Long Version

Something unknown happened to the blog between Dec 2025 and April 2026. Hacked? Database fail? I really have no idea. Specifically: somehow all the author accounts (including the admin account!) on this blog were deleted as well as a bunch of the posts. How exactly this could happen despite the many failsafes I have in place is something no one can give me a good answer on, but the end result was that my webhost overwrote my clean back-ups of the site with the corrupted version earlier this year because they didn’t realize so those were all useless.

Since we didn’t know exactly what happened and the newest post left on the site was from 2019, I decided it was better to only lose two years of posts rather than seven (especially since I have no idea what other problems there were on the backend or if the posts that were still up were edited).

So I took a back-up of the site I had from when I switched webhosts in Jan of 2024 and restored that.

Obviously none of this is ideal and I want to RAGE STAB, but we are looking on the bright side that at least I only lost a handful of posts and not the entire site.

But I did feel like everyone’s whose info was in the site in some form deserved a heads up!

Since we’re all here, how are you?

Me? I’ve been teaching a ton lately, you can see the full schedule of my upcoming classes on my other website here.

Writing Workshops

Mostly writing and marketing, but I just finished one up on dictation and I’ve got one on Self-Publishing coming up soon. I’d be happy to teach about more e-commerce stuff if people were interested, but more people want to book me to yap about writing these days. (I also have a new writing book that just came out yesterday, Make Ready to Write, if that would be your jam.)

Things are going great and I’ve been super busy… which is why I have been a slacker about blogging lately, sorry about that.

It’s funny how when I started this website, most of my income came from e-commerce and selling and fiction was just a fun thing I did on the side and at some point that flipped. I still sell obviously, just not at the volume I used to because so much of my time is taken up by writing and writing related activities.

Oh, and the kids. They have gotten larger. One is even a teenager!

Truly, the passage of time is relentless and unyielding.

As part of trying to salvage this site, I was going through a bunch of old comments and it was making me very nostalgic for all the fun shenanigans we used to get up to on here and in our little e-comm bubble. You other sellers were my watercooler for a long time there and I miss being part of that community. (I do NOT miss all the weird old men who were obsessed with hating me though, what was WITH them?? I forgot how many there were until I went through the comments, good lord!)

Anyway you don’t read this blog for wholesome content, you read it for complaining so let’s see what I’ve got for you in that department…

• Isn’t the eBay Mobile app The Worst? Just nightmare user experience for sellers. Why must it text me when the items I have sold arrive, I don’t CARE when they arrive, leave me alone!
• Speaking of Leave Me Alone, that’s the name of a decent service I use to manage my inbox, remind me someday to write a review of it.
• Are we annoyed about WaveApps charging to connect bank accounts starting on June 1st? I actually worked around that with a great little Google Sheets extension called BankToSheets that lets me connect 5 bank accounts (including PayPal!!) for only $5 a month which was WAY cheaper than paying for the upgraded WaveApps. Now I only have to pay that one $5 a month and use Wave Connect to use it with all my WaveApps accounts instead of having to pay for Premium on each of them. Granted, it’s a tad more manual than auto import but since I only need to do it quarterly, I don’t mind a little quick copy and paste to save that much money.
• I deleted my Twitter account a while ago (I had a blog post up about that but, ya know, we had to reset to 2024) so you cannot find me there but if you ever want to chat I am semi-active on Threads and Bluesky. And, of course, you can always just comment on the blog or drop me an email!
• New Newsletter. Instead of spreading myself thin across multiple social networks, I’ve decided to concentrate on just my main site as my social hub as I convert that into a more regular newsletter and just have that content syndicate to other platforms to make my life easier. In addition to this being a time saver it’s just waaay better for my mental health because social media has become such a trash fire, it’s really not worth wading into the fray when I have other ways to chat with people. I explained more about why I made that shift here if you’re curious, but the gist is that I was already posting everything on my blog so I just used Jetpack to turn my existing site into a Substack-like newsletter because that gave me more flexibility to keep everything in-house.

As for this site, updates will still just be sporadic until I figure out a plan for what I want to do over here. I like the idea of turning this into a more monthly newsletter instead of trying to bust my butt doing weekly or even daily updates like I used to but I want to live with the Jetpack set up on my other site for a bit first before I decide what to do.

Anyway, sorry I am not checking in for better reasons but I hope you’re all well and still living your best internet lives!

Don’t be