Friends, it’s June. Can you believe it’s already June? I can’t. I don’t even know what year it is. Who even are you people and how did you get in here?
Well, since you’re here anyway, there’s a bunch of various things going on so I thought it was a good moment to do a big update post on a few things going on right now…
Email Outage. If you tried to email me last week, your email may have bounced back. That’s due to a massive failure on the part of my webhost. It’s fixed now but if you didn’t get a reply about something important, I almost certainly didn’t get it so I’ll have to ask you to please resend it. Relatedly…
New Hosting. While this is (hopefully!) an invisible change from your perspective, I finally said goodbye to SiteGround’s increasingly terrible service and moved to a new webhost. I don’t anticipate any bumps from this, since my new host has been amazing at moving everything over so far, but if you do find something missing or otherwise broken on any of my sites, please let me know!
New Plays! I like to give producers I’ve worked with before the chance to get first dibs on the world premiere so I’m going to be waiting a little before putting these on the website, but if you’re a member of the NewPlayExchange, peep my profile for a preview two brand new full length comedies coming very soon!
Old Plays! Speaking of plays, Vardiello has been picked up by Brooklyn Publishers. I don’t know exactly when it’ll be up on their site, but I approved the final proof on Friday so I would venture to say, “Soon.”
Upcoming Classes. Early as it may seem, I’m already starting to book classes and workshops for 2025 so if there’s a particular topic you’d like to see me teach about, please let me know!
NaNo HARD NO. As most of you probably know, NaNoWriMo had a scandalous year in 2023. Despite this, I had been planning to stick around to try to help them rebuild the program during what was going to be a very difficult 2024. Well, instead NaNoWriMo is under new management which is determined to drive it directly off a cliff and into the deepest ditch as fast as humanly possible and I, like the majority of their volunteer forces, have forcibly noped out. It’s a complicated emotional moment because of the love I still hold for what the event was mixed with the seething hatred I have for the way it’s very deliberately being run into the ground in the most spiteful way possible. What does this mean for all the NaNoWriMo content on this site? I’m still leaving it up because I think the hashtag and the concept will long outlive the org, but I want to make it very clear that my using the name is NOT endorsement and I absolutely do NOT recommend donating to this org in it’s present form. When I have a minute, I’ll try to add some kind of auto-message to everything tagged NaNo to that effect but, for now, I just wanted to make my position very clear.
Blogging? I’m still trying to figure out a solution for how to go back to my regular blogging schedule in the cyberpunk dystopian hellscape that is the AI world and leaning towards moving towards moving long blog posts behind a login. This isn’t ideal for anyone but I want to be able to keep sharing writing advice and excerpts from my books for free and it’s the only way I can see to do it until there are protections against content scraping in place. It’s either that or move to something kind of gated mailing list situation like Substack or Kofi. I’m still in the process of figuring out how that would work. Either way, I won’t change anything before giving you a heads up first so stay tuned for that!
The next few weeks are kinda crazy with the end of the school year and booking productions of my new plays, but I’ll be back in a few weeks to officially announce said new plays!
Hope everyone is hanging in there and I look forward to finding a solution for being able to communicate more regularly again!
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
