crackerjackjoe

09:20 pm: Nothing, nothing, nothing
Just because it was trendy, I got the DDR pad, but being too cheap to buy DDR, I set up StepMania. After tracking down device drivers, installing, troubleshooting, mapping keys, installing songs, finally I rested my fingers and let my son do the dancing.

He found it very frustrating to see each song end with "FAILURE!" It reminds me of the old computer errors: "FATAL ERROR! YOU'RE GONNA DIE WHEN YOUR BOSS SEES WHAT YOU DID TO THIS OH SO EXPENSIVE COMPUTER! NOW READ THIS HEX AND WEEP FOR YOUR SOUL! Error 0x34FA"

Also, today I learned a little about Blerg. It seems to be a purple monster with horns. Or a bad day. I'm not sure yet. Google wasn't sure either. Well, blerg it, I'm just going to use it as an expletitive.

Since santa brought me my digital camera, my next creative plan is to make a photographic comic book using comic book creator and the Gimp. Have I time to do this? Well, maybe if it gets me fired... My son's been putting together his Christmas legos and we've been taking pictures. It wasn't too hard to do close up shots once I read the manual. Like most lego comics artists, I'm going to have to use Gimp to add in the blood, guts and blerg.

In other news, Melissa submitted for CVS! A very good submission, too! I think all I contribute in the way of critique here is routine praise.

I've been sort of writing, if you can call jumbled blogging writing. I now have, count them, 1, 2, 3, 4,
active blogs. Soon I will be more famous than Robert Scobble! Well OK--a narrow group of geeks know who he is, and he's published a real dead tree book.

So, time for a quiz to see if you were paying attention or just skimming. What does blerg mean? Hmm? Louder? I don't think that is quite right--

FAILURE!

01:10 pm: What my cat would probably do at the library.

07:12 pm: I actually wrote 797 words!
The nano win date is now about January first. OK. Back to writing. My character needs to start an internecine struggle and so verbosely.

04:44 pm: NaNoWriMo Schedule
The new strategy is write large blocks of time using an previously written outline.

If I write 6800 words per day for all the weekends, I'd have a book. That has got to be something close to a 6 hour block of time. Likewise, if I wrote no weekends and wrote 2800 words a day I'd have a book--again about a 3 or 4 hour block of time. If I miss my goal about 50% of the time, I'd still win NaNo, if I hit my goal each time, I'd have a commerically viable book and I will retire rich enough to spend the rest of my days in a favela in Basilia, Brazil.

The key enemies to success are:

Good house keeping
Cooking
Working at the office
Exercising
Comics and BoingBoing

04:18 pm: Dana has Alzheimers
Dana keeps losing her keys, can't remember my name, etc. It's a tragic disease, very heart wrenching to watch.

So I spent $10 on Right Back up.

With paliative care and therapy, hopefully I won't have to euthenize Dana.

09:41 pm: NaNo With Dana
Went to Starbucks Coffee on Clarendon Blvd. I give it four stars as a place to write. Don't forget to take your Dana and a mug for a 10c discount.

If something is worth doing, it is worth overcomplicating. I've got the Dana and a goal of finishing NaNoWriMo, so today I spent some time getting ready and complicating things....

Alright, eight keys, so I've set them up like this:

F1- Novel outline. I never know what to write next when I'm writing prose, but I can generate ideas pretty quick if I don't actually have to describe the action and only need to list it.
F2- 1st 3rd of novel
F3- 2nd 3rd of novel I can't write linearly to save me.
F4- 3rd 3rd of novel
F5- Map of Dana, Map of world. I thinking of ripping off the names of streets in Clarendon for all my place name needs.
F6- Personae dramatis. Actually, this is just a list of 24 names, 1 per letter of the alphabet. I can't tell you how many times I'm writing along and I just stop because I need a name and can't think of one. OK, I can tell, you. It was 14 times.
F7- Prologue, Epilogue. This isn't part of the novel, so I think this is fair game for October work. Last novel didn't really get going until I had a reasonable vision of my two main characters. This time around I'm having a hard time imagining the world.
F8- NaNoWriMo Manifesto. All the things I love about novels, all the things I hate about novels. Plus my lists of story questions, lists of conflicts, etc.

Now I have five things to do when the prose typing has slowed. My theory is that if I can just keep typing something, I can get back into the groove.

Last novel was extremely jumbled. This created an editing problem. I needed to yank the naughty bits, list the factual stuff that needed to be researched, put the story into roughly chronological order, etc.

I could have written linearly, but that is too easy. I could have inserted each new scene into the appropriate place, but that requires stopping and searching through several thousand words for a suitable place to plug in the relevant scene. That costs word count.

My solution is to use XML tags, like:

< scene time="1" > blah, blah, blah < /scene >
< scene time="50" > blah, blah, blah < /scene >
< scene time="25" >< pr0n > blah, < need_info >blah< /need_info >, blah < /pr0n> blah blah blah < /scene >


Then, come December, I can whip out a pocket Swiss XML parser, sort the scenes by time, generate an G rated version for friends and family and an R rated version for posting on the scroupleless internet, and generate a list of sentences with shaky factual content that I need to google.

Also, this year I will not use italics. I will not use italics for foreign words because foreign depends on how much you know about a words history and how stupid you think the general population is. I will not use italics for characters thoughts because I'm going to try to keep my characters from engaging in pointless thinking. This year, due to a lack of suitable punctuation, my characters will be forced to make rash decisions and make rude, thoughtless comments to each other.

07:01 pm: A man a plan, a canal, lanacapanama.
According to newsweek and reputable blogs on the internet, my life style is killing me. Apparently I need to head out the the smoky bars, sit around, drink Chimay and swap jokes with the regulars to save my life. Or as newsweek said, I should find a girlfriend who's bubbly nature would compensate for my sleepy awkwardness.

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08:03 pm: Saw Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett was at Olsson's Books. In summary:

Books write themselves if you've done a good job of imagining the characters.
Don't cross writers, they know too much about forensic pathology & the like.
His books are copyrighted in his and his spouse's name for all sorts of reasons--extends the copy right, might cut taxes, and it was only fair since his wife dealt with the fan mail, etc.
There probably won't be a Discworld movie any time soon.

10:30 pm: Terry Pratchett in Arlington Sept 13
Just in time for getting in the mood to write Nanowrimo.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005 07:00 PM
Pratchett, Terry, will be promoting THUD!
OLSSON'S BOOKS & MUSIC/Speaking/Signing
2111 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22201

04:37 pm: Building up a tolerance for pain
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08:18 pm: Writing with Personality...Disorder
I swear I was at the store reading "Writing with Personality," but Amazon doesn't seem to be listing it, or I have misremembered the title. I'd link it if I could find it. If I was a paranoid personality, I'd suspect a plot. But this is a blog post, so that is the last thing anyone should expect. The book wanted to make sure the writer could write as if they had a personality. I'm interested in personalities because I want to make sure I write characters with distinct and believable personalities, that is, believable personality disorders. All happy, functional personalities are alike.

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11:30 am: Writing Squick and Fear
I started thinking about this while critiquing a scary shorty story.

Not scary or squicky to read about.
Thunderstorms.
Ghosts.
Blood & guts.
Villians. They make me mad.

Actually having these happen to me would probably be a different story. Next time I meet Darth Vader on a dark and rainy night, I'll let you know how it went.

Very scary & squicky
Symptom descriptions (especially knee, joint stuff) Sometimes it is called medical student syndrome, when you read about descriptions of symptoms and you feel them youself. Also called sympathetic symptoms. Even a vague description of someone's knee caps being shot makes me want to sit down.

Dealing with strangers is scary, but reading about just strangers isn't as big a deal as reading about someone deal with strangers in the awkward and clunky way that I'm afraid that I would. Some comedies that rely on humiliation as a gag fail on me for that reasons. I've read social anxiety has it's roots in the subsystem of all mammalian brains that make them skittish around others. It makes sense because animals that are universally friendly, including friendly to predators have all been eatten, leaving only those with tendancies to social anxiety.

I can tell you now that when Darth Vader takes insult to my awkward introduction and slices through my knee caps with a light saber, I will be really squicked.

06:45 pm: Critiqued! Wherein our thin skinned hero gets a resume rejected
Wow, some HR gnome saw my current resume and absolutely zapped me. I mean, I think I'd rather have gotten the form letter, "While your qualifications are impressive, we don't think you are a good fit for this position, good luck in your search." Instead I got a 'helpful' zap.

The advice that the resume was too long, was well taken, and I plan to ignore it, although I will ask head hunters in the future if they would get bent out of shape if I gave them a two or three page resume.

What really bites is the advice I get a book and learn to write a resume, presupposes that I haven't read the canned advice, (keep to one page, use action verbs, don't talk about your job waiting tables if it doesn't apply, etc.)

In my defense, my resume does need three pages. When people talk about computer work, if you put skill 1, skill 2, and skill 3 on your resume, people tend to interpret that in the most narrow way possible. How are they to know that Visual Basic for Applications and VB6 are actually virtually identical? To a HR gnome, these are vastly different positions. Or that almost using all ANSI databases for most task require essential the same skill? I'd write six dozen resumes tailored for each imaginable one page combination of skills, but I don't have time. I got a job that pays real money and not hypothetical money, and that job isn't leaving me enough time to knock myself out looking for work. By the way, HR gnome, you called me, all I did was leave my resume on monster.com for six years.

What doubly bites is the advice that I reformat it, but the without exactly saying what my formatting fox paw was, it just reinforces the implication that I haven't a clue on how to write a resume and must be making it up as I go along. Besides, doesn't everyone use rainbow blink for their digital resume? It's cool.

The HR gnome, I'm sure, was just trying to be helpful. I was tempted to critique his rejection letter, but I will hold my tongue and blog instead. I needed a suitable topic to blog about today anyhow.

02:28 pm: Knitting the Hyperbolic Plane
Aparently the knitting fad has hit the mathematician community as well.

05:15 am: Meme! Meme! Me! Me! Meme!
When will we unravel the memeome? Will the rice meneome be larger than the human memeome? Should couples get memetic testing before they date? Do we have opinions or merely memetic disease? If you get an idea from your cat, do you become a cat/human hybrid on the memetic level? Is an ideology a meme's chromosome? Genes are 90% genetic junk, molecular programming that serves no purpose, but just keeps getting copied, and copied because that's what genes do best. To keep pushing the analogy, this is a memetic basis for Sturgeon's Law, 90% of all sci-fi (and everything) is crap.

03:11 pm: Bizzare ways to Outline Stories
I saw the graphic novelists at the CVS meeting and was going to ask them how they storyboard (a movie or comic books version of an outline), but I don't think there was enough time to do any justice to the topic.

They did mention 22 panels that always work. They also mentioned that you don't need to be able to draw beautiful art to make a graphic story work. For example, RealLifeComics.com, he does 4 panel comics which it is obvious that he draws a character once and then uses cut and paste on the computer to reproduce it in the other 3 panels. (He is a pretty good artist, but that is beside the point) Then I thought, "Ah, ha,
that would make for a good writing workshop or exercise...( Read more... )

11:00 am: Oh my, breach of contract
I'm in breach of contract with myself. I've hired two lawyers to defend and prosecute myself for falling behind on my contract with myself to write 50,000 words in 30 days...
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09:59 am: Writing Contract
To help further the hyperlegalization of US society, here is my out of season NaNo Contract with modifications--

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10:46 pm: Carrot Sticks
There has got to be a better way to budget for a 30 day novel other than making a goal of writing 1666 words a day.

Here's my thoughts on the matter--
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06:01 pm: How many Scenes? How Many Characters?
Do you write novels? Do you have fond memories of algebra class?

If so read on---
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