I've spent most of the evening dealing with a catastrophic computer failure. Kablewie. I didn't lose any fiction, fortunately -- I back that stuff up pretty regularly -- but all my saved e-mail is gone, gone, gone.

This is relevant, and annoying, for several reasons. A couple of weeks ago I sent out a slew of responses to Star*Line submissions, including lots of acceptances. I now have no record of the poems I accepted. So if I recently accepted a poem from you for Star*Line, drop me a line, and send me another copy of the poem(s) I accepted.

Also, if I accepted fiction or non-fiction from you for Flytrap #2, please re-send me your story/article. I have hard copies of that stuff, at least, but I'd rather not have to key it in again by hand. I'll be sending e-mail to all the contributors over the next couple of days, but if you happen to read this, and have a moment, go ahead and re-send your stuff to timpratt@sff.net. Sorry for the inconvenience. But believe me -- it's more inconvenient for me.

On the bright side, we just got DSL, and it's all zippy-fast and lovely, though I haven't set it up on Heather's computer yet. The DSL is the reason I contracted the malware that crashed my computer, though -- I got the high-speed connection turned on late last night, and didn't bother setting up the firewall right away, and at some point during my surftravaganza a nasty virus got into my system and started changing settings and provoking cascading crashes all willy-nilly. Sucks, but it's my own fault, just as it's my own fault for not backing up everything more regularly. Ah, well. Lesson learned, I guess, and it could have been a lot worse.