Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Making lemonade

How's this for a bright idea? I get loads of spam, I'm just not computer literate to know how to block it and I've had the same email account for over 5 years. Spam is annoying, it's intrusive, it's dodgy and there's never anything you actually want. But I've found a use for it. When I write one of the big problems I have is character's names, I really struggle to come up with decent ones. So I'll stop bothering and just use the names of the 'people' who spam me. There's some incredibly inventive names, I got an email from Prospero Purdam today, how cool is that? There's a story I started last year that calls for silly arcane, gutteral sounding names, there wasn't a Prospero in it, but it is now.

5 comments:

Danny said...

LOL! Use Jessica Rory. She's the lady who asked me the same question as Gopher was asked...

I think JG Ballard has a US phone directly and uses that for names. Always an interesting area that, where writers find names for characters.

Gopher said...

I think that's an excellent idea for names. I'm back to using a pseudonym for all of my work and that took enough effort to work out.

Danny said...

sorry... i meant 'Directory', not 'directly'... I'm my own spellcheck I suppose

paulhd said...

Arggh, spelling! My spelling and grammer suck at the best of times, throw blogging into the mix and you get that last sentence in my post, it should end 'but there is now.'
Spammers have some colourful names and I like the idea of taking something irritatingly useless and rubbish and forcing it to do something positive, seems like one in the eye for the spammer.... er, one in the eye sounds rather like a spam subject now I think about it.

paulhd said...

Insinuates? Jeez, the spam I get just comes straight out with, usally accompanied by a booming laugh and a slap across the back of my head... unless I'm just imagining that.