I tried to come up with a URL for ages and came up short. My favourite was thrisk.com and it was available, but Lorraine didn’t like it. I stopped thinking about it and decided not to bother signing up with Squarespace and spending unecessary dosh as I could build a WordPress blog for free. But it kept playing on my mind, so I decided to go for thrisk.com, only to find it had gone. Oh no!

I started looking for other made up words with single syllable that would be easy to spell, but nothing came up.

So, what about sunbane? Well, I found my way to a site about my favourite series of books, Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and then it came to me: sunbane.com!

For some reason, the Sunbane is the one feature of the books that I think about most often. When I leave work, the first thing I see at the back door is an overgrown hedge and bushes. That makes me think straight away of the Sun of Fertility. When the rain is bouncing off the street outside, as it so often does on our little island paradise, I think of the Sun of Rain.

So I registered the URL, paid for the pro package on Squarespace (using the TWiT coupon code for 10% discount) and I was done. Lorraine doesn’t like it, and understandably so as she has no idea what it means. She reminded me that the world revolves around me, and that without me, none of you would exist; the AA meetings aren’t quite working yet I guess!

So, what is the sunbane? It occurs in the second chronicles. When the Staff of Law is broken, the Sunbane replaces Earthpower in the Land and brings about a corruption of the natural order. The corruption manifests itself in one of four ways: pestilence, fertility, rain and desert. There is no pattern to the various suns, and each can last one or more days. During each variant of the corruption, the sun wears a halo of a different hue: green for pestilence, red for desert, and so on. It is fed by the Banefire and human sacrifice.

So yes, the Sunbane is not a nice thing. It is, however, something that I think about in my daily life and it makes me think of God and natural law (which, to my mind, are synonymous). So for that reason I thought it a good URL for my own (or our own?) web site. Anyone who has read these books will relate straight away, and those who haven’t won’t know what it is anyway.