Making Changes

June 3, 2026

After spending this year mulling it over, I've decided I'm gonna start making a bunch of changes now, in terms of this website.

First off, when my rileykifer.com domain name is up for renewal later this year, I've decided I'm most likely not going to renew it, unless something convinces me otherwise. I really only bought it because my boyfriend convinced me to, because "It's only $10 a year and you never know you could get published someday and it'll be handy to have before someone else takes it for whatever reason! And it's good for using as a professional-sounding email too, which you can easily send emails from your gmail account under it, no problem!" (In which there has been a problem the handful of times I've tried using it over the last decade. Not worth the headache and tears- I have since made a proton email under the Riley Kifer name.) Cue today. Not only is it now more than $10 a year, but over the past couple of years, I've slowly come to the realization that I don't want to be published. I always thought, if I did ever professionally publish, I'd do self-publishing because- creative freedom, cheaper, easier (in some ways), among other reasons. Now, I don't even want to go the self-pub route either. I cannot stress how much I hate marketing and advertising. I've heard so many stories about how hard it is to sell a book these days- so much marketing and advertising just to maybe sell 50 copies if you're lucky. The only real way to make money in it is to write to market. That is, make sacrifices to my stories so that they'd appeal to a wider audience. The #1 reason I'd go the self-pub route would be to avoid people making me do that shit. Instead, I'd be the one making myself do that shit. I already learned the hard way that the fastest way to make myself miserable is to create content based off of what other people want. (If I wanted to do that, I'd actually be using my degree.)

On top of that, I'm honestly not even sure about posting stories on writing sites anymore. I mean, I like sharing my stories with the world, and always hope someone out there enjoys reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. But spending the last year and a half posting stories made me realize something.

It's made me realize how easy it is to lose sight of why I started writing to begin with. It's so, god damn, easy to get caught up in analytics and gaining readership. It is literally no different than any other form of social media. I quit social media long ago because of the negative effect it had on my mental health. I am noticing similarities between now and back then. Only in some ways, it's worse because there's a lot more work involved and pressure to finish a story.

I really, really wish writing sites actually didn't have any analytics- kinda like how Cohost was. Where you can't see any likes or view counts. Then, we can all focus purely on writing the story we want to tell, and spend more time actually writing, instead of getting caught up in playing the numbers game. Alas, I am most likely the minority in feeling this way, and writing sites don't give a shit about the minority.

I'm getting off track...

The good thing about Neocities, is that I can post all my stories, without getting caught up in analytics and shit. It's far less likely that someone will actually read any of the stories I do post, but they're out there to read. Which brings me to my next point.

The internet is going to shit.

With all these age verification laws going into place across the globe, on top of AI taking over everything, on top of nothing on the internet being permanent anymore, I want to put all my work in a place that (hopefully) won't be too affected by that noise. On a site that has similar values and principles as myself. So, I'm going to upload all my past work onto this website. And- I'm going to have fun with it. Currently, I'm starting to upload chapters of Russell and Sal because, why the fuck not start with my first ever novel? But over the next, whenever, start expecting to see my old works pop up on here, chapter by chapter. I might also include fun trivia and things for each story I've written. Also, I'm going to be making new changes to the site that'll make it less of a "professional" author site, and more like a Neocities site? Except nothing at all fancy, because I want to keep it mobile-friendly, and I have a hard enough time keeping it mobile friendly when trying to be professional. Idk how to explain it. The website's style and code will stay the same. But the words and pages might change.

I feel like I had more to say, but I guess that's about it for now.