Grrgle

Since every other blogger tries to come up with an ambiguous title for each blog post, I thought I'd better do the same.

Just over 900 words tonight. Not great, but not bad. I've been working on what had been a plot blockage, that was solved by Mitch Wagner's excellent suggestion. So progress is being made.

Lots of stress and extra work connected with the day job right now, which doesn't help with writing fiction. No doubt some writers react the other way to outside stress - by producing fiction at a furious pace, and benefiting from that emotionally. Unfortunately, I've never been like that. I need calm and peace and nice stuff. On the bright side, while I write, I've been listening to a classical music station in Johannesburg, South Africa over the Internet. That's the area I lived in before coming to the U.S., and it's nifty to hear that accent again and the local place names being mentioned. And to hear them pronounced correctly!

Another stress, and the explanation of this post's title, came from Google today. About a month ago, I signed up for Google ads and started adding the code to the pages of my Web site. That required much fiddling with the existing HTML and CSS to get the pages to look right with the ads added. The ads weren't earning much, but it was something, and it looked like it would cover my ISP bill, so it would be a net gain and would make all the work on the pages seem worthwhile in the long run. But today, I got e-mail from Google saying there had been invalid clicks on my page (implying that I've violated the user agreement by clicking on the ads myself, which I most certainly have not done), so they're killing my account. I appealed. They acted like Dubya Bush responding to an appeal from someone condemned to death when he was governor of Texas. I've been looking at posts online (in a Google group, ironically) from other people who've had the same thing happen to them. There are a lot of them.

Very upsetting.

The only revenge I can think of it to write a bestseller. Then they'll be sorry. Well, no, they won't care. But I won't care about them, either. I suspect that having a bestseller cures a lot of ills.