Why leave a high-profile site like MuggleNet and strike off on my own? If it was easy to do, the answer would be simple. Actually, this move is anything but sudden. It's the result of accumulated stresses. Since The Magic Quill started in 2004, I have had three sets of editors go AWOL, and each time there was an "interregnum" that lasted weeks or even months before someone else came along to publish my writings. During each of these frustrating periods, I lost swaths of regular readers and found it
harder to get the momentum back again; while the staff at MuggleNet, preoccupied with their other affairs, took ages to respond to my inquiries.Unlike the two previous editors, the latest one didn't simply fall off the face of the earth. Rather, she gradually faded away, taking increasingly long periods of time to publish each number that I wrote until, just now, a chapter has gone unpublished for two whole months. Things finally came to an embarrassing impasse in which no one at MuggleNet was answering my emails, while my last handful of devoted readers were talking about abandoning ship. I faced the choice between ending a story I have worked on for 4 years - with tons of loose ends sticking out - and starting over by myself. I decided to start over before every last faithful reader gave up on TMQ.
Reposting 144 back-chapters of TMQ was a big job. All that copying and pasting took enough time; but there was also a bit of quality-control involved; plus, I had to add tags and work out other details. The first post-MuggleNet chapter has finally come to light, the comments are working, and responses from my readers/cowriters are starting to come in. Success! A big thank-you goes out to my Dad, who just today sent me a new banner image for the new blog. Great work, Cuda!
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