I bring this up to compare, as I get usually 3 or 4 mails a week to Black Champagne at this point. But at least none are Klez or spam.  So I have plenty of time to reply to mails here, as there are usually only a couple when I check, every 3 or 4 days.  In other words, don't be afraid to mail with comments on a blog, or suggestions, criticisms, etc.  Often reader input or comments touch on things I've not thought of, and give me ideas for new features or just something else to bullshit about for a few paragraphs a day.

Date: 4/13/02
From: Saidin
Subject: HA!

HA, I found your email on this site! after a long time of checking up on it often enough since you posted the url.

Geeze it took me forever to find it! although I probably wasn't looking hard enough.

Anyways, Your incredibly well spoken on your issues! I love reading about what you gotta say cause I agree with it, and disagree :)

The stuff you said about playboy and all that childhood stuff certainly goes along the same grain as me. I could totally care less for playboy magazine, I'd give you the reasons why but they're pretty much the same as yours.

You need some sort of a comments section where we can post our own experiences about airports and playboys and such!

here's my suck-up comment :)
keep on ramblin' cause there's definitely someone listening.

Saidin

I mentioned this mail around the time it came in, and his idea for a forum on this site.  As of now, it would be pointless, since there just aren't enough visitors to sustain it.  I also don't really want to bother with setting one up, and having it eat up a bunch of my bandwidth.  Forums require a lot of visitors to be any good.  In my experience, forum posts are viewed by 100 or more people for every person who actually replies to them.   

I also added the email to the nav bar, at the top of it, thinking that perhaps others had wanted to mail but hadn't easily seen a link to do so.

If you want to see the daily updates where I talked about what he's commenting on here, look around the time he sent the email.  April 7th or 8th.  Aren't I helpful?

________________

 

Date: 4/16/02
From: MasPower
Subject: Random Raving

Hi, I couldn't resist mailing you about your site for some reason.

The funny thing is, I like everything of your site BUT your horror writing. But don't mind me, I just simply don't like horror fiction. What I enjoy most is your critical view and the funny way you say it. I think you might actually do a pretty good job as a critical columnist for some magazine or something, rather than a horror writer! Even when I don't agree with you its still funny to read.

"I imagine most of the clickers look around and maybe check out the dirty slang page, and then move on."--quote from your site.

This is funny, you predicted exactly what I did on my first visit! (however I came back later for more) Funny, but also a bit scary, the idea someone can predict what ppl or a person will do and think. Maybe a good idea for your next horror story! And its actually quite plausible, thinking about "FBI profilers" or that some shopping malls are specifically designed a certain way that 95% of the ppl will go, do, see, and think a certain way because of its design.

Anyway, I hope this e-mail was good enough for a bit of motivation for working on your writings OTHER than horror, I guess you already get enough mails motivating you to scare more ppl. (now that your mailbag is finally up and running)

Other than the mails from Flaw shortly after the site was online, I don't recall any mails about the stories.  I am planning out what will be a long (novel-length?) story set in the Diablo II world, which I'll be posting chapters from on the D2 site, and also here, with more notes and revisions and such. In theory that will draw in more readers.  Of course it would help if I'd quit screwing around with news items in the blog, and actually wrote more stories, and posted more of my old horror ones, if I wanted to get comments on the writing, eh?

That was what the site was going to be about, but I'd been seeing other blogs around the time I was going to start this one, and thought it would be fun to do a daily update thing.  It's sort of taken over my time now though, so I should try to cut back on the size somewhat.  They're going like 25k a day now, and I think 15k or so would be fine.  It's all the little news items that take the time up; so I should just do a couple of those, quick links or whatever, and write longer about one thing a day, rather than 10 a day.

Which would probably drive Mas here away, since he likes the blogging and not the fiction.  *sigh*

Date: 4/17/02
From: Jim
Subject: OK, a couple more.

After reading the thing about David Lee Roth and Hagar, it occurs to me that Roth can now be perfectly cast as a Necromancer, what with that movie casting contest over at D2.net. I mean, dude has even got the stringy white hair and everything.  Was going through your mail bag and saw a dude suggest Brian Lumley. I'd say save yourself the wasted time myself. I decided I'd go ahead and read the Necroscope series (only thing I know by him) and regretted it once I started. I have this annoying habit of HAVING to finish some series if I start it and just kept getting more and more annoyed with the books as they progressed.

The stories are OK I guess and have some neat ideas, but the guy kinda suffers from the Koontz syndrome where he tends to repeat the same plot line again and again. It's more annoying though because he's got the same main character and a few repeating secondary characters. Basically it goes: guy has powers, gets in trouble because of powers, discovers new and even more ridiculous way to use said powers and saves the day. Now of course the big variety is how he gets into trouble; sometimes he's recruited into it, sometimes it's a chance encounter, etc. 

Oh yeah one more thing: you're kinda scary. Was going through archived pages and you said in one of 'em (don't remember which) "Sleep is for the weak anyway" or something to that effect. I used to use that exact phrase when I would make fun of my roommate for going to bed at like 1 or 2 am.

Jim

I did go ahead and read several Brian Lumley Necroscope novels, and found them okay.  He's not real good, but he does come up with some cool story concepts. Plot points, action, events, settings.  His characters are one-dimensional though, and as static as TV on the moon.  I wrote about him in a couple of the blogs this month, and I've since read a book of his short stories, (which owe 97% of their existence to Lovecraft), so at some point I'll add him to the Horror Novelist Review page, mostly pasting in what I said on the daily updates.

I'm better than Jim about stopping things that aren't good; I've read Necroscope books #4, #6, and #7, and that's plenty for me. ;)

Date: 4/28/02
From: Roy Bryant
Subject: Broken link in www.blackchampagne.com

There appears to be a problem on this page of your site.

On page when you click on the Image: "../images/andariel-sml.jpg", the link to gives the error: Not found.

As recommended by the Robot Guidelines, this email is to explain our robot's activities and to let you know about one of the broken links we encountered. LinkWalker does not store or publish the content of your pages, but rather uses the link information to update our map of the World Wide Web.

Are these reports helpful? I'd love some feedback. If you prefer not to receive these occasional error notices please let me know.

Roy Bryant

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Roy Bryant, roybryant@seventwentyfour.com
President
SEVENtwentyfour Inc. ("Always watching the Web")
http://www.seventwentyfour.com 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

An auto-generated mail, and their spider was correct, the link was bad there.  The reason it was bad was because I hadn't uploaded the large version of the image that was being linked to from the thumbnail.  I hadn't uploaded the thumbnail either, for that matter, which their spider was not configured to catch.

I replied to the mail saying that, and thanking them for the mail, but mostly to see if they'd reply, and if a human, or some sort of auto-generated reply would come back.

I got a reply, but I'm not sure if it was human or robot generated. It was 99% a, "thanks for your reply.  You may be interested in our other services, which include link checking for your whole site, HTML optimization, etc."  I'm paraphrasing.  I wasn't interested enough in bothering with it.

That's it for the April emails of note.  Several others mailed to mention things but asked that I not include them in the mailbag.  So you may clamor for their blood, that this mail bag wasn't longer or more interesting.  But before you sharpen your oaken stakes, ask yourself, did you contribute an email?  *He said solemnly*

Here's the obligatory link.

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