It turns out that if one forgets to update one’s Wordpress installation, saucy little link-farmers running exploit scripts will look upon one’s mostly-dormant blog as fertile ground. I’ve just gone back and peeled hidden links out of half my old posts. Feh. (If you read this blog via RSS, you might still be able to see the “hidden” links at the bottom of the post that appeared earlier this morning, which was also generated by the link-farmers, not by me. I’ve deleted that post on the blog.) All should be fixed and safe now, I hope.

I guess this is a sign that I ought to update more regularly. (And remember to upgrade Wordpress on occasion.) I haven’t been doing much writing lately; hardly any fiction or non-fiction that isn’t graduate-school-related, and only a short paper for a class, in addition to work on my prospectus notes. Mostly I write email: to patrons at the Ransom Center, answering research queries, to other eComma team members, to my parents and friends. I wrote the short paper last week, and it was the hardest paper I’ve written in a while — not because the topic itself was difficult to tackle (although that’s true) but because, as I’d just discovered, the migraine preventative drug I’m taking was affecting my ability to write and to speak. It was weird. “Difficulty finding words” doesn’t express the strangeness of losing the word for “roof tile” when you’re trying to describe your house to a friend on the phone. By a week and a half ago, the verbal block was happening at least ten times a day.

By next Wednesday, I’ll be off that preventative completely. I can find a lot of words to describe how happy I feel about it, but most of them are dirty.

Anyway, I promise — promise! — to be back soon to write about what I’m doing this summer and why I’ve added links to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and HASTAC to my blogroll. Also, there will be probably be cat pictures. Just fair warning.