It’s been an interesting weekend. Among other things, I discovered on Friday that I’m no longer the gardening columnist for Gothic Beauty magazine. After twenty-odd years, it had to have been the most passive-aggressive firing I’ve received this side of the “You’d better not quit, or I’ll fire you” treatment I received at Science Fiction Eye. Apparently publisher Steven Holiday thinks that he owns the rights to everything published in his magazine in perpetuity (given as a friendly warning to anybody who wants to contribute in the future), and took umbrage at my reprinting my old columns on the Triffid Ranch site. His way of dealing with it was to fire me, and then let me know about it when I queried about the column in the new issue. I’d get upset about that presumption, but I figure the impending collapse of Borders Group will take care of the problem for me. Besides, I should have learned my lesson a decade ago that it’s a sucker’s game to spend more money on buying up copies of a magazine for promotion purposes than what you make by writing for it, because it’s almost never appreciated.
Anyway, that shall be all that’s said about that. I’ve been labeled “difficult” before, and by magazines that are now nothing but trivia questions. And so it goes.
The practical upshot to this is that the main Triffid Ranch site has a new update. In particular, the old Projects & Observations section, which really only made sense if the site didn’t have a blog, is pretty much gone, with the exception of the LOLPlants subsection. The old articles will be put up here over the next few days, and then it’s back to new content. It honestly makes more sense, and it gives more reasons for regular updates. It may also be time to rewrite and revise it anyway, so that it’s more relevant. Again, so it goes.