Lost – one smallish bag of inspiration. If found, please return to me at the following email address (redacted). Reward offered, finders can keep half.

If only it were that easy! The past several weeks have seen a lot of things going on, and very little of it is writing. I’ve been working on edits mostly, and it’s very slow going.

I think I may have lost my inspiration for that as well, seeing as the projects I’m doing now were done, and lost to the computer swaps (twice!). Yes I know, back-ups, etc. I had back-ups. Disc, external hard-drive and flash drive. Not a single one will work on this computer. The folders don’t open, and if I can manage to get one to open, it crashes windows explorer and takes Dr. Watson with it, and usually anything else. All that is followed by a hard reboot that I want to avoid.

Basically, it’s just easier to go back and do it all over, thankfully there were clean files and some partially edited files in my email, so that’s one step forward.

The big overhaul of my network of sites is ongoing, very slowly. The plugin I use to rotate text and images was recently crippled by the author removing free functionality and saying “You want it? Buy it!” I went in and looked at the support forum, and the author has been extremely rude, sometimes outright condescending, to people he expects to pay for what they had for free only months ago.

I’d donated to this creep, and I refuse to buy a plugin for $45 a pop for five sites. That’s right – no multi-license.

WordPress backs the guy, despite their claims in their TOS that beta testing for-profit plugins isn’t allowed. That is exactly what the guy did, though. Beta-tested his functionality in the plugin with thousands of users, then took out all but very limited functions and moved them to the ‘pro’ version.

Thankfully I found another plugin that does the same thing, only with less flashy tools on the dashboard. S’alright for me, I know how to use code to manipulate what I want. Can’t imagine what other folks are doing now… Still, this new plugin’s author seems to be straightforward and it’s a simple one, so others have been tweaking and testing to suit their needs. I’m hopeful. It’s Random Text, for anyone that’s interested. It’s running both the quote block and the ads block in the footer below.

Well, that covers most of my week, I guess. Except two fantastic little bits of news – one, I finished the third Galleys Between novella last Friday, again, thanks to Friday Night Write Club! And, I received an email saying I was one of 18 contestants to be moving into the third and final round of a fiction competition… I just have to go over my story a couple more times, and send it off… My nerves have, yes, crumpled under the giddyness, and I am a wee bit scared to be fiddling with the story in case I add or remove something vital.

Still, I’m pleased and excited!

Maybe I have found that inspiration after all…

’til next week – keep those words comin’!
<3 JL