Hi Everyone!

It's Jeff this year asking for your help to keep our sites up and running. You may well know our sites are run almost entirely on your generous donations! When your donations do not cover all of the cost, the difference comes out of our pockets. We have no ADs on our sites and no Premium Tiers and No Pay Walls! There is no charge to our authors for hosting their stories nor any charge for you the readers to read them. That was the original agreement in the beginning and we work hard to keep our promise to keep it that way. Of course we would appreciate it if you could find a way to donate any amount to help us in our mission keep our sites AD-free and running. So please check between your couch cushions and under your car seats any amount will be gratefully accepted. No amount is too small. Seriously!

We thank you very much for all of your help over the years.

So you know, our last offer is still on the table. We are still running the following promotion, simply put, make at least a $10 USD donation and say that you are interested, you'll get a random autographed copy of one of the soft cover Joel Books directly from Ted Luis himself. I don't know how many copies are left but while he has them, he's happy to send them to you all as a thank you. Mine is on a shelf here in my room and it's probably one of my favorite keepsakes.

The Original Offer - Repost:

Have you considered helping to keep these sites up and running? Are you also a fan of Ted Louis' "Joel" series? Well, Ted has informed us that he found a case of assorted Joel books. Yeah, "actual" in print books! He decided that for anyone willing to make a $10 or larger donation within the US to the hosting service paying the bills for the Fort Family Community of sites, he is willing to send you your very own copy of a random book in the "Joel" series, autographed by Ted Louis himself as a thank you! An amazing keepsake from an amazing author!

What to do:

1. Click on https://dsshosting.net/donations/donation-form/ and click on "Donate Now".

2. Make a qualifying donation of $10 or more.

3,. Email your name and mailing address to joel-offer@fortfamilyforums.com (Yes, a P.O. box, relative's address, next-door neighbor, total stranger's address... is fine. As long as you are able to intercept the mail ;)

4. Once the donation has been confirmed, Ted Louis will send a random autographed copy of one of his books to you directly.

(One book per donation. This offer will be withdrawn once the limited number of books has been sent. The early bird gets the worm! Unfortunately, only US residents due to expensive international shipping :( We'll take down the offer as soon as we confirm that no copies remain.)

Originally Posted by Fred DeElve

Originally Posted by JeffsFort

Dear Readers,

If you are reading Felix P.'s revised version of After The Game, I strongly advise reading Scribe 1971's story Substitute Dad as more of the characters from that story will be appearing in After The Game. Learning more about Josh, Shelley, and Mark will enhance your reading of After The Game.

Enjoy reading,

TSL

Originally Posted by Fred DeElve

Originally Posted by Fred DeElve

Originally Posted by Fred DeElve

Dear Readers,

It seems that while I was transferring stories from Ted's Original Site to this new one, I inadvertently forgot several of Charles Bird's Stories from his High Seas Series. I will begin posting those stories later today.

I will get those stories posted as soon as I can, please be patient though.

I will also be continuing the posting of Felix P's revised version of After The Game.

Take care,

TSL Webmaster.

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!)