Nothing like shooting yourself in the foot

How I deleted my SubStack, lost all of my posts and subscribers...

This is an embarrassing confession and I’m putting it out there so that the folks who might have had me as their subscriber and the folks who had subscribed to my publication (All Stitched Up) with the YELLOW door of my studio in its header, just might be able to find me again. I will send out an email to all those who had already subscribed that I firmly know about. But the recovery of many years of blog posts that I had migrated over from my WordPress blog, a veritable archive of my life from 2011 on, well—that might be gone. Unless I can use the WayBackMachine? Hmmm… For the rest of you—please learn from my mistake! Here’s what happened.

I was busy going from one device to another, toggling between screens and tabs, and for some reason saw an account with my email address not correct— “@ma.com,” not “@mac.com” and my profile photo was missing as well! So I (rashly) thought I had made an error and deleted the account—Yes, I was absolutely certain—and pressed the f*cking button. Pouf! my SubStack publication, my subscriptions, my subscribers, everything… gone.

Sylvia from the “special ops” SubStack Support team confirmed my worst expectations but says she will be able to reinstate my paid subscriptions and I have screenshots of all of them so, those of you who were free subscriptions, I will get back to seeing you soon… as soon I finish this glass of wine and can deal with reconstruction. The paid ones should be back with me before HCR can publish her next Letter from an American. All be well.

On to better news and more to the point, I am currently helping my husband, Robbie (singer, songwriter, raconteur and writer) set up his own SubStack and YouTube channel. That’s really how I ended up in this mess. You would think that someone who was coding on the web back when it was gray, wall-to-wall, and images took 5 minutes to download, would KNOW better.

You can check out this migration and transition by going either to his old website or by going to his new SubStack, which, admittedly, doesn’t have much more than a promise of what’s to come at the moment, but if you are interested in following our progress, please subscribe. We’re hoping to schedule a post a week with a song for his songbook archive starting in August. Each post will have the lyrics, genre, creation date, album (if recorded on vinyl/cd), and the backstory or context. We’re excited about it and looking forward to pulling it off. He has a lot of songs—it will take a year, at least, to post them all.

When I’m not doing that, I will be working on recreating what I can of what I had, largely for me, my family and friends, especially those that I don’t see often because they/we are so far away. And… knitting and quilting and gardening. And maybe I’ll eventually get around to that book about the old gramophone records I researched back in the 2010s. Shooting myself in the foot indeed! One might even think it a little Freudian.

Thanks for hanging in there with me… if you find me again. Message me if you do.

OH! And if you kept my newsletters, forward one back to me so maybe I can recreate some of what I have lost. I’m aware that there are some people who don’t delete anything in their emails—you know who you are :)