Well, damn. I really should have known better. I’ve been online since 1998, and the fact that a seemingly perfect woman messaged me out of the blue should have raised at least one tiny red flag. Three emails later, I finally decided to google her, and lo and behold – it turned out that “she” is a foreign (Nigerian?) scammer that’s been sending out identical emails for years. Apparently, at some point “she” asks for some money in order to confirm that the rube is serious about their relationship.

I don’t want to say I dodged a bullet because, well, if a stranger (even a pretty, almost perfectly compatible one) asked me for money, I would have put that person on ignore right away. Still, though – the truth hurts. (When doesn’t it, though?) Overall, it was a fun experience: for a couple of days I actually felt quite happy, hopeful and optimistic. While day-dreaming about my improbably perfect penpal, I also did some brainstorming and came up with a pretty neat idea on making a small fortune off Kindle books (and Nook books, and Sony e-reader books, and Apple books, and so on). The plan is to flood the e-book market with an unholy number of books priced so low that my competitors wouldn’t be able to, well, compete. Who knows, it just might work… If I spend all my free time working on this project and actually finish it, it might make me famous (and/or infamous), cementing my status as the ultimate shameless opportunist.

I’m not sure if I would have stumbled on this idea had I not been inspired by my fake Internet muse, so I’m dedicating the project Plunder Q to that creative spammer. Time to get to work…