Beside suicide’s door: A guest blog

Lynn Henriksen invited me to do a guest blog for her TellTale Souls blog. She posted it today at http://telltalesouls.com/blog/. Much of Lynn’s work centers on collecting stories about the mother/daughter relationship. And through her workshops (some of which are done in collaboration with Kate Farrell), she succeeds in creating a very safe, supportive place for daughters to explore their memories and write keepsake memoirs about their mothers. She has also collected a number of such stories for a book, which her agent is shopping to publishers now. So, when writing the guest blog, my thoughts naturally drifted toward my mother, who, unfortunately, committed suicide when I was very young.

Lynn’s blog, which she updated frequently, also has book reviews, contests and links to interesting resources.

 

Lost domain

It’s been one of those years. Stuff happens, you know, you get behind.

So, I was stalled on getting content up for my web site. Not much was required, really, even just one page about my memoir coming out from RockWay Press would have sufficed. Each author on RockWay’s list is supposed to have a web site in his or her own name. Since there are many Laura Hollands in this world (I’ve met two others; I’m a Holland by marriage), I use the name McHale, too. So, I registered http://www.lauramchaleholland.com with Uplink Earth, the service recommended by my publisher, and signed up for a year of Uplink’s hosting, too.

Then I pondered what to say about myself every so often, even did a few drafts, which I promptly marked all up, but I never pulled the content together.

Comes time to renew with my web host, and I decide against it. During the year, I’d received several e-mail notices about attacks on Uplink Earth’s servers, downtime, remedies, more attacks, downtime, remedies. failures, remedies, etc. I thought this would really be a problem if my site were actually live. So, my host and I parted ways, or so I thought.

Yesterday, thinking I’ve recovered enough presence of mind (like I said it’s been one of those years, the kind you wish you could have skipped—until you learn the lessons the experiences have to teach you, which I haven’t done yet) to tackle this website project, I decided to renew my domain registration through Network Solutions. But, I learned that some entity has taken my now-former domain name and put up insipid content that has nothing to do with me. I saw I might be able to buy it back: minimum bid $100. I was thinking, Why? Why? I’m not a big-name author. It’s not like a gazillion people are going to lauramchaleholland.com each day. I mean, even I, the site’s owner, only visited the placeholder my host stuck up, maybe, three times.

Just now my sister and I went to Register.com, typed in my name, then typed in Who is?, and it listed me as the owner. There’s hope, we thought. We called Register.com to find out what’s going on, asked if I can renew. Nope. Turns out even though I’m still listed as the owner, the site now belongs to an outfit called enom, according to Register.com., which gave us enom’s contact information. The rep at enom said http://www.lauramchaleholland.com actually belongs to the reseller Lux Movera. Enom gave us an 800 number for Lux Movera. We called, and guess what? It’s Uplink Earth’s number! Nobody’s there on weekends; they’re only open 9 to 6 EST.

I will call Monday, see what Uplink Earth has to say. I’m thinking all sorts of dark thoughts, but really until I find out what they’re up to, it’s all speculation. Perhaps Uplink Earth will offer my name to me for a pittance. Or, perhaps I’ll have to sign up for another year of service in order to re-acquire it at a reasonable price. I can’t imagine doing that.

I know it’s my bad for letting it slide. But, this is a tough one. I mean, who knew?