Who Am I Without My Website?

It's been a tough week for this Wild Rose Press author. I'm revising a book, waiting for editorial notes on another, and thinking about a third. Meanwhile, I'm tweeting and Facebooking and checking in with Goodreads and Amazon Authors. For me, social media is fun, but my website, now twelve years old, is my rock. It's my core online identity and truly a part of me. My non-writing friends don't understand when I say things like this, but my website is like a child. I have nurtured and cared for it during all the phases of its life, and when it goes down, I worry.

My son suggested I start blogging twelve years ago, promising to "help." He's in the business, but at the time he was just out of college and working for a small family company in Michigan. Then he decided to apply to grad school in California. And got accepted. He fell in love with the West Coast and I don't think he'll be returning to Michigan except to visit. Much has happened in his life since he "helped" me (ie. does everything except write the posts) put a website together: he's married, has a family, a big job, a home of his own. Yet he's still taking care of my website way past the time when we should have made other arrangements.

At first, the website was mainly used to host my blog and archives, which for all those years I called "A Writer's Diary." I managed to find fresh material almost daily for ten years, but then, things slowed down and I knew writing about writing was, for me, growing stale. I tried many different ways to blog. New subjects were tried and rejected. Finally after almost two years I decided to just call the site http://www.cynthiaharrison.com.

I thought about having a static front page with links to my books, the covers of which now march in a vertical

Through these years, I've been hacked a few times. It's never fun and something is always lost. Recently, I was hacked again and while my son tries to juggle all the demands of his own life and work with my little blog project that has grown larger and lasted longer than either of us imagined, I sit and wait and wonder: who am I without my website?
column down the right side of the site. This is what I dreamed of all those years ago, and now it has happened. That "trying to get published" part of the journey is over and now...I've been writing about real life these days. I love reading memoir and my family posts remind me of mini-memoirs. I also post about mind/body and spiritual stuff. Also diets.

Find Cynthia's Books Here on The Wild Rose Press