I bet you were thinking I fell off the ends of the earth. Thankfully, the world is round, so no need to worry about that, right? I wouldn’t be too sure. This is 2020, after all.

(Sounds like an episode of The Twilight Zone, doesn’t it?)

I wish I could give a cool reason why I haven’t put out an update since May, but I have no such excuse. Especially since I’ve been stuck in my home since March (and still am). But it hasn’t been entirely uneventful.

Back in June, I got a message from a friend saying that when she tried to access my web site, it took her to some dubious online pharmacy. I immediately fired up my browser and entered the address, only to find it came up just fine. I thought this extremely odd since my friend is reasonably tech-savvy. So I dug deeper and found out to my horror—the site had been hacked. And the clever suckers made it so that if you entered the address directly, it brought up the site just as you would expect. But if you searched for my site using one of the popular search engines (like GOOGLE!), it redirected you to the malicious page instead of my site. To say I was upset was an understatement.

I immediately fixed the redirect but quickly discovered it was not going to stay fixed. Unfortunately, my webserver was so old, it had about a million ways to break into it. So to prevent further hacks, I needed to upgrade. And upgrading wasn’t a simple matter.  So I ended up getting a new server and moving my site over to it. This was not extremely difficult, but it did take quite a bit of time. The one upside to all this is that the new server allowed me to enable site security. So now, when you visit the site, you no longer get a warning about it being insecure.

Thankfully, the hackers haven’t prevented me from making progress on my next novel. I am just about done with the second draft of Assassin of Curses, which puts me a little ahead of schedule. If I can maintain my current pace, I expect to be done with this draft by the end of October. This puts me in a good spot for publishing in early 2021.

That’s assuming Godzilla doesn’t appear in the Pacific next month.

After all, it is 2020.