Why I’m launching a new website

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I am best known for creating the website Delimiter.

If you’ve followed technology news in Australia at all over the past decade, it would have been hard to miss it. Launched in January 2010, Delimiter attracted almost 15 million page impressions during the six and a half years it was active, and over 150,000 reader comments. We broke some huge stories and truly moved the needle in terms of the national technology policy debate.

But Delimiter was not my first website.

In mid-2009, I was growing restless with my career as a journalist for major media outlets. I knew that I eventually wanted to launch my own technology media outlet, but I didn’t really know how.

So I tested the waters with a little known site called Keeping the Door — named after a character from the Ursula Le Guin novel A Wizard of Earthsea.

Keeping the Door was a very different site to Delimiter.

So as to avoid any conflict of interest with my day job, it focused exclusively on my lifelong passion for science fiction and fantasy literature.

Like Delimiter, it was based on WordPress, but it had no email newsletter, only a small social media presence and archaic commenting functionality. And its design was appalling. I look back upon its early iterations and shudder.

However, Keeping the Door was successful enough that it allowed me to test many of the concepts that would eventually allow me to build a site as large and commercially successful as Delimiter.

As Delimiter grew, Keeping the Door inevitably fell by the wayside. I published new articles to it now and then, but after a few years it was a ghost town; with no new content and no readers.

And yet, I always had in the back of my mind that I would return to it, when the time was right.

Well, now the time is right.

I am no longer a journalist of any kind. I have successfully transitioned into a new career as a technology process and content specialist within the Federal Government domain. You can read more about that on my LinkedIn profile here — I’m enjoying it immensely.

In addition, my interest in writing technology news is exhausted — I won’t go back to that role again.

And yet, my lifelong passion for great science fiction and fantasy books still remains. I am always seeking great new books in this category, and of course I am writing a science fiction novel myself at the moment — and plan to write many more.

The launch of a new site to work on at home after work hours will allow me to engage with this personal interest on an ongoing basis.

Through this new site I will:

  • Publish news, blog posts and reviews about science fiction and fantasy books and authors (and much of the old Keeping the Door content has been migrated here)
  • Publish my own books (I have two coming later this year — one on the history of technology policy and one science fiction novel)
  • Publish ‘best of’ lists of the greatest science fiction and fantasy literature of all time

It is my hope that, over time, this site will become a substantial resource for science fiction and fantasy book fans. If it serves the purpose of helping myself and others continually discover great science fiction and fantasy literature, then I will consider that it has met that aim.

If you want to keep up to date with my writing on this site, please sign up to my weekly email newsletter through the sidebar on the right (no ads or spam), follow me on Twitter or Facebook, or subscribe via RSS. I can guarantee that if you’re interested in great science fiction and fantasy books, you won’t be disappointed :D

Happy reading!

Renai LeMay

5 COMMENTS

  1. Excellent! I’ve been wading through poor recommendations for a good read…now that will change.

  2. I’m looking forward to your review of the upcoming controversial blockbuster “Overruling Mathematica”, the first novel from long time short-form specialist M. Turnbull.

    (You’re probably better off deleting this comment, I couldn’t help it)

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