If you have forgotten your Booktrovert password, you have arrived at the correct page, and the reset is not complicated. Follow the steps below in order. Do not skip ahead. In my experience the people who skip ahead in a set of instructions are the same people who skip ahead in a book, and I have strong opinions about both, which I will now be paid, apparently, to keep to myself.
I should say plainly, since we are going to be spending a page together, that I did not want this assignment. I was engaged, if that is the word for it, to write a proper set of operating instructions for the machine that resets a Booktrovert password. Naturally I asked to see the machine. There is no machine. I asked to see the password. There is no password. I asked to be excused. I was handed a pencil instead, and the pencil had already been ruined by someone before me, and here we are. Read on. It gets no better, but it does get stranger, which in my line is nearly the same thing.
A thing cannot be reset until it has first been set, which means that somewhere in your possession there ought to be a password already. Look for it. Check your coat. Check the inside band of your hat. Check the margin of whatever you were reading the last time you felt sure of anything. This is where passwords actually go: not into some cold drawer full of other people's secrets, but into the margins, where the good thoughts keep. If you turn one up, you never needed me. Shut the window and go read something.
If you have searched and come up empty, you must now say it to the room. The room is small, and paneled, and holds one desk, one lamp that keeps its own schedule, and one window on the north wall that has never once agreed to close. Stand in the middle of it and say, "I have forgotten my password." The lamp will flicker. Do not take the flicker for sympathy. The lamp flickers at everything. I have watched it flicker straight through a funeral and a lunch.
Here is the part they would rather I softened, so I will not. The password at Booktrovert.org is chosen once a year, by contest. The contest has exactly one entrant, which is the draft that comes in off that north window, and the draft has won every year running since 1997. It wins because it is the only contestant with the decency to show up, and because Doug, who judges, has never in his life been able to resist anything that keeps arriving without being asked. Your new password is therefore whatever the draft is currently spelling across the loose papers on the desk. This morning it spelled BRISK. Yesterday it spelled nothing at all, and we counted that too, and gave it the ribbon.
Write the winning word onto the back of your hand, then look away, then look back. You will find you have already misremembered it. Good. A password you can recall perfectly is a password somebody else can guess, and I have spent enough of two lifetimes being quoted by people who got it slightly wrong to tell you that the slightly wrong version is the one that lasts. Keep the mistake. The mistake is now your credential.
Most systems will at this stage demand that you prove you are yourself. We have no way to check and no wish to. Simply state your name aloud, and, if it helps, one true thing you have never told a form. The desk will not record it. Randy would have recorded it, in that handwriting of his, but Randy is not in today. Randy is at a wedding, or on his way to one, or returning from a third, and the schedule on this point has never been mine to keep.
You are reset. That is the whole of it. No confirmation will reach your inbox, because there is nobody at the desk to send one and nothing in the drawer to confirm. If what you were truly after was the login screen, we do keep one mounted on the wall over at the login page, strictly for atmosphere, and it works exactly as well as this did. And if this page has convinced you that the cleaner course is to have no account at all, we walked a previous visitor through deleting theirs, which took two hours on account of a loon.
Now. I have done what was asked, under a protest I consider entirely reasonable. The window is still open. The draft is still, at this moment, spelling something across the desk that I am choosing not to read. And you, having reset a password that was never yours on a machine that does not exist, are more welcome here than you were an hour ago. Buy a book on your way out. Authors are fragile organisms, and I would know, having been one, and being, I am told, still technically employed as one.
Irritably,
Booktrovert #4195