I bought this web domain in 2004 — a year after I posted my first stories on the ASSTR website in 2003. It had always been my plan to park my content here; I had even added a blog backend to it. But for a long while I did absolutely nothing on this space.

In fact, it was easier to maintain an (ugly) static website on the ASSTR site, and after a few years I just decided to use ripemangotaketwo.com to mirror that ugly static website.

Then, whenever I wanted to update the contents, I just updated both websites simultaneously. Yes, it looked ugly. Yes, I knew it needed a facelift and a boob job, but I kept putting it off.

One complicated issue was deciding what exactly I wanted the website to do. Initially I wanted the stories to stay on web pages. But I began having second thoughts. First, there was an advantage in making my fiction not that accessible. The project was Creative Commons, and so I knew that it would always have a significant web presence. But it didn’t have to be that easy.

Second, I wanted to package the stories in some kind of ebook format. Reading in a web browser on a laptop was not ideal. An ebook (i.e., an epub) was more portable, but this whole project was open-ended enough that I couldn’t decide how to finish it — or even if it could be finished.

By 2020 a few things had happened. First, I wanted to distribute an ebook through the commercial bookstores because well, that’s where the money is. Second, I had mastered the technical parts of producing ebooks. Third, during Covid, I had a lot of time to catch up on my book projects. Finally I came up with a plan to transform the stories from the original website to a series of ebooks.

By 2022 I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. The website would be mainly promotional in nature, but would also help readers and contributors figure out what this project was about. Since that time, I have come up with other ways to use this website over the next decade. I don’t plan to post regularly here, but every three months or so this site will feature another Lusty Bibliophile Book Report. It will also include roundups of reader responses and reviews and perhaps some light blogging.

I started writing these stories in the 1990s and posting them online 2003. Finally in May 2023 I can say that this website is finally doing what it was supposed to do when I bought the web nineteen years ago!