One of those great dawns — cloudless, peach-colored, pellucid. (See the Geoclock image over on the right for how dawn looked from above Ireland today. The one underneath it is the same view close to the winter solstice.) Absolutely silent outside: it’s still a little too early for the rooks and other birds in the area (robins, blackbirds, wrens) to start up the usual racket.
No, I tell a lie. The resident ravens have just started commenting quietly on something, from up on Castle Hill to the east. 
(There’s no castle there, by the way; as far as we can tell, there never was one. It’s just what that hill is called, locally.) Peter and I grinned at each other when the ravens moved in up there a month and a half ago: for ravens featured prominently in The Ring when we wrote the last draft. (They’re used as cellphones, sort of.) It was just after the ravens arrived that we got the call from our production partners in Münich to tell us that things were moving forward — that a major US studio was on board, and that a director with good TV-movie experience was finally in the process of being attached. Next week we go in to see our partners, meet the director, and hammer out what needs to be done for the rewrite.
In the meantime, when I’m not writing, I’m doing laundry for the trip. The shirts I hung out on the clothesline yesterday afternoon and left there overnight are presently stiff with frost; as soon as they thaw out a little, I’ll bring them in and start ironing. At the moment, though, I have an hour or so to have a little breakfast, catch up on the e-mail, and kill some more spam.
— A thought in that regard: I’m having good results with a program called MailWasher. Our most public address now gets about 200 spams a day from every corner of the planet. I’ve been using SpamCop on it for a long time, but for whatever reasons, I seem to be getting better results with MailWasher. The program looks at your mail server, identifies whatever mail is sitting on it as spam, possibly spam, probably spam, virus-contaminated, or normal. You can then check the mail (without downloading it) to see what it is, and use a series of check boxes to determine what to do with it: clear it, nuke it, bounce it back to sender. I really believe I’m seeing a little less spam than I was previously. We’ll see.
Right now, though, I want some tea…
