Archive for April 27, 2018

Bits and Pieces

First, a public service announcement: Be wary of “customer service” e-mails claiming to come from AT&T, telling you that you need to verify your e-mail address because of activity on your account, and telling you to call a particular number if you think there’s an error. That’s a scam, but it’s a really good one. The e-mail looks exactly like an AT&T e-mail, and if you look at the expanded headers to see where it’s really coming from, the domain names have “att” in them (though in a different format from the real thing, like “att-mail.com”). I was almost ready to think it might be legitimate, but thought I’d google the number you were supposed to call, and I got a string of sites reporting it as a scam, including a post on the AT&T customer service forums. So, if you get an e-mail like that from AT&T, call the number on your bill or on the AT&T site to check. Don’t click on the link to verify anything, and don’t call the number in the e-mail. Apparently, these same scammers do also call and claim to be AT&T, so don’t give information to someone who calls you. Say you’ll have to get back to them, and then call the number on your bill or on their web site.

Second, for the past ten or so years, I’ve been doing posts about writing every other Wednesday and then sending them out to an e-mail list. I took a break over the holidays and never went back to it, and no one seems to have noticed, at least, not that I’ve heard. Is this something that interests people? Does anyone care about the e-mail list? I’d kind of burned out on the schedule and was running out of things to say, and I was sidetracked by other things. I’ve been occasionally writing about writing when I feel inspired, just not on any kind of formal schedule, and I haven’t been e-mailing the posts.

Meanwhile, I have nearly ten years worth of posts. About five years ago, I put the ones I had at that time into a PDF “booklet” on my web site, but I’ve been thinking about compiling them into an e-book that I could distribute like I do my other books, probably with some cost involved, depending on the length of the book (but probably no more than 2.99). Would anyone be interested in getting all these posts about writing craft and business and writing life, in one handy e-book?

But first I have to finish the book I’m working on, and I’m so very close. I just need to figure out exactly what should happen at the end, since I’ve reached the “and then stuff happens” part of my outline and it needs to get more specific than that.