Is there a new virus…

Is there a new virus going around? The spam levels shot painfully up last night and are holding steady this morning. Yick. And I just got a telemarketing call -- I can't decide if phone spam or e-mail spam is more annoying. I wish they would just keep it all to snail mail spam. I can deal with that.

In other news, I revised a story yesterday, "The Emigrant". This is the one that I had revised, that was lost in the hard drive crash. It's satisfying, that I sat down and just dealt with it, and more satisfying, to have that missing piece back in place. I have three more stories to revise in the collection, and two more to write. Then I'll really have a full draft. It's exciting to be this close. Oh, a favor? If you're on the readers' list and have a chance to look at this story, can you tell me whether the ending seems clear to you? One poor reader wrote to me, quite bewildered, and I'm wondering if I was too opaque/oblique there, or if it was just her individual reading experience.

After writing, I went and joined my sister and some friends of hers for half-priced wine at The Tasting Room, on Randolph. Nummy. I only had one glass, of a muscat, but it was very good, fruity and not over-sweet. A very nice accompaniment to the bit of chocolate fondue I sampled. Kevin estimates that was about 500 calories; it's a good thing I still had that saved up! Apparently chocolate fondue generally has cream and butter in addition to the chocolate, to make it melt well. Dangerous food...but oh, so tasty.

I'm going to try to write the "Challah" story today, I think. This one is tricky, because I've written it before, a long time ago, and then I realized I wanted to do it as a novel, and then I wrote other short stories set in that relationship. But I do want to include one of their stories in this book, and probably it'd be the story of their meeting. I've been mulling it in the back of my head for a week or so; I need to mull a bit more before writing. Hopefully I'll get enough mulling done to be able to spend today writing. That'd be good.

5 thoughts on “Is there a new virus…”

  1. There’s an email worm. It caused my inbox to multiply fivefold this morning. I also had to update Norton so it would kill it. Symptoms are messages with the subject lines of just “test” or “HELLO” that contain .zip or .pif files (your mailer may also gripe about these files as they contain nonstandard material and some mailers don’t want to forward them, so I’ve been getting just as much mailer-gripe as successful mail).

  2. I find it obscurely comforting in these situations to know that I’m on a Mac using Pine and thus am not actually contributing to the problem. I guess we just ride it out. Sigh.

  3. Susan Marie Groppi

    And it’s making me cry.

    No, it’s not, it’s just disheartening, getting all this bounce-message crap, since a lot of virus mails are going out with fake @strangehorizons.com headers. sigh.

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