I'm Back!

My post content

Okay folks, it’s been a while. New site, new book, new upcoming series. It’s been all sorts of chaos over here. So what the hell happened?

Endless renovations at home. And fairly major ones as well. On a quest to learn new things and with an attitude of ‘how hard could it be?’ I’ve spent the last couple of years ripping up floorboards in half my house, ripping down all the plasterboard / dry wall, laying subfloor, putting in new plasterboard / dry wall, painting all of that, chucking out the old kitchen, laying new floorboards, and building from scratch a brand new kitchen. And whenever I tell people I’m building a new kitchen they seem to think, ‘I’ve drawn up designs for a kitchen and have hired someone else to make it for me.’ Not true. Or, they think, ‘I’ve gone to Ikea and got a bunch of pre-fab kitchen units and I’m just moving them into position.’ Not that either. Basically, I got a literal tonne of wood and cut it all down into kitchen cabinets. And oh my god, nothing has been a quick, smooth, or easy process. Nothing. Sometimes I have great bursts of energy and power through for several weeks. Then I crash and nothing happens for months. I've been living in chaos for years.

New job. While I’d love to say that I’m supporting myself full time as an author, I’m not. So, I have a regular boring job out of the house, and because the renovations still aren’t complete, I’d come home, manage to work on the house for two hours at most after a full shift, and then flop in front of the TV.

Those were the two biggest time-sucks away from writing. I’ve managed to do some, but not a lot. Which sucks. Because the easiest way out of working for someone else is by writing more books.

New site. Yes, it looks a lot like the old site. But it’s a new host. My previous host would not / could not get the SSL certificate done for my site, which was pissing me off. It got to the point where I refused to post updates on my site because there was no point, no one was going to be able to see them. And I was getting pretty snarky with their tech support as well because they'd ignore me saying, 'Here is a list of every recommendation I have received from you, nothing works, the problem is on your end.' So at one point I just gave up. I went to a different host. And guess what? They did the SSL certificate automatically and it was present within 5 minutes. Huzzah! And then, of course, my old host emailed me three weeks later saying, ‘We think we’ve found the problem. It’s because you’re using a different host. If you redirect it back to us everything should be fixed.’ I'm afraid that’s going to be a big 'no' from me.

More tech problems. Another issue was that all my email and contacts got completely wiped, and I was convinced it was all backed up somewhere. Turns out: it wasn’t.

There were also a dozen minor tech things that all needed to be tackled and, honestly, I didn’t have the enthusiasm to deal with them. And when I left them for too long, any time I worked up the power to tackle them, the sites had changed, the processes had changed, what used to work no longer did, and it became a full time job again learning how to fix something, so I ignored it until I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

Anyway, this is a long-ass way of me saying: I’m getting back into things now. Thank you for your patience. :)