Word count: 5473 | Since last entry: 2360
800+ words yesterday, 1500+ words today. Of course, I spent all day today on those 1500 words, not like Some People who can whip out 2500 words in an evening after work. But it’s still been a good productive day and I hold out some hope I can finish the story tomorrow.
I did find a way to work in the necessary backstory. My protagonist is a real Baen/Analog hero, a hard-nosed practical guy, but he’s also emotionally damaged in a way that will pin him to the wall at the climax… which is coming very soon now, I think. The biggest remaining problem is how to set it up in such a way that his choice at the climax makes emotional sense for him. (Some writers would just wind him up and see what choice he makes on his own. My characters aren’t that self-actualized, unfortunately; they only do what I tell them to.)
In addition to the writing, today we did grocery shopping, cooked dinner (curried green beans and eggplant, using some pico de gallo we had on hand for some of the tomatoes, garlic, and spices — it worked pretty well, but we neglected to compensate for the lime juice that was already in the salsa when adding lemon juice and it came out pretty darn tart), and took in a movie (An Inconvenient Truth — a well-made and rather hopeful documentary, despite its serious topic, but on top of this week’s rape of the Constitution I found it a bit of a downer). And now I’m going to bed before midnight, because I’m tired.
Oh, one more thing. I dealt with a storm of over 7000 bounce messages caused by some spammer who used various made-up names at osfci.org as his forged return address — and that’s not counting the unknown number of messages that didn’t bounce (probably tens of thousands). It would have been even more except that I got my ISP to turn off the “catchall” email forwarding in the middle of it. This was the second such storm this week, and it was over four times as big as the first one.
This spam storm and its resolution has three possible consequences for you, the reader of this blog: 1) If you ever send mail to some random address at osfci.org or orycon.org (e.g. programming@orycon.org) on the assumption that it will magically reach the appropriate person, you can stop that now. It used to be that I would receive such mail, sigh, and manually forward it to the appropriate person. Now such messages will bounce or vanish silently. 2) If you sent me an e mail today and didn’t receive a reply, there’s a possibility it got mixed in with the flood of spam and deleted — please resend. 3) If you are a mail administrator, please don’t bother bouncing obvious spam back to the From: address, as it’s almost certainly forged, and will do nothing other than annoy some innocent third party.
I hates spammers, I hates them to pieces.
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