Is it a sign of Molly’s rise to stardom? Or is it the inevitable fate of any Wordpress site that tries to make the site friendly to commenters?

YES!

We get one or two of these comments a day with links to pharmaceuticals and Nigerians in dire straits. So, I’m gonna try a new system whereby I approve your comment before it goes up. Once you’ve had one comment approved, the rest should go up automatically.

I think this is still better than making you guys log on to comment, even though you really only have to do that once, and the site remembers you. Still, I think it makes it less likely for lurkers to start participating, so we’ll try this out for a while.

Carry on, both of you!

Unless you’re peering at this post through a straw, you’ve probably noticed a smattering of reviews have invaded the site. That’s right, I now have a page of reviews. Check out the link on the sidebar over there. No, to the left. Down a little. Back up. Yeah, there! I know, I coulda been a champ and added a hyperlink to this entry, but hand-holding nurtures sissies. I need my readers to grow up.

To get things started, I’ve put up a handful of my old reviews from the now-defunct CrimeCritics site. I’ll be posting a mixture of old and new as I read or watch anything worth recommending. Books, movies, TV shows, comics, dinner theater… anything that moves me is fair game.

The plan for now is to display anything I review with a simple piece of cover-art. Once I get more than twenty or so reviews up, I’ll move some to a second page, and constantly bump stuff down with new entries. I’m not sure how slow a page with 20 thumbs will be to load, but c’mon, nobody reads this stuff besides me, anyway. Right?

Camp Meeting at Pleasant Grove in Waxhaw North Carolina is as impossible to explain as it is enjoyable. If you haven’t been here, you’ll never be able to grasp why thousands of people look forward to this one week more than any other.

I think part of the problem arises because we’d like to pack a complete definition into a single breath, exhaling it all at once. But that’s now how we came to know and love Camp Meeting, so the method seems a bit off to me. Most of us were born here. Rocked in our cribs here. Grew up here. Camp Meeting revealed itself in millions of tiny snippets that continue to pile up and delight. Maybe we choke people with our enthusiasm instead of feeding them morsels.

Last night we were having a sit-down dinner in our tent. Nancy Moore, the organist from our old church, and her husband had joined us for tomato sandwiches (Duke’s Mayonnaise, of course) grilled chicken-on-salad, deep-fried okra, sweetened iced tea, and pound cake with ice cream.

It was a highbrow affair, with politics, economics, and hymns discussed over my grandmother’s old tablecloth. In the middle of the meal, a knock came at the screen door. The sound of it was jarring to me… most of the people out here just walk right in. Must be someone from the “other side” of the campground, or a mere 5th cousin.

“Excuse me?” the silhouette called through the screen door.

“Come on in,” a dozen of us yelled in unison.

“Actually, I don’t mean to disturb you during dinner, but can my son get his frog back?”

The amazing thing about Camp Meeting is that this story isn’t amazing at all. Nobody was the least bit surprised. 10-year-old Jordan ran over to the critter cage and scooped up the green tree frog with his bright yellow legs. The rascal climbed and hopped while the dinner conversation paused. The little boy from a few tents over got his frog back. And we got back to our ‘mater sandwiches and highbrow conversin’.

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This is a question that Molly wrestled with throughout her upcoming life. It’s fascinating to me that she toyed with the idea of an objective moral truth at such a young age, before her travels and adventures. What’s really interesting, however, is the way she cycled through various stances. She didn’t settle on one truth and watch it harden though experience. Instead, going by her journal entries and observations from others, it seems as if she possessed a naive view of morality early on, had it shaken by experience, only to return to her previous stance, slightly modified, as she grew up.

It will be a difficult transformation to capture in her saga, so I hope to explore it further here on the website. I’m working on transcribing one of her philosophy papers from The Reader into my own computer so I can put excerpts up here. Until then, I would love to hear your opinions on the same question. If you have a short quip, leave a comment, no sign-up required. If you’d like to expound further, follow the link at the bottom into the forums and hash out your ideas. I’d love to discuss this vexing problem in detail.

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It wasn’t that long ago that we had no website… and now we have forums! It’s just too exciting. The world of Molly Fyde is expanding at relativistic speeds.

For those of you with Firefox, IE8, Chrome, Opera, and iPhones… you’ll no doubt be impressed with how clean the forums look and how well they’re integrated with the rest of the site. Those of you running IE7 and older… I haven’t figured it out yet. No, not why you’d use ancient software when the upgrade is free, I haven’t figured out how to code PHP well enough to sort the problem. Try reading the site over the shoulder of a non-Luddite and see if that helps.

What are forums for, you ask? The same thing Aristotle used them for, to mock ridiculous philosophical positions held by others, but in a snarky, non-cruel sort of way. Oh, and to debate about font choices. Our first active discussion guided me through the design of Molly’s first cover. The font, banner idea, and some color choices even came from some of our first members. Okay, from one of them. Thanks, Lisa!

What are the forums not for? Plenty. I’ll post some guidelines in the forums themselves, but I’d like to keep the foul language and adult themes in our short stories–where they belong. This site is intended for readers and writers of all ages to enjoy each others company. Anything that disturbs this mood will probably be deleted without animosity, like flies shooed from a pleasant picnic.

So, sign up. Poke around. Create some threads. Introduce yourselves. Tell me how insanely popular this series is gonna be (so you can brag later about what a keen prognosticator you are).

Here’s the tentative cover design for the book. Feedback and criticism welcomed.

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