All you sailors, all life-savers, all you cruisers, all you fishermen

All right, I am slowly catching up with the twentieth century:

I have a website.

My father laid down the bones of this site around the time of Ghost Signs in 2015, but then my life fell apart so speedily and so awfully that nothing ever came of it. In anticipation of Forget the Sleepless Shores, I restarted it this weekend. I have done basically nothing else for the last two days except enter a lot of HTML and futz with tiny fragments of Drupal and have a migraine. My parents, spatch, and selkie have been very patient.

All slides on the front page are the creation of my father; all photographs except for the deep space one were taken by someone in my family. All text and errors are mine. I may continue to tinker with the site for the next couple of days, but it should now be live.

At the moment I think it looks rather nice.

It's deep and dark like the water was, the day I learned to swim

Things may be about to become all book, all the time for a little while around here. Forget the Sleepless Shores is receiving its first reviews.

Today, from A.C. Wise:

Forget the Sleepless Shores by Sonya Taaffe is hot off the presses this month. It's a gorgeous collection, echoing with themes of loss, longing, and separation . . . [T]he characters have a sense of lives extending far beyond the page, as though the reader is merely peeking in on a slice of their lives. They feel familiar and strange all at once, giving the stories a haunted, and unsettling feel, in the best of ways.

And from Francesca Forrest:

Regret, sorrow, obsession, and yearning are so present in Forget the Sleepless Shores that it's almost like they're main characters. The human (and otherworldly) protagonists caught in their clutches often find words failing them—so light must speak, or clouds, or objects, or landscapes, but most of all, bodies must speak, skin to skin, sweat to sweat, intermingled breath, hands tangling in hair or gripping wrists. It's sensuousness with an incandescent filament of the erotic threading through it, surrounded by the glowing unknowable.

I have updated the website accordingly.

This is fun.