Who you gonna call?

Do-It-Yourself is great, until you get in over your head.

When I was updating “plug-ins” on The Horsey Set Net, the blog crashed. When I returned to the blog’s WordPress dashboard, a white screen of error messages confronted me. I logged off and rebooted the computer, only to see the same error message.

Fellow writer and blogger Denise Alicea answered my hails to my writer groups. Denise also respected my plucky if foolhardy self-reliance (my words, not hers) and gave me tips on how to fix things.

Behind the scenes

While I blundered through repairs on the files on the site’s web host, I had no more access to the horse blog dashboard. So, no blog updates were posted from the US Thanksgiving until just after early February.

During those weeks, while I dreaded and noodled under the blog’s hood, I did holiday things and worked on my first novel. I’m happy to say I “housebroke” the first draft and took it into the “sit & stay” stage.

Then, we lost our most senior kitty who began failing the day after Christmas. Just after New Year’s, we had a house call vet come to ease her transition, after which my husband MacGuyver and I both promptly got sick.

I kept trying some DIY work on the crashed blog, but I was spending a lot of time dizzy from spinning in the technical learning curve.

Finally, I accepted my technical limitations and emailed Denise to please, please, save my stubborn tush.

You can read more about it on my horse blog. Before you settle in to read, you might want to play AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” especially that first guitar riff, to enhance the experience.

What’s not in that blog post

I spent those two months of downtime wondering if the whole horse blog crash wasn’t a sign.

A lot of writers have left blogging for other projects, or simply gave up and surrendered to the popularity of Facebook. Contemporary conventional wisdom about writers blogging is that, if you can’t keep to a regular schedule, don’t bother.

The thing is, I have fiction to finish. I also have other non-fiction to explore. I wouldn’t mind writing something someone else will deem worthy of publication.

Still, while I dithered and sniffled during the early winter, I felt terribly guilty about letting down the horse blog’s loyal readership.

When people are reading, it’s not only yours anymore.

Many readers of The Horsey Set have been commenting or emailing me since Day 1, way back in the summer of 2008, just before the Beijing Olympics.

Even if the horse blog had run its course, I didn’t want it to end in unexpected, frozen silence. Many of those readers are friends or have become friends thanks to the horse blog.

Thank you!

So far, this blog’s readership is smaller, but it also hasn’t been in existence as long the horse blog.

You guys may not comment much here, but y’all email me or talk to me face2face at writer’s conferences. Thank you so much, even just for reading.

I don’t want to post here regularly just to post something, anything. I don’t think you want that, either.

Thank you, again, Denise, for bailing me out!