About

Pencil Stubs Online has been around for a long time.  Originally it was started by Mary E. Adair and her late husband, A.G. Adair as a "tabloid style" printed paper called, "Hobbie$ Etc" that shipped all over the United States and to several countries abroad.  Our webmaster, Mike Craner first met Mary online shortly after A.G. passed away and she was looking for more authors for Hobbie$ Etc.  Mike showed her a website he had set up with a few of his poems and invited her to print what she wanted.  Not only did she print all he had posted, but made it a "center fold" in the paper, boosting Mikes confidence immensely.

A few months later Mary informed him that she would not longer be able to keep up with the expense of printing and mailing Hobbie$ and would have to shut it down.  Mike had been playing at making websites for a little while and recognizing the potential of the medium and low cost, volunteered to take Hobbie$ to a new level, if she would agree to changing the name.

In February 1998 Hobbie$ Etc became Pencil Stubs Online and we have published hundreds of people since then, nearly every month.  At the turn of the century we became increasingly vulnerable to spammers and hackers and had to adapt, and even remove many of the features that made us great, like subscriptions, comments, our wall, and other features.  Several times Mike embarked on updating the site, changing with the evolution of the technology but often came up against a wall when it came time to importing past issues to the new format which proved too time consuming and cumbersome, so the promised updates never fully came into being.

Today we're in the process of another evolution, utilizing Blogger and the blogging format to take us from a monthly publication to one where our family of long-time contributors can publish as often and whenever they want.  Again there is the problem of importing past issues to the new format, but we are going ahead and importing our archives as we can from most recent to oldest, so not only will you have the new live format to enjoy, but you'll also get to revisit past issues as we import them from the old site.

The old site, at http://www.pencilstubs.com will continue to exist until we have imported everything over, so if you can't wait for it to be imported over then please by all means visit us there.

We also have a Facebook fan page now, so please join our fans there and watch our discussions and postings there for updates about Pencil Stubs.  We appreciate your support and all comments, so please don't be shy, we're just common people expressing ourselves on the 'net.  No corporate or political BS here, we're not snotty publishers who reject 98% of submissions with form letters.  We are here for those who want to express themselves through writing, and those who enjoy reading it.