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My computer was hacked last week. I clicked on a link from a Russian I didn’t know well on Twitter. It was supposedly a YouTube video link in response to my recent YouTube videos. But it was a wicked, warty virus from the sleazy side of Computertown. It forced me to log into my Google Chrome account again as it downloaded spyware to capture my password. Once logged into my Google account, they could look at all my saved passwords. The potential for disaster was clear. I did not know how much control they had over my computer at the time, or what they were actually doing. So, I used my McAfee security program that I bought as a result of the previous hack by a disreputable security company to clean away the spyware and trackers. I then got a McAfee technician to remotely go in and find any lingering Trojan Horse viruses and eliminate them. It turned out that I had already eliminated all bugs with my initial cleaning. All that remained was to solve the revealed password problem. Which wasn’t hard. All my credit card accounts are closed due to bankruptcy. Those passwords were all useless to the stooges who were looking at them. I had a bank card password on the list, but it was the password previous to the current one. I changed it and stopped saving it on Google the last time I was hacked. There were a few other passwords to change, but there was no way for them to steal anything from any of those unless they want to pretend to be me on the nudist website I wrote blog posts for, though that is not linked to any possible payments or funds. I will know if they decide to post things for me. And who knows? Maybe they will join the nudist community online. I do know some Russian nudists from Twitter.

Hopefully, that puts an end to my bout of Russian computer flu. I hope you are taking precautions too. Google Chrome is NOT a secure place to store passwords. I learned that the hard way. Take the easy way and learn from my mistake, because the fakers will get you too eventually, and you don’t deserve to lose any money to criminals.

https://catchafallingstarbook.net/2015/04/04/comic-strips-can-make-me-cry/

This old word-wizard is having a spot of trouble with his magical tools. More than just the usual cussing at crazy computer antics too.

I like to move the cursor as I write with the mouse pad on the keyboard, rather than the actual mouse. And this preference often leads to unintended zooms and shrinks when my thumbs stray too close to the hyper-sensitive zoom spots on the edges of the pad.

My alternative theory is that the laptop became both sentient and crazy because I dropped it on its micro-chipped little head one two many times. It now likes to mess with me constantly because the tiny computer fairies that move its thoughts around inside its dented brain are vindictive and vengeful.

So, yesterday it got way worse. Some Russian hacker sent me a link in the messages section of Twitter. I clearly saw that supposed YouTube video link was fake with the word “account” embedded in it. But the fairies took over the mouse pad and clicked on the evil little bugger without me even touching it again.

To make a long story short, so to speak, my computer is now sick with Russian computer flu again, and my anti-virus program is locked in the 26th hour of a life-or-death struggle.

I swear, of course, that this is all true just as I said it. And hopefully I come through it with all my passwords still secret. I am too old to be doing wizard war via computer. It makes me long for the old days of wands and potions. I had to write this post on my phone today.

When you make the mistake of admitting to others that you are a writer, they immediately assume you know things that are kept secret from “normal” people. For instance, they will simply assume that you can tell them where you get your ideas for writing. Well, I am fairly sure that I got the idea for this post from watching a YouTube video in which the Master, Neil Gaiman, says that every author has a joke answer for that one with enough sarcastic wit in it to punish the asker with public humiliation.

I asked the dog if she knew any jokes like that which I could use to prepare for someone asking me that question in public. She said, “You could tell them that your family dog tells you what to write every day.”

“No,” I said, “people would never believe it.”

“Well, it is supposed to be a joke. But you are right. No one would ever think you were actually smart enough to write down what a dog tells you.”

“Yes, it’s a good thing for me that you know how to speak in English. I could never translate and transcribe Barkinese.”

So, I began thinking of where some of my best ideas came from.

Dreams

Some of my stories come directly from dreams that I had. The nightmare about being chased down a street in Rowan at midnight by a large black dog with red eyes was an actual dream I had in the 1970s. So was the nightmare of the werewolf climbing out of the TV during a late-night viewing of Lon Chaney in The Wolfman.

Those two dreams together were the start of the story that became my recently published novel, The Baby Werewolf. Both dreams visit the protagonist in the story I wrote almost as if they were his dreams and not actually mine.

Events

Snow Babies, the best novel I have ever written, was based on two different blizzards I experienced, first as a child in the 1960’s, and then again as a high school kid in the 1970s. Each blizzard involved being snowed in for a week at someone else’s house. As a child, I was stuck at Grandpa’s farm place until the snow plows could finally do their work and open the gravel roads. As a teen, I was stuck in Great Grandma’s retirement apartment near the high school in Belmond.

That novel also is based on the next source of ideas;

Characters

I can’t think of any story I have written that isn’t based on real people I have known in one way or another. Valerie in the novel above is based on three different girls I have known or taught. One of those three is my own daughter. The four orphans on the bus in that story are all boys from my junior high classes in the 1980s.

Lucky Catbird Sandman, the hobo who wears the quilted coat of many colors, is based on the poet Walt Whitman, whom I knew well in a past life, and my own shiftless, storyteller self. Some characters are just so key to a story idea that they themselves are the reason for a book to exist.

In conclusion, the dog doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. None of these things are really where I get my ideas. But I am out of time. I will have to write about the bottle imp another day. No, really. A magical imp trapped in a bottle. You can make one of those give you ideas for novels with only a slight risk to your life and soul.