Today is ANZAC DAY in Australia. It’s the 25th of April, in case my North American friends are wondering. As ever, we rose before dawn to join in the solemn commemoration of the service and sacrifice of Australian and New Zealand men and women defence personnel, inspired by those who fought at Gallipoli in 1915, and honouring all those who have served in subsequent war and peacekeeping operations. We are privileged in the village in which I live, to have among us, an Army Chaplain, a Royal Australian Navy serviceman, a Royal Australian Air Force servicewoman, an Army National Service man (a “nasho” drafted for service in Vietnam), and a “Skippy” one of the civilian “Skippy Squadron” QANTAS crew who flew a total of over 600 charter flights from Australian to Vietnam return in the years 1965-1972.

I have written many times before about this significance of this day. Should you wish, you can read here, here and here. Plus several others, if you type in searches on my website.

My next comment is going to sound ultra banal in comparison. Honestly, I can’t even believe I am writing this switch in tone. Obviously, I am very wobbly at this time of the evening.

Rather than tackling the heights of forbidding coastal mountainous terrain in Gallipoli, I attempted to take on WordPress. About 18 months ago I thought it would be a good idea to combine my Wix Website with my WordPress Blog. I’ll stand by that decision, but the result was very untidy and in need of a lot of housekeeping. With the imminent launch of my debut historical novel, Louisa, the pressure was on to attend to that. And since I’d not only been up since 5am, but phone calls, emails and other distractions almost disappear on this special day, that meant, today’s the day.

Why tackle this myself rather than hire a website designer? Because for we “little” authors – which is actually the bulk of us out there – it becomes a cost-benefit exercise. How many books do we need to sell to pay for the site to look professional, and, once it does, how many more books will that sell? (I can’t even believe I’m writing this on ANZAC day. Clearly, being up since 5am is addling my brain.)

For those wonderful people who have been following and commenting on my blog for many years, I’m sure you’d continue reading and commenting even if the presentation was all over the shop. And one of the reasons I took time out for this exercise is so I can properly showcase the magnificent review fellow blogger Derrick J Knight has given for Louisa, an Historical Novel. Stand by for the grand reveal!

The other reason is that we missed ANZAC Day last year. Why, you ask? Because we were in the United States of America. For 7 weeks. S-E-V-E-N weeks. And I have only posted about the first week. I’ve left dear Don Ostertag hanging on a promise that our next day of touring would reveal something of particular interest to him.

So … coming up … watch me pull a rabbit out of the hat. Blogging about our USA holiday that happened twelve months ago, at the same time as promoting LOUISA, plus trying to continuously improve my website. This should be interesting … by the way, can anyone tell me how to reduce the width of the sidebar in WordPress? I’m using the Hemingway Theme.

Did someone say it’s bedtime?