Several of my loyal blog readers emailed me this morning asking why they couldn’t access my web site or blog. There was a mysterious Error 403 that showed up when they tried to visit my site.

I verified that there was a problem and did my standard diagnostics. Nothing worked. It looked like my site had somehow been wiped clean.

I called my hosting service (GoDaddy.com) to investigate and the technician eventually found that there was “known problem” with their servers. They were working on it, she assured me, and would fix it as soon as possible. “Soon” turned out to be a long time. I checked periodically throughout the day and kept finding that it still hadn’t been fixed. This evening, I spent some time playing chess with my daughter and then checked again.

Fixed!

Finally.

As far as I can tell, my site was down for at least 12 hours. That is a record outage for me. GoDaddy has normally been very reliable. But today, they weren’t. 🙁

Postscript added 11/6/2008: A representative from GoDaddy emailed me personally today to apologize for the outage and to say that they are giving me a month’s free hosting on this site as compensation. That was certainly a very decent thing to do, and I thank them for it. I have a long history of working with GoDaddy to handle my web site needs, and I have found them to be generally quick and helpful in solving problems.

Today is Election Day here in the US, an event that is no doubt of some interest to all my loyal blog readers, whether in the US or not.

Because of the high interest in the election, my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine will not be coming out this week–I’ll defer it one week to let the excitement die down a bit.

I hope that all of my loyal blog readers who are eligible to vote will do so. Studies by Sam the Plumber have shown that my loyal blog readers are the most intelligent in the world, so it only makes sense that they should be doing their duty to the state.

It is easy to believe that “my vote doesn’t count, so why bother?” But there is every reason to bother. If I remember the numbers right, this election will be considered high turnout if 64% of the eligible voters actually vote. This means that either of the major candidates could win, simply by getting 100% of his supporters to vote.

I’m relatively new to the State of Washington, but I’ve been told that the last election for governor four years ago was decided by a margin of 133 votes. That’s pretty close! I have heard of elections in the past that were decided by a single vote. You never know when the election will be so close that you could have made a difference.

While I don’t encourage you to “vote early and often,” I do think it makes sense to do your part to make democracy work.

My loyal blog readers will be happy to hear that I have just sent out the October issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine. Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up the series on my recent lecture on Motivations and Reactions and move on to some real-world examples contributed by you, my exceptionally loyal blog readers. So be ready!

I’m working hard today on my next issue of the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, so I have no real time to blog. Not to mention that those pesky presidential candidates are doing their debate thing this evening.

But I might as well point my loyal blog readers to my recent humor column in which Sam the Plumber speaks out on the topic of marketing. Want to know what got Sam the Plumber riled up? Check out my column, which has the perfectly outrageous title: “The Lean, Mean Jesus Machine.”

I’ll continue my series on Motivations and Reactions in my regularly schedule blog later today. But I thought it would be appropriate to take note of an important launch that is happening TODAY.

I went to a talk about a year ago by my buddy John Olson. John showed a list of the Top Ten best-selling novels of all time. I was a bit surprised to see that PILGRIM’S PROGRESS topped the list. I never much liked that book, to be honest. The big surprise to me was that of the other nine books on the list, the overwhelming majority (6 or 7) were in a category that I don’t read much — fantasy. But I’d read all of those on John’s list and loved them all.

John’s point was that there is something in the fantasy genre that is massively appealing to readers. But there’s something very strange about fantasy. Three of the most popular fantasy series of all time are LORD OF THE RINGS, by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, and the Narnia series, by C.S. Lewis. All three authors were British authors with a strong background in classics, and all three wrote from a Christian worldview, using well-known Christian themes.

The very strange thing is that Christian publishing in the US has been unable to make fantasy “work” as a genre. Yes, there’ve been isolated successes, but the fact is that Christian fiction is dominated by romance, suspense, and women’s fiction, while fantasy novels are blindingly absent. The quickest way to get a rejection from a Christian publisher is to start out saying, “I’m writing a fantasy…”

You might say, “Who cares? Fantasy is doing pretty darn well in the general market. If Christian readers want to buy fantasy, they can go there.”

This is true, but the whole thing just seems strange. A lot of the young writers I meet these days are writing fantasy. In fact, the MAJORITY of the under-25 Christian writers I meet are writing fantasy. And they all have the same question: Where are they going to get their work published? Something is seriously wrong in the Christian publishing industry.

My friend Jeff Gerke is a huge fan of fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, and as he say, “anything weird.” Jeff is also a very accomplished editor who has worked at three Christian publishing houses and has acquired a number of excellent authors. One of his goals is to bring fantasy fiction home–to create a publishing house that does those “weirdo books” from a Christian worldview (which can be a very broad label, if you remember that it includes Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, and a whole lot more).

Today, Jeff is launching the first three books from his publishing house (Marcher Lord Press). He’s giving out some special incentives for people who buy TODAY. So if you like “weird fiction,” check out his first three books: HERO, SECOND CLASS by Mitchell Bonds, SUMMA ELVETICA, by Theodore Beale, and THE PERSONIFID INVASION, by R.E. Bartlett.

You can take a look at them all here: www.MarcherLordPress.com/store

I dropped by Jeff’s online store today to check them out. All three books look seriously weird.

So I bought them all.