment I get into linking, transformations, XPath, and crap like that my eyes glaze over.
Alas, I am destined to be a scripter, not a programmer. I can do simple Javascript and know enough CSS code to customize this blog, but I can't program worth a damn. I've taken basic programming classes in high school and college, and passed them just fine, and yet the moment you ask me to make a big, complex content management system for a whole site, not just a page, my brain just can't take it anymore. I would have gone for an e-fic website, except that I never had time, and me, the control-freak, kept wanting to figure out how to do a notes/definition section like I had in Sacrilege. So the long-awaited update never happened.
So I surrender. Here I am, on a blog, seeing how it works. And maybe if I get good at it, I'll figure out how to do a "collaborative website" in which me and all the other authors on Sacrilege can upload stories and maintain a site together. That seems to me the only solution to fixing Sacrilege now. Let me just test the waters now.
