I’m still fixing the widgets and things, but I’d rather get all the sites back up that I can and then get the widgets sorted than play around with that right now, the feed subscription is back up and that’s the main thing as far as I’m concerned.

What happened is that on Friday a person in Sheffield initiated a scam of PayPal and to do so had hacked into one of my other domains using my password which they had somehow phished. My host is incredibly wonderful and incredibly on the ball (seriously you guys should ALL host with drak.net and tell them I sent you!) and had everything locked down within a few minutes, but that’s still meant that they had to lock all my sites down in case the person had been messing around in all of them and also that once they got me fixed I decided to take everything down and put it back up in pieces anyway because I’m paranoid like that and thought it would be a good time to weed out anything that was up on the server that probably shouldn’t have been because it was old, stale, and not being used (like my old Joomla installation).

Anyway I hope that I can regain my readership and breathe new life into everything like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of this disaster.

Thanks to those of you who’re sticking with me!

In the end after several different requests from them and further badgering from my step-father I did send in a writing sample. The first chapter of something I was working on. It involved a metamorphic police officer chasing down a suspect through a traffic jam and finally catching up by turning into a fly and freaking them out when she turned back into a person on their windshield.

After that I kept getting letters from them telling me how talented I was and offering to set me up with a writing coach and all the rest of it for X amount of dollars. That was when I realized that it was a scam, just like some of those offers for cheap insurance and viagra and things you get in your spam folder can be. Up until I was in college for several years I was still getting letters from them. Since I’ve been married I’ve seen the last of it.

However I get offers now and again from random publishers or agents who are wanting to help me self-publish and a lot of the time when I investigate them they’re also scams. I do know that their are some authors out there who will mentor people but I doubt that they’d be involved in something like that. I realize now that they’re more likely to do guest lectures and courses at actual universities.

We joke that perhaps someone died upstairs because there was a suspicious stain on the padding and all the carpet had been ripped up, but you never know if that might be right or not, so we made sure to do lots of cleansing rituals when we first moved in. We’re going to do another one once Kore gets back from her mini vacation as we get things set up and painted and can even put some protective symbols on the doors and windows. It’s a long process but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

The nicest version of a protection that I’ve discovered in my searches for a small child is this one.

Light without, light within
Let this magic spell begin.
Keep me guarded well, safe to be
Knowing the light walks with me.

The idea with this spell is to have your child mix together a cup of baking soda, a teaspoon of chopped dried mint and powdered clove while saying these things, and then if there’s a day where things are worrying them, you sprinkle a little in their shoes to keep them guarded.