This year, I blew up my website. While loading a new page at four in the morning, I pushed the wrong button and everything vanished.

I couldn’t blame anyone, it was my fault. My fault, too, that I didn’t have access to any available backups. Thankfully, I did have coffee, a cuddly poodle, and – somewhere unseen and halfway round the world – an incredibly kind tech support person who very patiently stayed on our text chat and fixed what they could at their end.

By sunrise, my website had been restored to what it had been… when I redesigned it, three years ago.

Everything I’d added since then was lost.

Which was fine. I was grateful to have the site back in any form, to be honest. And I did what I ought to have done in the first place: I called my wise friend Kate MacIntosh, who despite being stranded in an airport connected me with our equally wise friend Crystal Hunt, who immediately took me in hand and went about Fixing Things.

Some things are easier to fix than others, of course. All the blog posts that were lost here need to be re-entered manually, and that will take me time.

But whenever I sit down to begin a new book, those blank pages in front of me are filled with endless possibilities, and this adventure with my website has been just the same.

Because starting over here has let me do one thing that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – set up a newsletter, so we’ll have a better way to stay in touch beyond this website, whenever I have things I want to share with you.

That might be information on a new book release or a sale that’s going on, or a behind-the-scenes peek at the book I’m writing now.

Feel free to use the purple bar above (or on any page of my website) to sign up for More to the Story – I’ll try to share only the good stuff!

And meanwhile, my thanks for your patience while I work to restore order here on the blog.