Did I mention I was hacked? Yup. Last month.

I got two texts from a fake Meta business account at 3:43 AM telling me “We think that someone may have accessed your Facebook account, so we’ve locked it to protect you.” At the same time, I got several emails purportedly from Facebook saying “We’re here to help.”

An hour later I got an email telling me “Your Facebook account has been permanently disabled.”

All while I slept.

I think the last one was, legit, from Meta, because my account has, indeed, disappeared.

The only “person” I’ve been able to talk to is an AI bot. ​According to the ​New York Time​s,​ “In March, Meta announced plans to hand more power to A.I. bots to decide which accounts to ban or harmful images to remove. Months later, the company ​laid off thousands of employees​, including those who did those jobs.”

Needless to say, I did not post harmful images on my account.

But there were three unauthorized Meta advertising charges on my PayPal. So yeah.

And the advertising charges are particularly weird, because Facebook banned me from advertising two years ago, because I wanted pay for an ad to offer my kids’ civil rights book as a fundraiser for the Equal Justice Initiative. They said it was “political,” presumably because of the scary buzz-words like “justice.”
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So no more Facebook ads for me.

Apparently someone else was allowed to buy them with my PayPal account, though.

In a way I feel peaceful. It’s freeing to be loosed from Facebook, with its collective meanness and orchestrated divisions.
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On the other hand, I have friendships I’ve maintained there over the last seventeen years.

And Facebook has also been one of the main ways I let new people know about my classes and developmental editing.
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So that part is a little scary.

Has this happened to you? What did you do? All the articles I’ve read about this have been a bit overwhelming, and for the moment I’m not spending my days arguing with a robot.

Instead, I’m thinking about other ways to find the writers I used to find on Facebook—and ways you might help me do that.

In the meantime, Labyrinth is growing. We’re having some terrific workshops and discussions with some truly amazing member writers—several of whom are well-published already.

I’d like to give you a taste of what we do.

I’m giving you access to Bare Bones Plotting, the first craft workshop I taught when I launched the current Labyrinth membership program.
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We start with a plotting method I learned from David Sheppard’s book Novelsmithing, beginning with a ridiculously simple three-word formula: X overcomes Y.

From there, we work through Sheppard’s five structural milestones and use them to find the underlying shape of a story.

If your novel has gotten tangled up—or you’re in revision and trying to see what you actually have so you can figure out where to go next—I’ve taught this method for years, alongside my own approaches, because it gives us a remarkably simple way to strip away all the complications and find the bones of a book.​
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It’s 48 minutes long—a practical, visual workshop that takes you step by step. This is one of the monthly craft workshops included in Labyrinth membership; I offer individual workshops to nonmembers for $97. But you can take this one free when you sign up here.

​Take Bare Bones Plotting Free​

And here’s the other reason I’m giving it away:

If you know a writer who could use it, would you share this link with them? Or post it wherever you hang out on social media?

Since apparently I no longer hang out on Facebook.
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