Something Knitty

I avoid reading my spam as much as possible. Don’t we all? Gmail very conveniently dumps suspicious mail in the spam folder before I ever lay eyes on it, and mostly I ignore it. But, you know, every once in a while a non-spammy message ends up in there, so I skim the messages every few days to catch wayward messages.

I zip down the list of names and subjects. Most of them are unintelligible, garblings of drug and sex enhancement products, but every once in a while a creative spammer will have a catchy subject line. I don’t mean catchy as in commercial-jingle catchy or gross catchy. I mean that they do something a little different.

One style of message pastes in a bit of a news article or headline into the subject line. I guess they’re trying to fool us into thinking that someone has sent us a news article to read. These aren’t particularly interesting to me, but they do tend to stand out.

The style that I really like is the random list of words subject line. These are often like monkey-poetry. A random list of words that somehow come together in a lovely juxtaposition. More than once, one of these listy little gems has inspired a character or scene in my writing.

So, if you’re lost and looking for a smidge of inspiration, take a skim at your spam subjects. You never know what you might find.

Oh yeah, NaNo Day 1: 3500 words.