Lynne Simpson

This year, I’ve been having a lot of “Doh!” moments. One of them was realizing that the alchemical correspondences in my fantasy series had a HUGE flaw in the way I’d aligned the elements of Air and Spirit. I’ve had to rearrange the order of the books, which meant putting a story that’s only a detailed outline in the second slot and moving a much closer to done book to the end of the series. Ouch.

But hey, I do have some time to get book #2 finished, and when I’m on a roll like I am now, things cook right along. I’m not worried. Mostly, I’m amused that I REFUSED to see this mismatch for so long. It was more convenient to put a closer-to-baked book right after the first one, so I just kept plugging away, vaguely aware all along that something wasn’t right.

I had another “Doh!” — probably also “Duh!” — moment this week. I’ve realized that I work much better with fixed, limited writing time. If I tell myself I’m going to write for, say, two hours on weekdays and four hours on Saturday and Sunday, then all I have to do is fulfill my commitment to myself, and after that, I am free to do whatever I want, including absolutely NOTHING. When I don’t set myself hours goals, I tend to feel bad about any so-called free time I don’t spend writing. What kind of life is that? :-)

I’ve tried setting page count goals, but for some reason, that doesn’t work as well for me. Picking a window of time during which I will write about *something* is typically enough to do the trick. Most of the time, I’ll end up meeting or even exceeding whatever page count goals I would’ve set, anyway. And then when I’m done, I can go watch History International or read a magazine or whatever — and not feel bad at all. :-)

Of the decade, even. While reading an excellent article on why a writer needs an agent, I ran across this quote:

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

Ain’t THAT the truth. I could come up with enough examples from both my careers to fill a hundred blog posts. But I won’t. :-)

Ever since we opened the pool in mid-May, we’ve been swimming anywhere from five to seven days a week — even in the rain! Today, we had rain AND fog, but there we were, swimming away. As long as the thunder only occurs every ten minutes or so, we’ll still keep going.

Why?

Frankly, I think we’re addicted. It’s great exercise, which is something two computer jocks like us sorely need. And it’s fun. (Sometime I’ll post about our Pride and Prejudice quotation game, aka Pool and Prejudice.)

I even bought SHOES for swimming. Who ever heard of that? Not me. But these things really do add a lot of resistance, which makes workouts much more productive. Swimming laps isn’t quite as fun when I’m particularly tired, though, because it feels like no matter how hard you kick, you just may not make it back to the shallow end. My reward right before I get out of the pool is to swim a few laps without the shoes on. :-)

If you ever get a chance to try swimming or aqua aerobics as a regular workout, I highly recommend it. I do a combination of both, with some ballet and kick boxing exercises thrown in. I’ve only lost maybe seven pounds since I started, but I’m much more fit overall, which is what I was hoping for.

Okay, so he’s the equivalent of 40-something years older than I am, but wow. I totally have a crush on this guy, even though he has a weird habit of chewing the corners off my books!

You’d think a person with more than twenty years’ experience in the computer biz wouldn’t be foolish enough to download and install applications from untrusted sources, but sometimes even those who ought to know better get distracted by shiny, pretty graphics. Oh, the humiliation. :-)

I’ve been working on my pseudonyms’ web sites lately to get them ready before any submissions go out, and I followed a bunch of links to various WordPress template sites. Some of the themes were absolutely gorgeous and captured just exactly the kind of mood I was hoping to create, so I happily downloaded them and applied them to my sites.

Stupid.

Very stupid.

The prettiest templates I downloaded had seriously nasty hostile code embedded in the footer.php file. And how did I find this out? Hitting the sites from somewhere other than home. I usually don’t set up my personal security software to filter that kind of thing, but that’s not the case for everyone, certainly not corporations.

Now what do you suppose would’ve happened if I’d left that code in there and an editor who was reviewing one of my manuscripts tried to hit the site from her office? Her corporate web filtering software would’ve blocked my site, and the same thing may have happened when she tried to hit it from home, the library, or Starbucks.

Zoinks.

Lesson learned? Only download WordPress templates from trusted sites, like the WordPress Theme Directory. They automatically reject any themes that contain weird code like I found in footer.php. Still, it doesn’t hurt to take a quick browse through your theme files, even if you don’t know PHP. Any long strings of characters inside parentheses (basically a huge encrypted string passed to a function call or nested function calls) is probably a sign that the template designer is trying to do something sneaky, and you’d be well advised to steer clear. Pay particular attention to anything like base64_encode.