Weeks ago, I began to run into problems with not being able to log into my website. We tried all sorts of fixes, hoping to figure it out for ourselves, but I also needed to use my time to handle edits on Captured in Flames since that had to get back to the editor for a final pass. It had a tight deadline if I wanted to stay on track with my publishing goals. I told myself I’d redouble my efforts on the site once I turned in the manuscript. Well, I got the book finished in time for the editor this past week, so that’s the good news.

The bad news is that we (my father who was helping and myself) finally relented and contacted the website host who concluded my site had been hacked. They said I had the option of hiring a security specialist to clean it up or use a backup file. I didn’t want the expense of a specialist so I told them to go with the most recent backup before the problems began. Unfortunately, many of those files were corrupted. The best one to use was all the way back in April of 2016!

I thought about it for a bit and finally succumbed to the inevitable. Without my website, I can’t reach my full audience to keep them updated. They took that old backup and got everything running again yesterday afternoon. Of course, that meant I was back to an old theme, plugins, widgets, outdated pages, banners, etc. It drove me crazy to look at it all and know some readers might stop by the website and wonder what was going on with it. The most recent post was from April 2016, so you get the idea. I had only one Dragon’s Breath book out and none of the Dark Destiny Series. A lot had happened since then.

For those of you who don’t follow me in my Facebook fan group, I had another baby boy a little over 15 months ago named Dean. He’s great and I love him so much, but like his big brother was at this age I cannot get near a laptop without a meltdown. He loses his mind if he sees me on it.

Thankfully, Dean is much better at taking naps and going to bed at night. My firstborn, Adam, saw it as a challenge to make him sleep and keep him down for the night until he was three years old. Now that he’s four, he is much better about that and even good at entertaining himself while I work (usually). The second boy still wakes 2-3 times a night, especially when teething, but he can be relied upon to go to bed on schedule. This allows me to sneak time to work on my book during his nap and after he’s in bed (assuming there is nothing else pressing that must be done while he’s sleeping like shower). This is how I was finally able to get back to writing again.

Anyway, I worked on the website until 1:30am last night updating my theme, pages, header, and adding back the posts between 2016-present that I felt couldn’t be lost (I skipped dozens of others). They look like new since I couldn’t carry over the comments or even back date them. Also, though I checked boxes declining sending notifications of those re-posts, I have heard some people still got them. My deepest apologies for anyone who got slammed with those updates and I promise there will not be anymore since I managed to knock them all out before bed! And if it’s any consolation, Dean had an usually restless night (likely due to teething), so I got woke up every hour until around 8:00am when he was wide awake and ready to face the day. I’ve ran on fumes and coffee since then.

Today, during Dean’s nap today I got a lot more done on other necessary modifications like my Contact page, security stuff, and book pages. I still have some minor tweaking left to do, but the rest of it isn’t urgent. I’m switching my time back to working on formatting Captured in Flames so I can get it up for pre-order as soon as possible. Also, I really want to post the first two chapters in the next couple of days so you all can get a taste of what’s to come.

Once again, I apologize for any inconvenience and promise I’m working every spare minute possible.