Two topics that don’t have anything to do with each other.
1) WordPress sites under attack.
At least for self-hosted WordPress sites (like this one), there’s a steady stream of spam activity. I moderate all comments, so no spam comments get through, but there is a steady stream of bogus users joining the site (I deleted around ten or twelve this morning), and from time to time I disable pingbacks on posts which are getting a lot of spam comments that way.
What I’m writing about now is not that. This is something different. I’m sure a lot of bloggers are aware of this already, but just in case…
Apparently there’s a massive attempt to crack WordPress sites (both self-hosted and at wordpress.com). Here’s links to articles from ArsTechnica, TechCrunch, and the BBC
This is not a scheme to post porn ads on your blog. This is an attempt to hijack the sever where your blog sits.
So, it seems generally agreed that if you’re a WordPress blogger you should:
- Make sure your user name is not “admin”
- Make sure you’re using a good password and
- For self-hosted WordPress sites, make sure the WordPress software is up to date.
2) Ideas come from here and there
It was interesting to read the post “A week of reading” over at writeafirstnovel. Martin talked about the negative aspects of reading material which is closely related to your own writing, and (as I talked about in my comment) I realized that I don’t have this experience.
First of all, I’m not boasting, and I don’t think this is any sort of achievement (and obviously it would be a huge drawback if I was aspiring to be professional).
And I’m certainly not saying that my ideas are all (or even mostly) original. Mostly I even describe the process here on the blog, as in this post about The Golden.
So, the characters all came from somewhere (and in most cases I know where), and even with the mystery stories I usually know what the inspiration was (one Ellery Queen, one Philo Vance, one John Dickson Carr…).
I’ve held back with saying where I got the ideas for Stevie One, but that’s only because I can’t talk about it without giving away a major plot point.
So, I know where most of the parts came from, but the whole doesn’t remind me very much of anybody else.
What about you? Do you know where the parts came from in your writing, and do you find (or have other people found) that the whole is similar to anyone else, either deliberately or not?
I had an old WordPress self-host blog that I had to change. I didn’t see any damage (that hadn’t been done previously already during a hack of my host years ago), thankfully. Right now I don’t use that blog, because it’s at an address that is named for some books that I’m not actively writing, right now.
As for #2: no one has ever told me, that I recall, that my writing reads strongly like anyone particular. But yeah, I draw a lot of inspiration from the past giants of my genre: both in what I think they did very well, and in what I think they did poorly.
Stephen: I don’t usually pass along this sort of Internet warning message — they often turn out to be bogus or wildly exaggerated — but this one arrived with pretty good provenance. I updated the WordPress version on all my blogs.