Wednesday 27 March 2024: Hack attack!

At first I couldn’t remember what I’d done at all on Tuesday morning…and then it all came back to me.

After 2 very early starts for me, which included putting real people clothes on and going out, I was really quite tired. I chose to be kind to myself and let myself have a nice, leisurely, relaxed start to the morning, and then the $h!t really did hit the fan.

I made the mistake of checking my emails. The first one, right at the very top, was an alert from Stripe saying they’d blocked what they deemed to be a fraudulent payment. It wasn’t someone trying to take money out of my Stripe account, though. It was someone trying to pay money in. And it was only 99p. But Stripe thought it was fraudulent and when I checked the email address, I was inclined to agree with them.

So I blocked the user and marked the payment as failed. And that was that, or so I thought. The next email down was one from WordPress, telling me that I’d sold a book. There was nothing I could do with that one. But the next one down, also from WordPress, told me there was a new registered user. And I hadn’t registered anyone.

Well, I removed and blocked the new user, changed my password, and started to do some maintenance on my WordPress, removing any plugins or themes that weren’t active.

And then I saw it. One of the book selling plugins allows users to register themselves. I don’t know what that means to the selling aspect, but I deactivated it. Time will tell if I need to do something more, but already I’m looking at Shopify to see if it’s worth me paying for the starter package there. I assume Shopify will have more of its own security.

If the books page disappears, you know I’ve really had cold feet and removed it completely. Or at least hidden it while I decide what to do. And that, my friends, took up much of what was already a short morning.

It really knocked me out of sorts, though, and made me think I’ve got a bit too complacent in my old age.

I did do some work on THE LAST PIRATE OF PENZANCE, and I liaised with one of the blokes who started Plottr, telling him I hadn’t had a response to my ticket yet. He asked me how I reported the bug, and I told him, but he hasn’t replied to that yet either, and nor has support responded to my reminder email. If I don’t hear anything by dinner time today, I’ll raise a new ticket.

For the rest of the day I faffed. And that was it. I didn’t even do today’s blog until this morning. The poet went to work but came home early. He’s okay, but the pain is starting to kick in a bit now in his jaw, like a bruise coming out. He still managed to make a nice prawn linguine for tea, but he only wanted ice cream for pudding.

My learning this week

I haven’t done very much learning this week, but I did do some.

Writing Mastery Academy
On Thursday, I revised the last 2 steps of WRITE A BESTSELLING NOVEL IN 15 STEPS, back to back. This was as far as I’d got on the course when I started it last year. I was quite happy to see that everything I’m supposed to do for these 2 steps, if I want to follow the plan, is already done.

On Monday, I started Step 6 and made some notes, but I didn’t do the exercise because I’d already done that part of the process too. I watched Step 7, and the same thing happened. I must have paid attention when I was reading the book, SAVE THE CAT WRITES A NOVEL. I have no idea of the percentages or the word-counts of where the story should be, but at least the story is keeping up with the plan.

I didn’t do anything on Tuesday.

Plan for today

Because we break up tomorrow for a week, I’ve moved some jobs to the other side of the holiday. The plan for today doesn’t look like a lot, but I do still have a lot of work to do on THE LAST PIRATE OF PENZANCE, and I want to submit that one if I can by the end of tomorrow. If I’m almost there, but not quite finished, I have no aversion to finishing it and submitting it by Sunday either, which is the actual deadline.

The plan for today, then, in order of importance, looks like this:

• ELVIS IS MISSING (12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS)
• THE LAST PIRATE OF PENZANCE
• weekly scan
• weekly backup
• tomorrow’s blog

What’s on your schedule for today?