’17 Comeback Special – The Violent World of Parker returns

We are back!

As longtime readers know, the site has been neglected many times in the nearly two decades it has existed in some form or other. This past year-and-change is the first time it has vanished entirely.

For you old schoolers who were wondering, here is what happened. I was in one of my fairly typical crazy periods and not spending any time with or paying much attention to the site. One day, I realized that it was around renewal time and I needed to get that done (as well as get my rear in gear and start writing again).

Alas, my registration had expired. I didn’t think this was a big deal. My URL had no commercial value–it wasn’t exactly U2.com or something. Who is going to take it? I’d just go pick it up again!

But it was gone. Apparently a bot had picked it up, and now it sold hair restoration treatments to Japanese men. I tried to contact the new owner, even being willing to pay blood money for my worthless URL. I never heard back. I paid GoDaddy to pursue it. They never heard back.

In addition to being incredibly frustrated that I had lost my domain name, I was also in fear that I had lost my archives as I hadn’t renewed hosting either.

I was devastated, as anyone would be when faced with losing years of work due to his own stupidity.

Fortunately, as you can see, the archives were recovered–barely.

The archives weren’t doing much good sitting on a server in who knows what country, so I finally resigned myself to the fact that I was likely never going to get my URL back and bought violentworldofparker.com. I really don’t know a thing about websites and was intimidated by trying to put this one back online, so I sat on the new URL for a few months before deciding one recent weekend to take a stab at it.

Fortunately, while still a pain, it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. So we’re back! I have some repair work to do, and I’m fixing things as I find them (feel free to let me know via the sidebar contact link if you find anything broken). But at least it’s up and running.

New content will be coming in the very near future. I’ve got a few pieces drafted already and plans for many more. I also have at least the seeds of a couple of ideas for new site features, but I’d like to get back in the groove before putting too much thought or effort into those.

Long-time readers will be pleased to learn that Esteemed Co-blogger Nick of Existential Ennui has graciously agreed to return to the fold. His posts were a highlight of the site for our readers and for me, so I know we are all excited about this.

If you would like to help, please get the word out, link to us, and follow us on Twitter. All of these will help us to start showing up in search engine results again, so that lovers of Donald Westlake, Richard Stark, Parker, and crime fiction can find us.

Sorry for the extended absence and thank you for coming back to visit. If you had us bookmarked, don’t forget to update the link.

More coming soon!