I’ve just spent several weeks redoing cordwainer-smith.com, eight years after it first went up. For the first two or three years, I had a lot of energy for it. I did an ezine every couple of weeks and corresponded with fans who emailed from all over the planet. Several of us started the Cordwainer Smith Foundation, and out of that came the annual Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which now has a home at Readercon.

Well… then what happened? I think I just burned out. I’m sure it’s not hard for you to imagine that being the kid of this particular Great Man has been a mixed bag. So when my life got busy with various forms of work and travel, I neglected the CS site. It didn’t help the software I was using for the old site (Dreamweaver) was clunky in a variety of ways. I kept saying, gotta get back to my father’s site.

Then recently I got some new website creation software (Xsitepro2, with a major virtune of automatically creating menus) and decided to make over the site. It’s involved cutting and pasting old material, reorganizing, updating the Rediscovery Award pages, and so on. I found that the one-page illustrated bibliography contributed to the original site by fan Mike Bennett could more easily be accessed if it were in ten pages! I thought about starting another ezine but decided that this blog was a better way to be interactive with readers. (Blogs didn’t exist back then… remember?)

And through it all, I’ve gotten closer to my father again. I’ve enjoyed his weirdness maybe more than ever before, certainly more than I did as a kid! I’ve felt his zest for life — not a little of which I inherited.

So here you are, Daddy! A new site and new energy for it.