about this blog

It occurred to me recently that this site really needs an About page, since there’s nothing to explain who I am or what’s going on here.

First of all, if you’re visiting from wordpress.com, you should be aware that this blog is self-hosted (it’s not part of wordpress.com), so you would need to register here in order to comment. That confuses a lot of people who are used to the automatic login when you travel between blogs on wordpress.com and want to leave comments. I’m entirely in favor of comments, but you’ll have to register to leave them (it’s really easy, and you only have to do it once).

I considered moving this whole site to wordpress.com, but there are customizations here that would not be possible if I wasn’t running it this way (and, having put together websites of various kinds for… 14 years[?], I’m kind of used to running my own show).

As for me, I’ve been writing for over 40 years (and a couple of my characters do go back clear to the beginning). The stuff from the first couple of decades wasn’t that great (to be kind) and I started a lot of things that I never finished. Then, in the late 1980s, I started A Sane Woman, my first novel, which was published in little monthly chapbooks.

But then somebody gave me a modem and I got online (dialup BBSs, in those days) and I knew I had finally found the best way to get my writing to people. So, I shelved A Sane Woman (which wouldn’t have worked in the format of BBS posts) and started something else, which eventually turned into U-town, my second novel. I didn’t finish that either (it kind of got out of control, and there was one snag in the plot that I couldn’t figure out how to solve). That’s when I started to write movie reviews. A few of them were pretty good, I think, so I’ve posted them here.

But there I was, nearly 50 years old, and it started to bug me that I had two unfinished novels sitting around, so I decided to finish them both for my 50th birthday, which I did. Since then, I’ve written a series of mystery stories, and a new novella called Stevie One.

I’ve never been published conventionally, but A Sane Woman is available in hard copy: www.u-town.com/jansleet. I’ve experimented with putting U-town, the second novel, on paper, but it would be a really big book (it’s around 170,000 words), and some chapters are really designed to be read online since they have hypertext aspects.

The mystery stories are located here. Jan Sleet, the detective character, was in both A Sane Woman and U-town (she’s in everything I write) but I thought she deserved to be in some more conventional detective stories as well, especially since in U-town there actually is a murder mystery, but she doesn’t get to solve it.

Stevie One is located here. There’s an HTML version designed specifically for e-readers.

Also, I’ve been blogging for over five years, having started completely by accident. I talk about that here.