What Happened to My Old Blog?

I am really excited to be part of BestiesWriteStuff.com with my bestie Nikki Penner.  But for several years, I blogged solo on my own blog site, thenovelee.blogspot.com.  Unfortunately, this blog no longer exists, there are times I miss my old blog very much. So what happened to the old one?  Read on to find out…

Way back in 2013, when I was trying to get my first book, Romance is for Other People, off the ground, I was put in touch with Deneane Sutton, who helped me get my book out into the world. (Thank you so much, Deneane!) She told me it was a good idea to make a blog to get the word out.  So I went to Blogger, which I liked since in the family of Google products.

In January 2014, the “thenovelee” blog was launched (subtitle: Thoughts on stories and the making of stories).  On Tuesdays, I would do a blog post with a “tidbit” of info about my upcoming book, characters, and story details to garner interest in the book (I do have this archived so it may or may not show up again). On Fridays, I started doing a blog post about stuff I was interested in, movies/TV/books, and sometimes music and theme park rides.  One of the first blog posts was about my favorite anniversary collections of Comic Strip Anniversary Books (Calvin and Hobbes, Baby Blues, Dilbert (note - this was looong before his controversial comments), and The Far Side).   Then another week was about the three JJ Abrams TV shows out at the time (Felicity, Alias, and Lost).   

At some point, however, sending the book to editors and revising was taking longer than I thought, and I stopped updating the blog.  However, I eventually took to updating the blog again, finished the rewrites, and set a date for a launch party for self-publishing my novel, May 2nd, 2015.

After releasing Romance is for Other People, the blog became less about my book and more a weekly blog about my interests, mostly TV shows and movies.  Some of my favorite individual posts are Songs That Were Written by Artists for Themselves but Found a Home with Someone Else (Example: Jessie McCartney co-wrote Bleeding Love for his third album, but Leona Lewis scored a huge hit the song), In Praise of Penny from The Big Bang Theory, and Adventures in Odyssey: A Short History. I did my first miniseries, about TV shows that were spun off from movies, called It’s Great on TV, Too!  

The blog took a turning point when I wrote a blog about 3 famous directors’ first movies, which led to another blog and another and another until I had 12 or so blog posts about different directors’ first movies.  For example, did you know suspense king Alfred Hitchcock started in the silent era?  Or that Ava DuVernay’s first movie was a documentary? Or that James Cameron’s first movie was actually a sequel (Piranha II: The Spawning)?  While there were some exceptions, most of the director’s first movies were either 1) they worked their way up through Hollywood (JJ Abrams, Steven Spielberg), or 2) they were microbudget passion projects with friends (Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson).  

Another favorite miniseries of mine was short-lived comedy shows by famous comedy stars.  What was so fascinating to me was that these comedy stars, who previously experienced success with a long-running show, tried to come back with a completely new concept.  It was so interesting reading about the actors and the roles you’ve never heard of: Andy Griffith as a headmaster in a private California school in Headmaster; Brandy as a newly single mom in Zoe Ever After on BET; Jimmie Walker as a conniving GI in the military comedy At Ease; Kelsey Grammer as a CEO who loses his job and needs to reconnect with his family in Hank (in fact, Grammer himself called the production company that produced Hank to cancel the show because he thought it was too unfunny).  

Other miniseries: Books from different countries that were adapted into Disney Films, Foreign versions of The Nanny, Everybody Loves Raymond and Disney shows like Good Luck Charlie and The Suite Life of Zack and Cody; and first roles of famous actors like Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Andy Garcia.  

I did a few individual blog posts during this time: a comparison of The Departed with the movie it’s based on, Infernal Affairs, made in Hong Kong, and a 1980s Soviet Russia version of Mary Poppins.  But one of my favorite individual blogs was a celebration of my friendship with my bestie in Cali (at the time; she’s in Montana now) Nikki Penner who is a HUGE Harry Potter fan. We met at Camp Chestnut Ridge, then we stayed in touch, went to two Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 & 2 Midnight premieres (remember those?), I attended her wedding, and with her family, we went to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. In 2018, I tweeted about going to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald with my best friend, and J.K. Rowling liked my tweet!  It was a very special blog with pictures throughout our friendship together.  

Then the blog took another major turn in the fall of 2019, with the arrival of Disney+.  I did a post before the streaming service launched about what I’d like to see on Disney+, with the thought of what I’d like Disney+ to be, an archive of every single thing Disney has ever done, instead of what Disney+ actually is, which is the “best” that Disney has to offer.  When Disney+ launched on November 12, 2019, there was a lot of content still sought after by me and others who subscribed.  So I started my weekly “missing from Disney+ miniseries,” initially focusing on Disney Channel or Disney-produced series one week and a movie the other week.  The first blog post was about the summer camp reality series Bug Juice, before moving on to other TV shows like The Famous Jett Jackson and movies like Enchanted (which was eventually added) and Oz the Great and Powerful.  

The most viewed pages have an interesting story behind them. I started the Disney Channel show Phil of the Future on Disney+, and the first episode on Disney+ was not the first produced.  All confused, I did some research online and made a viewing order list for Phil of the Future, followed quickly by Lizzie McGuire. It was just a little side project next to my main project, “Missing from Disney+.” But to my surprise, those two posts shot up to the top and remained there mostly for the rest of the time I blogged.  (I tried to recapture the magic with viewing order blogs about Jonas and That’s So Raven, but those two didn’t get nearly as many views as Phil and Lizzie.)

Eventually, I moved away from alternating TV shows and movies to miniseries inside the Missing from Disney+ series.  Some of the ones I remember well were Saturday morning cartoons, preschool Disney channel series, Disney XD series, early Disney channel TV series and movies (1983-1997), classic live-action or hybrid (animation+live action) movies (1940s-1970s), ABC Wonderful World of Disney TV movies (1997-2008), Missing Muppet Marathon - Movies and TV shows and Specials (most weren’t produced by Disney, but since Disney now owns the Muppets, I decided the missing Muppet titles were worth the list) and a series called Canadian Wishful Thinking (Shows produced by Canadian production companies and aired on the Disney channel, like Life with Derek and Naturally, Sadie - unrealistic that they would stream on Disney+, but we can always dream...).  The last series I did was various Winnie the Pooh shorts and specials still not included on Disney+.  

Near the end of 2022 I was working ahead for my most ambitious project yet: daily posts with missing classic Disney shorts from the 1920s to the present, set to start in 2023 - while also simultaneously considering a break from social media and the blog for personal reasons. Near the end of 2023, I had in draft mode posts about 100 different shorts.  But I ultimately decided that I did need to shut down online for a while, and I did a post on all my social media, and the blog, that I was taking a break from social media starting in 2023.  I closed my blog, and on Blogger, you can delete your blog and everything will be saved if you “undelete” within 90 days.  Unfortunately, I forgot the day I had shut down my blog and came back a few days after the 90-day window. 

I’m sure you can guess I was, on the one hand, trying not to be too upset about my mistake while also mourning the loss of 8 years of work on my blog.  I do have some blogs I wrote in Word or Google Docs that I saved, but most of the stuff is gone for good.  Through the Wayback machine, click here to see what my blog looked like a month or so before I shut it down.

So my advice to you is to save all your work and archive as best you can. While on my social media sabbatical, I thought, okay, I’ll come back to it before the deadline, and instead, I lost the whole blog.  It was a heartbreaking lesson but an important one.  There might be a story or article you’re working on and it seems all wrong, and you’re feeling a fire to delete the whole thing.  I just encourage you to pause before doing that.  Yes, start over if you feel you need to do so.  Maybe the story or blog post doesn’t work in that particular form, but there’s part of it or an aspect that can be saved to make something that does work.  Save all your work, and don’t be quick to delete.  You might find yourself missing something you had written and you can’t get it back.  And yes, I wrote this in Google Docs before putting it on my blog on the website.  

So what’s next for my blog? I honestly have no idea what I’m going to write about in the future on Besties Write Stuff, but I do know I’m not going to limit it to one narrow subject.  Thanks again for reading my blog, and keep writing!