Ack!

Arggh! Yeesh! @#!!

I'm in the middle of full-on edit angst attack.

The book was supposed to have been sent to the formatter a week and a half ago, right before my vacation started. I planned to use that week to paint, putter, and relax. Instead I spent said vacay in front of the computer, progressing word by word through the long manuscript.

And then I got hit by a hacker scam.

Folks, if your Internet suddenly freezes and you get a message from the browser company telling you that an Error 333 has happened, and that WHATEVER YOU DO, don't turn off the browser or your computer, or you may lose EVERYTHING... And that their support team operates 24/7 and will help you; here's their number...

Just force quit out of the browser. Proceed as usual. Maybe get some new anti-virus software.

"First Choice Tech Support" is a scam operation, according to all I could Google about it. There were a few places that said they were a ransomware site. They seemed legit enough to me, and it scares me that I was taken in so easily, when I've easily seen through so many scams before.

Anyway, I contacted the CC company (they've sent me a new card), deleted everything on my HD, and rebooted from my backup (which amazingly I had made just a few days before). Unfortunately, I lost 3 days' of vacation work on the book.

But wait—Dropbox (where I store my wips) has its own backups. Sure enough, there it was. Hadn't lost a keystroke, yay!

But I'm still editing. No time to do a real blog. Current schedule is to get the book to the formatter Friday or Saturday. He could take up to a week to get things done, but fingers crossed: next week's blog will reveal my latest novel!

Hope to see you then. In the meantime, protect your computer with a good anti-virus program. Make a backup now.