September 2006 Issue The Horror Library, your Haunted Home for Horror Fiction, Dark Art, Horror Games, Movie Reviews, Book Reviews, Non-Fiction, Alternative Music, Horror Authors, Horror Short Fiction and featuring The Terrible Twelve - RJ Cavender, Bailey Hunter, Boyd E Harris, Megg Roper, Jason Beirens, CJ Hurtt, Eric Stark, Cordelia Snow, Chris Perridas, Curt Mahr, Stephen Sommerville, M Louis Dixon, Kerry Drummond
Chris for HL: Anthony, the Darklines site was a creative success and jump started many discussions and budding careers. You showed many writers a new way of creating horror on the internet. What happened? Where have you been?
Anthony for Darklines: Thank you for the kind words. You know, when we started Darklines I didn't actually think it would be as enjoyable and rewarding to build as it turned out to be. The members were all fantastic and the feeling of community was palpable. There was a camaraderie between our members that I would have never thought possible. Bringing it down was painful, but necessary in my opinion. Probably the first thing that started the ball rolling in the bringing down of the site was the fact that my partner, Ritchy, for his own reasons, had to bow out. That left me to maintain, enhance, and administer the site on my own. This didn't leave much time for the expansion and reengineering of the site that I felt needed to occur. Toward the end of Darklines Ritchy came back into the fray.
Unfortunately, however, the site wasn't built using a solid technological foundation and it became quickly apparent that enhancing it the way we wanted to using the existing architecture would have been excruciating to say the least. Right at the very end I attempted to do an incremental reengineering of a few key pieces of the site without completely tearing it apart, but alas, I determined that the only way to do the site justice would be to rebuild from the ground up.
HL: How long have you rethought this process?
Darklines:2. If I remember correctly, we brought down the site in early 2004. We immediately began reconstructing our ideas both technologically and idealistically. We found ourselves sidetracked from time to time with other projects, but Darklines was always alive in our hearts and minds. I guess it was probably late 2004, in the November-December range when I began building what is now our new software architecture. I spent several months writing what I feel is a fairly solid and very maintainable software foundation. The last couple of months have been tough because it's very easy to get bogged down in details. We've spent considerable time trying to precisely define what our Phase 1 website is going to contain and how it is all going to function from a workflow perspective. We have finally decided to throw caution to the wind and just get the site out there. It will not be perfect
on day 1, but the very high level of maintainability that we've built into it will make enhancements easy.
HL: The internet has changed a great deal in that time, what innovations and exciting things do you plan to unveil?
Darklines: Well I don't want to give away all of our secrets, but I will drop a few hints. Think organization tools, collaboration tools, workflow management tools, tighter security controls over your publicly posted submissions, plus much, much more. A lot of this will be developed and enhanced over the next several months, but rest assured it will all be there.
HL: I understand you have a web log with continuing updates? Is that on-line yet?
Darklines The blog is online and can be viewed at Darklines for now. This is our way of reintroducing ourselves to the world and hopefully generating some interest before we're actually fully back online.
HL: How do differentiate your site and how will you help and reinforce your style and brand of horror with others in the horrific cyber community?
Darklines We hope to differentiate ourselves by being a horror/science fiction/fantasy writer's one stop portal. There are many sites out there that give writers a place to post their work and get feedback but we're upping the ante. We're attempting to bring all of the disparate services available to writers under one roof. Our mission is simple .... make it as easy as possible for a writer to promote himself or herself and, if they so choose, build a team and collaborate to create great things.
HL Thanks, Anthony, for sharing your vision with the Horror Library community. We wish you all the best and eagerly wait to see what horrific innovations you plan on unleashing!
