As of 5:03 pm EDT, 21 Nov 2016, 2040 words for the day, 39,710 for the month, 109,168 total for the book. That puts me very close to the 40,000- word mark for the month.
I freely confess that, in recent days, I have been bailing out for the day as soon I realize I am over 2,000 words. Part of it is the brain gets tired, part of it is that I have other things to do, and part of (a smallish part) is that if I leave the story when I still have some words in my head, those words will sort of marinate overnight, and be there to get me jump-started the next day.
Today, though, something else had me just a tad rattled. I normally have my main computer’s speaker output hooked up to headphones so that the noise won’t bother anyone in the next room. (Usually there IS no one there, these days, but force of habit has left me doing it that way anyway.) Usually I don’t have the phones on. Some time after I had looked something up on the Internet, I head a faint voice from the phones. I put them on and heard something to the effect “– if you do not, we will have no choice but to encrypt your –” but by the time it had gotten to that point, I had found the hidden-under-everything-else web page from which the audio was coming and closed the window. I did a software eject and pulled the thumb drive with my book on it, disconnected my two network drives, disconnected the computer itself from the Internet and immediately started running Windows Defender. It is still running (and I am on another computer running another operating system, thank you very much) and last I checked it hadn’t found anything. I also popped up the Windows task manager and the start-up control menu and killed, uninstalled, or deactivated anything I wasn’t sure of.
Since I didn’t hear the full dread warning, and I closed the web window damned fast, I am not sure what the hell it was, but I think it was either a spoof page pretending to be ransomware, or an actual ransomware page. (Ransomware either locks up your computer, or else encrypts all the data on it, and then demands you make a payment to get your computer or files back. Sometimes the baddies actually do release your stuff, and sometimes they don’t. In any event, it was a disconcerting moment. I *think* i am okay — but we’ll see. A spot check of files on the computer in question shows I can still open stuff and nothing is scrambled. That, I hope is a good sign.
More fun tomorrow.
(PS — this post about how I stop writing after 2000 words runs to just about 450 words! Oh, well.)
(PPS –further research makes me at least hopeful that it was just a sleazy scam, and NOT actual ransomware. Boy, are there jerks out there. )