Well hey there, welcome to my new mask fiction site.. and of course, my new blog. Breath in that new website smell. It’s like a mixture of cough drops and moth balls.

It’s been… oooh, about 16 years since the last time I held a mask fiction related domain, and of course, MaskFiction.com has long since vanished into the no-man’s land of inexplicably squatted-upon domain names. But who cares? Today we’re all about personal brand. Ghostly Writer dot com it is. So welcome.

Remember MaskFiction.com?

For the wizened and grey-haired amongst us, you might recall that MaskFiction.com was a repository of mask fiction, run by me (with able tech support by the ever-shadowy Laz). In those heady early days of blogs and this thing called the internet, it was all hand-coded (painfully) and maintained using arcane things like ‘frames’ and ‘anchor tags’. Now it’s all blogs and WordPresses and themes, which weirdly makes things easier but also… there’s just as much fiddling. I’m sure this whole place will be a work-in-progress.

That said, I need to state up front what this site is, and what it’s not. It’s not Mask Fiction dot com 2.0. It won’t be a place to host other people’s writing – at least, that’s not what I’m currently planning. Instead, it’ll be a place where I’ll ramble about writing, showcase my writing, and hopefully get you to buy a book or two. (Go on. They’re waiting for you.)

In addition, I hope to foster a healthy discussion space about mask fiction, masking and the general kinkiness all of us seem to be stuck with as we head through life. A lot has changed since 2000 – and a lot hasn’t, really. Generally speaking, we can do a lot more with technology – publish books at the touch of a button, for one – but at the same time, the ‘community’, at least in my eyes, hasn’t moved on much. Hell, we’re mostly still clustered around a Yahoo! Group, which of course I have a part in, and don’t aim to supplant. There could be a much wider discussion and general interest in mask fiction though, and of course, it’s in my interest to try and foster some of that, I’ll try and do that here.

What that means in practice is that starting with the comments below, I welcome you to talk to me, to start discussions with others, and to generally feel free to chat. Comments on blogs are notorious spam magnets, but I’m doing my best to make this one friendly. That said you will have to register to post, and you’ll need to have your first comment approved by me to appear. After that you’ll be able to post as you wish.

As you’re registering here on the site, you should be able to remain anonymous. As someone who’s operated under a pseudonym forever, I completely understand how important anonymity is to you. That’s why I promise you I’ll never do anything with any information registered here at the site. (Incidentally, I’ve taken a number of measure to make my WordPress installation as secure as I can, too.)

What else?

As well as hosting details on the current books I have for sale (which I will be adding to later this year, with the release of The Substitute, at least) I’m also going to host my existing fiction, including the complete Betty Brant, the Sensational Spider-Girl series, plus other assorted bits and pieces.

Over time I may pull stuff from the Yahoo Group, I’m not sure – but if you want to read new stuff from me, I’ve committed to penning original, new fiction for subscribers to my newsletter. (I have no idea what said fiction will be about right now, but I expect it’ll be M2F based… no certainties, mind you. Leave a comment with your preferences!)

Oh, one last thing. I tried to pull in existing blog entries from my old site at Blogspot, but frankly the Blogger to WordPress migration process isn’t too great. (Not least because I think it got confused over dates; when I started the blog I lived in the UK, now I’m in the US.) My point is, that site will remain live. I may pull over a few posts, or content from them, to flesh out some of the book pages.

Right. That’ll do for my first round of waffle. I am fully intending to write a lot more in this blog too. Given how infrequent I’ve been in the last couple of years, I know that might be hard to believe but… every book starts with a single word, right?

So welcome! Leave a comment, come on in, join the party.