Dorienne's Log

I was almost completely duped by a phishing e-mail today. It was kind of scary because I clicked on the link and everything and probably would have gone through with the whole thing, if Firefox had not stepped in and saved me from my own stupidity.

I have an Amazon account and I received an e-mail that said Amazon.com and the “From” domain was amazon.com. The e-mail said that “Amazon” noticed that I had been logging in from a different IP address recently, which is what was got me to let my guard down a bit. I had been logging into Amazon from work because it sometimes helps out customers to walk them through things on the site, so when I saw this e-mail, I immediately thought Amazon had the same system set-up as Chase.com, where if you login from a random IP address, the site makes you verify your information first.

Thank God for Firefox, though. It wasn’t until my beloved browser flashed me a note saying that site looked…phishy…that I took better notice of the e-mail. The link provided in the e-mail, asking me to verify my information, actually did not go to site it proclaimed to be and after noting that the e-mail started “Dear Amazon Customer” instead of Dorienne Smith, I realized that the e-mail had been sent to a completely separate address than I use to log into Amazon!

I feel shakened that someone like me, who is normally so careful, could be duped so easily. I thought that I had checked all the safeguards: there was an Amazon.com logo in the e-mail and the “From” address was security @ amazon dot com, so I went for the link, albeit with some suspicions in mind, but I did click the link. I think what through me most was the fact that I had been signing in from different computers recently and I just let down my guard.

Oh well. I suppose that is why there is a need for “Constant Vigilance” when it comes to safeguarding information, but thank goodness Firefox is there to cushion my fall when my own ignorance seems to take hold.

Piggy-backing off of my YouTube milestone, I’ve hit a far more important one; two actually. This Tuesday past, I wrote my first 100,000 words in my novel Flight. Always the obsessive-compulsive writer, I actually narrowed down the 100,000th word…it was “felt” :). The second writing milestone was writing 200 pages worth of text. While the page count isn’t all that important because depending on how paragraphs flow and much of one page is simple dialogue, the hundred-thousand words most definitely is. Having no idea how big a book any word count would be, I compare everything to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as it is the only book that, for some reason, I’ve remembered its word count. OOTP is about 225,000 and the book is about 900 pages in the US, so I figure that I’ve written about nearly 400 pages, if Flight was ever a published novel. The idea of it just makes me laugh because I’m 400 pages into it and I’m only about a third of the way through the book. I know this thing is just going to be a beast.

The length of this book has got me thinking, though. I may end up being one of those Stephen King-ish, long-winded writers since the notes themselves for the novels are getting longer and longer. I guess I just have a lot to say, but I’m excited overall to see what others have to think about this, my first novel. My dream is that years from now, when I look back on my work, I’ll think to myself, “All the Newberrys notwithstanding, Flight was my first novel and therefore, will always be thought of as my greatest work.”