I've been on the fence about this for a little while. Not so much what to post about this as I was considering "if" to post this. Why?

Back in 2004, we had been contacted by a concerned author/reader regarding a free forum we were using that was laced with ads and crap to gather and talk to a small handful of fairly well-known authors of the time. The "community" was considered back then, some form of author support. LOL! That concerned author/reader purchased a parent domain and the software to build an internally supported forum to move the conversation to and gifted it to us. You see the name August Christopher come up for us, this is why. That was the official birth of what we now know as the Fort Family. We all came from small beginnings, the oldest of us were developed in a relatively young internet and needed to change with the times. Our forum is gone now but because of the interconnectivity of the modern internet, the forum became obsolete. So now we focus on hosting the sites that keep online authors' work available to the world. Are we alone in this task, heck no.

On September 9, Dude (IRL - Vale Mike Wengert) founder of the online community "AwesomeDude" that is as old as we are, passed away from a massive heart attack at the age of 79 years old. Just shy of his 80th birthday :(

All of our communities face issues that unless managed could knock us off the internet. This is why there are so few of the "Old Guard" (as ACFan put it to me earlier) left out there. The death of the founding member is bad, when that founding member was also the person managing all the bills and accounts, it is more than a speed bump, it's a mountain to overcome. When August Christopher passed, we were in danger of losing all that had been built so, we have seen that mountain, and feel for the AwesomeDude community.

If you have time, please reach out to them and offer them some positive energy and support. Not only are they facing a difficult battle but they are mourning the loss of a close friend. That mourning has to take a back seat when dealing with trying to save their creation and I can say from experience, that part sucks! Our community was only a year old when we dealt with this loss and fought to get our hands on the wheel of what felt like an out-of-control bus. Their community was established almost 20 years ago, around the same time our community became something we could also call a community. So it is more the size of a freight train compared to the bus we needed to learn how to drive.

Even though over the years all these "competing" communities had fences between themselves and others of its kind, I've always considered us in competition with no one. Just another group or gathering supporting independent authors and offering a hand to get them exposure. That's all any of these sites ever offered. Dude was one of those people who felt the same way, and his absence will be felt by us all.

RIP Dude and best wishes to the community you created and those within.

https://awesomedude.com/

Dear Readers,

Felix P. has revised his story After the Game, and I will be posting the revised chapters shortly. Felix has asked that the original story be removed, and we are complying with his request.

Look for the revised chapters shortly,

TSL Webmaster.

Hi Everybody!

It's true, after decades of some of the best stories on the web, Ted Louis has decided to close the book and really start to enjoy his retirement. To him we wish all the best and look forward to his future input. (I mean, you can take the web away from the man, but you can't take the man out of... It sounded better in my head O.o)

 At any rate, today is the official launch of "Ted Louis' Bookshelf", a completely community integrated site that will allow us to continue to make sure all of Ted's hard work is protected and available to us all for as long as we are able. It's taken quite a bit of time to build something worthy of all the talent it will now contain and protect. We hope everyone will enjoy and maybe even contact an author or two to let them know how much their work is loved and appreciated. Our way of doing that was to build this new home!

 Soon we will be reaching out to all the active authors on the site to give them the keys to their new home and make sure all the right boxes went into all the right rooms. Real or virtual, moving has its challenges. The end product was sooooo worth the effort.

 Special thanks to The Story Lover for the time and love he put into translating all the HTML into each and every story that you now have access to. He spent hours making sure everything was ready to go. Then passed it to me to make the site itself work, LOL!

 So, we say goodbye to the old tedlouis.com but everything we came here for is still here, just looking slightly different with a new coat of paint, some spit, and lots of polish!

Thanks for all your hard work Ted and remember, this is and always will be your home!

- Jeff
(on The Story Lover's behalf. He's napping and can you blame him? LOL!)