Ephemera

The last flowers of spring, blossoming before summer's heat

Google announced changes to its inactive account policy not long ago, without mentioning blogs specifically.  (Anything blogspot.com is essentially attached to a Google account.)  I dug into the changes a little further, and found that, yes, blogs too.  After two years of account inactivity, a blog will be deleted.

Which is to say that my efforts to produce advice that lasts, essays that can provoke thought for many years, and, I like to think, prose that remains timeless, all stand to be deleted, since I won't live for decades and decades, and thus can't keep my account active that long.  My words and thoughts will be mere ephemera.  Here, then gone.

If I'd known that starting out in 2013, I would have found someplace else to put it all.

Steam rising from a cup of tea

So, there's two results from all this.

One is that I'm going to be producing a bunch of free ebooks in the immediate future, starting with "How to Write," with all my writing entries in it.  There will be another on problem words at some point, and a third with at least most of the blog entries on decisions, relationships, self-identity and other topics down in the right sidebar, not to mention another short story collection, too.

That's one result, if multi-volume, so to speak.

A child's delight on Christmas morning

The other is that I'm not going to be posting essays or thought pieces here.  Other things, but not the things I want to last and last.  I just don't see the point.  I'll take a lot of what's already here, that I think has a timeless quality to it—so, probably not the topical, political, or the pandemic posts—add in some of the unpublished pieces in my stockpile, and publish them all in an ebook, as said above.

That doesn't mean I'll be shutting down the blog.  I'll be posting book announcements, I know.  Probably some other things.  Not everything I say needs to be around for forever.

Let me add that I'm not angry.  Google has its intentions where blogs are concerned, and I have mine.  They mostly aren't compatible, that's all.

Beads of dew on a cool morning

Ephemeral things can be beautiful.  I'm not disparaging them.

But I have no desire for so many of my words to evaporate and vanish, lost but in memory.

As I transition material to ebooks, I expect to remove it from here.  (My apologies for any link rot.)  The blog is too vulnerable to abuses like AI training, even aside from my reasons given above.