6:09pm (Eastern)

I was originally going to use this text to replace the content of the January 4th post (read on for an explanation), but about eight minutes in, I figured out how to recover the post content I lost. (More on that below)

When I’m owning a dumbass mistake (especially one that I’m not quite sure how I did it), I own all of it and try to be as transparents about it as possible.

Right, then…

Over the weekend (I think), I received an email stating that all of the posts on my site showed the text from the January 4th post. Being the Server & Networks geek that I am, my mind immediately went to troubleshooting the problem as if it was a database issue.

It wasn’t.

I’m very glad that I didn’t do anything drastic, like start restoring site backups, because that would’ve been utterly pointless. If you’re wondering why I’m talking about databases, I suggest communing with Google to acquire a better understanding of how content management systems (like WordPress) do what they do.

You see, the problem wasn’t a database issue at all. When I wrote my January 4th writing update post, I somehow managed to edit the “All Posts” template and put my post content in there.

Which is why all of my site posts showed the January 4th content.

I have no idea how I managed to do this, but I’m willing to wager it had something to do with being incredibly tired and damn-near braindead from the writing I’d done that day.

6:20pm

So, I started a new post to roll this in with the weekly writing update I should’ve made on Saturday the 11th. I was going to make two posts, until I realized that I could recover the text content that I lost correcting the problem with a little bit of sweat equity and my personal web server VM.

VM is tech-geek for virtual machine, basically a computer running as a software program on another computer. There are a couple different ways to achieve this, but that’s beyond the scope of this particular batch of rambling. Leave a comment if you want me to discuss VMs and how they work.

Right, then… moving back to the description of the problem.

When I finally realized and confirmed the nature of the problem, I was so tired and frustrated that I deleted the post content from the “All Posts” template without saving the text first.

Which is why January 4th is currently blank.

But I figured out a way to fix that, and I’ll write a post about that as soon as I’ve done so.

Okay. That’s my Dumbass Mistake Number Too-Damn-Many. Continue on for the writing update for the second week of January.

So, I was doing fairly well on my writing last week, including maintaining my focus on one project (Tribunal)… right up until January 7th.

The best explanation I have is that I caught up with my internal storyteller, and the words just weren’t there. As of this writing, Tribunal is 37,688 words with a rough target of 96,250 (my standard writing target). I know where I want the story to go and end, but I haven’t had the realization of how I’m going to get there just yet.

As I write this, though, my internal storyteller just whapped me on the back of the head and informed me he is now ready to put more words into Tribunal.

I will do that once I finish this post, but I digress.

As you will see from the screenshot below, all of my January 8th writing went to Lynxeen (Shepherd Security Services #3). That happened because I hadn’t figured out what came next in Tribunal. But because I wanted to devote each month to a specific story, instead of accepting that I wasn’t ready to write more on Tribunal at that moment in time, I allowed myself to get sucked into a couple new-to-me stories… all under the guise of “taking a day off.”

You can see from the screenshot below what a slippery slope that was.

But! I’m back at my computer, and I have more words for Tribunal and (possibly) Lynxeen.

So, I’m going to go write them.

Hope the days treat you and yours well. Stay safe out there.