Copyright © 1999 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Return to lately 1999.

SENTENCE has been online for one year now.

I had never accessed the Internet before then, had no idea what it was like, although like everyone else I heard about it every day on TV, in the newspapers, conversations, etc. I had finished writing KID, my third novel, was starting to market it, turned on my pc one Saturday afternoon to do some more work, and couldn't get on. My hard drive had crashed.

I wasn't one to back-up files. I lost the text of KID, a number of short stories, and about 10 years of correspondence. Although I didn't have hard copies of the correspondence, I did have earlier texts of KID and the stories, so Mary and I bought a new pc and I retyped everything into it.

The new pc also came with Internet access. At some point, I did what everyone does: I typed my own name into a search engine, and hit Go! I expected nothing to come up, but in fact discovered there were references to some of my published work, as well as the text of a short story I wrote years ago.

It occurred to me then that I could put up my own page and make even more of my work available to anyone who wanted to read it. My first attempt was at GeoCities (the name SENTENCE came about when one after another rob-related passwords was rejected as already used, until it got to the point where I'd have to use something like rob438, which sounds like an android, so I typed in sentence instead, one of the most basic words I could think of, and it was accepted. I kept it because I like its double meaning). This webpage at SWBell is my second. SENTENCE will soon be available at its own domain, ralphrobertmoore.com, where I'll have sufficient throughput to inaugurate a number of new features I've had in mind.

In the year SENTENCE has been up, it's received over 7,000 hits (counting all the individual pages). The most popular page by far is THE SEX ACT, located under THE SHORT STORIES. It currently gets about 50-70 hits a day. This home page is the second most popular, followed by THE SHORT STORIES, then THE NOVELS. A few people visit KING FOR A DAY, but virtually no one goes to THE POEMS (it had about a dozen hits last month). I may be forced to rename it Bride of The Sex Act.

Thanks to all of you who visited during SENTENCE's first year. I hope you have a great 1999, falling in love or deeper in love, as applicable, eating great meals, hearing great jokes, writing great sentences.