Welcome to the new version of Charity’s Place, which I hope you enjoy as much as I do!
My plans for the site moving forward are to re-add a lot of my former reviews, but with updated analysis, historical reflections, and passages where I reflect on the time period and what the social and moral behaviors were like to highlight how modern interpretations often miss out on the true story. I will continue to write essays, shedding new light on historical events and figures, so you can learn more about them. For example, the spiritualist movement in the Victorian era (a subject I touch on in The Giftsnatcher), why I write Christian Horror (the Byron Series), and so forth. I look forward to this, as it will be a time to let my creativity flourish while I continue writing historical novels.
Since I love the Tudors and have an enormous collection of films centered on them, I will get to those, with episodic “deep dives” into The White Queen, The White Princess, Wolf Hall, Becoming Elizabeth, and The Tudors in which I harp on what they got wrong. First, I will finish my analysis of The Spanish Princess’ second season. Over time, I will add in all the films or series that reference or center on them.
I will expand into other historical time periods, continuing to review movies, but from a historian’s perspective. Since my updated novel about Pontius Pilate’s wife is coming out later this year, I will introduce Biblical-and-Historical-based content before long (essays on what we know about Claudia, her husband, adjacent figures in the story, and analysis of The Chosen’s take on the same time period).
This will be a gradual process, but I am excited to remap this space to reflect an older, wiser version of myself, and to share my passion for incredible stories with you. If you want monthly updates on my content, to know about book sales, or upcoming novels, please join my mailing list.
Experiencing an Unexpected Process of Grief
I remember the first time I uploaded a site onto the internet, in 1998. I didn’t know yet how to import pictures, so I copied and pasted them where I wanted them on FrontPage, resulting in duplicated images and gigantic files! Those were the days of dial-up. Yes, I have been here that long. The only way I can mark it is I devoted a section of this site to The Mask of Zorro! At first, it was a slapdash collection of whatever held my fancy, but over time, I started writing movie reviews. Thousands of them. I had collaborators sending me more, recruited from various online communities that no longer exist. Over the years, I streamlined more, focused on period dramas, devoted sections to my books, and outsourced my other writing to blogs.
A month ago, my html maker was giving me trouble, and that led me to discover I would have to manually move my site to a WordPress format. At first, I felt excited about all the potential, the tagging system, the search engine, etc., and dove into it, shifting 200 reviews in a mad frenzy of activity one weekend… and my excitement tanked as I realized I had 1800 more to go and was looking at four to six months before I could shift the website over to its new format and share it with the world. Doubts set in. Were my reviews relevant or necessary? Now that thousands of YouTubers are doing video reviews, hundreds more are sharing them all over the net? I paused to reflect.
A year ago, I helped a friend move and as we went through her stuff and she packed too much into her boxes, I kept thinking, “A move is a fresh start. You could let this stuff go and make space in your life.”
Yes, the Lord nudged me, you could.
It meant letting my past go, to make space for who I am now and what may interest me going forward.
Then came a process of doubt and grief. I wrestled with insecurity—what would you, my reader, think of me just deleting two thousand reviews? Do you even care? What would I replace them with? How much content would I need to launch? And do I have to write it all from scratch?
Beyond that lay a deeper sadness, whose fragrance clings to me like a lost whiff of perfume. My former site and all of my reviews represented 28 years of my life. Over two decades of friendship. Of learning, of coding, of watching the internet change around me, and trying to adapt to keep up with it. Memories of people now dead or whom I haven’t spoken to in a decade. The portfolio of a young, ambitious writer who didn’t yet know proper punctuation, but who now combs through her novels on a ruthless quest to eliminate clutter words.
It surprised me how much I grieved over the death of this former self, and it made me realize that as much as I like change on a superficial level, it is also painful and scary to let go of the past. I want to cling to it, fearful that what I replace it with won’t be as good. This life is fragile, and full of hope but also anxieties about the unknown. And that is okay. It’s part of life. I opened my hand and let the grains of my past flow through them, scattered to the wind.
That site represented who I was; this one represents who I am. It’s going to be a little messy and confused for a while, since I’m not always sure what I want or how to do things, but hopefully you will stick around so we can learn together.
