It really is hard to believe that it’s been ten years already. It was January of 2007. I was about a quarter of the way into my two-year odyssey in Japan. I only taught something like two or three lessons a day, so that meant a lot of time sitting at my computer in the office. I’m not sure what really triggered my decision to start a website, but it seemed like a way to get my work out there and I figured a release schedule would put a little pressure on me to keep moving forward. It had been eight years since I last did any web design, so I had to refresh my memory on HTML and CSS and spent at least two or three weeks before launch testing code and getting it where I wanted it to be.

Back then, the site served as a platform for not only myself but also my good friend and fellow author Steff Johnson (now Meade). The idea was for Palidor Media to become a community of creative types, but I’m not all that talented at networking and the contacts I do make tend to slip through my fingers. Steff and I parted ways after a few years and later collaborators like Angel DeRiso and Kazuya Mori grew distant (though not entirely out of touch). Shoot, even junior mascot Olivia Bean is a closet-bound recluse these days. That isn’t to say I’m not still open to the idea of Palidor Media as a creative community, but for now it mostly seems to be a one-man show.

I’ve made some attempts to expand the site’s offerings, with the short-lived Mascot Monday series of cat videos on Youtube, an aborted Knight of Gladius animation project, social media integration, and the ever expanding review section of the site. I joked that if I couldn’t make it with cat videos on the Internet, I can’t make it anywhere. Ha ha. Well, guess what. -_-; The mascot is a star in my eyes, at least. Admittedly, I wasn’t that invested in a gimmick like Mascot Monday and honestly, cat videos are a rather saturated field. One thing that’s surprised me is how time-intensive the reviews have become. They were never intended to be more than a little diversion to increase the available content but sometimes they seem like more work than the actual stories that are supposed to be the site’s bread and butter.

While some of my grander plans haven’t quite come to pass, I’ve serialized twelve complete novels (with two more currently in progress) and fifteen short stories with plenty more on the horizon. It’s true that I don’t have the audience I’d like (Ukrainian spambots don’t count) and I’m not actually making anything off my writing, and while these were originally the parameters I set on whether or not to keep the site going after ten years, I’ve moved beyond that. Even if I haven’t really found my audience, the site is almost worth it as an online reference for my work, more easily navigable than my stacks and stacks of Word documents, and the schedule doesn’t hurt when it comes to keeping me on task, something I’d be even worse about without it.

My life has had plenty of ups and downs since I founded the site, but it’s proven to be something of an anchor for me, a source stability. Working toward the weekly updates, trying to make daily progress to report on the blog, these are things that add structure to my life and I’m nothing if not someone who likes structure. Even though I’m inclined to be stuck in my ways, there’s no telling what the future will hold and it will be interesting to see where I and this site will be in another ten years. Keep your eyes peeled and stay tuned.

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