So overnight, my website decides that the files for my five most important plugins simply don't exist. I can't sort that out until I get home, but needless to say, that worries me a great deal.
Gone are:
and a couple others.
I changed my password and have to accept broken functionality on various parts of my website until I can load the backup files via ftp. If the original files are even gone.
So I’ve been collaborating and publishing these last few days, and my fingers are itching to get back to my cover art to get it corrected for Createspace. I’m ready to order my proofs and get it off to bed, seriously.
In the meantime, I discovered again a deplorable lack of information out there about genre. Most of the intensive information is workshops and classes. I want a reference book. So I’ll be adding into my already over-scattered writing schedule to put together a reference work called The Indie Author Guide to Genre, where I get to cover BISAC, Amazon, cross-genre, subgenres, and examples of how broad the scope of these genres can really be.
Then I’m also going to start putting together some tutorials on the Pods CMS plugin for my own benefit due to the fact that it is deplorably underdocumented and I use it extensively here and exclusively for my new series bible setup. I don’t know PHP. I don’t know SQL. I want an awesome site. Surely that's not too much to ask. :grins:
I’ll put both of these series under cuts so you can skip them if you want.
Didn’t do so good today, but it was a busy workday and I had to run to break on lunch. I got a chapter tweaked though and it’s off to the collaborator for editing and/or general assessment.
I look at how fast other writers produce and how they do it and I find myself wondering what in the world besides overthinking is holding me back, but then I remember it’s not always overthinking but sometimes sheer ignorance that must be rectified before my thinking actually produces anything of value again. Why do I insist on writing things that require me not to be ignorant?
Scribbling snippets here and there and not big ones, but they're coming.
As mentioned above, I think I’ve got a decent series bible setup now. It’s sparse because I’m focusing on canonical data and current WIP and building the site before focusing on filling everything out, but it exists. This is good.
Sign-ups for the Invisible Ficathon start tomorrow. Yay!
So over the course of the last few days, I have fixed my computer three times and it has unfixed itself. Virus scan tomorrow.
I am reading The Flood while reading other books because frankly, I'm not ready for the Fire and Water series to be over. The other books were the Queen's Thief books by Megan Whalen Turner. A very long time ago when I was fourteen years old, my writing instructor recommended The Thief. I fell promptly and wholly in love. I never picked up the other books. This year, I rectified that and wow, these are so incredibly good. I want more too. Much more. I feel new fandom coming on.
I got through page 20 of justifying/hyphenating the updated trade paperback interior of Dowse and Bleed. This proof already comes to hand too easily. I'm so ready to publish more and update Gone Hunting and write more. Alas! Only so much time and energy.
Started at 1696 words on Tracing Trouble, wrote 211, dumped those words, then went to the end and kept writing. I wanted to get 1000 on both this story and the collaboration today, but my computer was still crazy and my aunt visited today. I expect my evenings for the rest of the week to be similarly shortchanged.
*written by me in 2014
Well, to be honest, reading The Drought, Honor of the Queen by David Weber, and getting ready to dive into The Flood while also working on getting all formats of Dowse and Bleed ready for publication while trying to resurrect my dead-in-the-water home computer (registry error).
I'll get back to updating after I start scribbling again instead of just percolating and tech supporting. Did I mention tech is not my color?
Because I copied the post to a new draft. I can't believe it. I still have the email version of the comments, but...
I'm starting to really hate technology sometimes. Really.
I have tried somewhere around a dozen spam blockers that don't require me to manually cull through a few hundred pieces of spam and rescue the false positives. Finally. This Wordpress plugin delivered: Antispam for all fields.
I still get emails with my potentially spam comments but only a few because it allows me to zap the mess out of them so they'll never show their spammy faces again. It's also quite easy to approve a false positive if someone does get caught. Instead of 50+ spam comments a day, I'm getting less than a dozen emails. Lovely.
Dear Yahoo,
You have never listened to any feedback I've ever sent you; you have never respected my privacy; and you have never cared, so frankly, I don't expect you will now. You used to have one redeeming quality: you put out the one decent email program left.
Gone, gone, gone. As of today gone.
Not only am I required to downgrade to the BROKEN version of Mail that I kept telling you was broken and I wouldn't upgrade to until you fixed certain very nasty bugs, but with it, I am now required to let you rifle through all my mail and read it and use it to target ads to me that I will never click on. Unless there was a way to export my entire decade's worth of mail, which of course, there isn't.
Not only am I required to let you read my mail to make ads, you have moved the ads to the side so that I am required to never be able to move a blinking ad out of my line of view.
Not only am I required to downgrade to your lousy idea of an upgrade, but it's because you aren't supporting Classic anymore. Guess what? I didn't need support. It worked, unlike this new mail that only works if I have Messenger, chat, and photo slideshows active, which I hate and will never, ever, ever, ever use except to delete the spam messages you force me to have to look at.
Not only am I required to downgrade to the new Yahoo! Mail, but I'm required to use the Full Version I don't want because the Basic is so broken you can't even click "Previous Email."
You now have no redeeming qualities. And I still can't export all that mail that I need to keep handy since I used my email as a hub of operations before and now don't know how I'm going to hub without it.
No love,
the scribbler
P.S. Whoever invented infinite scrolling should experience ten levels of purgatory for making it cryworthy to try and clean up 14,000 emails in an attempt to actually see the number of emails in my inbox in the header.
