A Healthy (Healthful?) Mistrust

As I deleted another Spam e-mail with From indicating the United States Department of Justice, it occurred to me that these days suspicion has to be at the very top of instinctive reactions to almost everything, especially on the indispensable Internet.

It must follow that our (that is, most people’s) automatic responses to one another will eventually be tainted if it isn't already. The notion really frightens me. Somehow there has to be a way to recognize and accept the goodwill most of us have grown up to expect from our fellows. 

Will there be a kind of evolutionary process that over time develops the ability to tell the difference between honest and fraudulent, between Spam in life and genuineness? If not, we must despair of our future.

Imagine having the gall and the stupidity to call yourself The United States Department of Justice with a message saying the reader will receive a seven figure number of dollars when the necessary information has been forwarded! Thank heaven this Spammer/Phisher was so greedy and so cynical as to think the mere mention of that much money would entice some poor fool...

Caveat emptor once said it all, but now everyone with access to the Net has to be terminally suspicious all the time.

Conditional Cheers for Hi-tech

For anyone with a yen to exchange conversation and work with other writers, the Internet is a life saver. My cyber pals are virtually the only connection I have with people interested in writing what I want to write. I met another yesterday. Thanks to a publisher who followed through forwarding a comment I made about a poem I read on the Net, she wrote to me and even added another poem. I have writing friends scattered now in three countries: the US (of course), but also in France and now England. In fact, in the spring issue of an English journal I'll see a new poem of mine. Check out The Lowestoft Chronicle.

You may notice the new picture to the right. It's the cover for another short story out on www.bookstogonow.com, also available for Kindle and Nook. Maybe we can't hold these things and hug them the way I often have done with print on paper, but it's better than not being read at all! One of these stories has been published in a literary magazine, the other only online.

Technology, however, makes me more certain than ever that I don't want to let hard copy go. Some tiny electrical malfunction is all it would take to wipe out ten years' work! Paperless is a fine idea for some things, but I guess I haven't much faith in its ability to last.

Word processing has made writing so much easier, I'm afraid of using too many most of the time because it's so easy to change them, improve on them, and I lose the sense of how difficult or easy it is to read them. I'd never have finished more than a couple of stories, let alone some books, if it hadn't been for the boon the computer is to the compulsive rewriter. Still, it's probably a good idea to try to remember some of what we were taught decades ago.

I know one thing: even if I had Jane Austen's talent, I could never have written at a 2'x 3' table with a quill pen and finished half a dozen wonderful novels!