Author portrait . . . not reallyWelcome to Elsewhither. My name is Charlie Hills and you may know me from my other blog, Back to the Fridge. I created this blog due to the increasing number of off-topic posts over there. (It was either that or write a book, How To Lose Traffic and Alienate Readers.) I officially announced Elsewhither on Friday, August 6, 2010, but if you see posts prior to that date, it's because I transferred all my writing-related posts from there to here.

Purpose

For a number of years, this blog was an outlet for me to write about writing. But writing is only one of my creative interests. So on Monday, February 9, 2015, I expanded the site to cover additional topics, primarily music and art.

Elsewhither?

If you've never seen the word elsewhither before, it's because you were born after 1690. It is an archaic form of "elsewhere" and not used all that often, making it an ideal choice for a twenty-first century domain name. Philologically speaking, the -ither part of such words can be converted to their modern counterparts by swapping out -ither for -ere, like so:

hither = here
thither = there
whither = where

I adopted the word for three reasons:

First (just like pretty much everyone else on the planet) my day is divided into "have to" and "want to." What I have to do is go to work, clean the kitchen, and pay taxes. What I want to do, however, is more of what defines me as a person. But because it doesn't pay the bills, these things don't happen hither, they happen elsewhither.

Second, I'm working on a novel entitled Elsewhither. When I started it, I immediately registered the domain name elsewhither.com. When it came time to start a new blog, I already had a place for it.

Lastly, I just really like the word. 🙂