2017

I've been too long in making daily updates anywhere, even for myself. Time to get them going again.

I cranked out some words today. Not bad for less than a week post-op. I seem to be in less pain than I was lkast year, and so can think a bit better,

But typing with just my left hand is hard.

"I Hate NaNoWriMo"

It' s November, the month for NaNoWriMo. If you got to this page you probably know what NaNoWriMo is. If you live at the bottom of Valles Marineris, on Mars, you likely know as well, but for those that don't I shall explain: NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. All over the world, people attempt to write a novel in one month. For the purposes of this activity, a novel is defined as 50,000 words, most of them different from each other, and a month is defined as November. Participants keep track of their wordage on an official web site and through various non-official social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and the dinner table. There are write-ins and parties and meet-ups for the participants, and quite a lot of people saying, "Sorry I can't make your party, but I'm Nanoing this month."

Along with all the people happily joining the activity, there are a fair number of people loudly announcing that they will not be participating. While some are simply stating it, others are writing long explanations as to their actions. Even though a simple excuse would do, such as, "I have to clean out the septic tank for winter," or, "My wife/daughter/son/I just had a child," the long-winded posters have to explain pretty much why they hate NaNoWriMo. A few point out that they are "just kidding," reminding me far too much of certain people in Jr. High School. So, after reading far too many of these, I can boil some of their objections to the following bullet points.

* It encourages sloppy writing.

And there's a whorehouse in Texas!  Yes, yes, sloppy writing is the point of NaNoWriMo. If you hack out fifty thousand words in a month it will be sloppy, free-style, self-editor turned off, wild abandonment writing. Wildfire writing. Misspelled words, characters changing names, cities marching all over the map. A mess you'll have to spend months cleaning up. And it will be writing that bounds off into new and unexpected places as your brain makes wild associations, rampages down obscure alleys, and rides the flood of raw wordage. It doesn't have to be a good story. It can't be a polished story. But it can be a playground for the imagination, and a mine of freshly turned ideas to dig out and use in other stories. Sloppy writing is more creative than polished from the pen writing, and NaNoWriMo can be a good excuse to visit the playground of the mind.

* Writers have been ruined by NaNoWriMo.

As in, if they fail, they are turned off to writing forever? Then add it to the list of things that can ruin a writer, such as red pens, criticism, rejection slips, writer's block, professional writing workshops, creative writing classes, and onions. Excuses come up a dime a dozen. But the truth is that a person can't blame others for his lack of success. He must look to himself, see where he went wrong, and ask the big question: "Do I really want to be a writer? Or do I just want to be someone who dreams about being a writer?" The problem is not in the activity, it is in the person making the excuse.

*NaNoWriMo is a waste of profitable writing time.


NaNoWriMo is playtime. I do realize that there are many people out there who take it seriously, and I think that they do a disservice to themselves. But then, maybe they take all their play seriously. Maybe the only way that their activities can be respected by others is if these activities take on the veneer of serious work.  Maybe what they really need is the permission to say, "I'm going to play."  To do real work during working hours and play during the play hours. And if NaNoWriMo isn't your choice of play, don't sweat it. But respect those who do choose it.

*There are too many rules to NaNoWriMo, and people get anxious about not making word counts!

I don't understand people and their rules, frankly. Give them a simple idea, and the next thing you know they come up with dozens of rules and limitations and penalties. And they keep making it harder to meet all the goals and targets. As in video games -- no one wants to just win the game.  They want to win with the High Score. And then the Higher Score. They want to move the game to harder settings. Well, NaNoWriMo is a game -- yes, it's a fun writing game! -- and people who have been winning it for a dozen years want to make it harder all the time. But if you're playing a video game for the first time and you're not a practicied video player, then set the game to the easiest setting.  Crank it up after you've gone through it a few times.

In other words, change the rules to something that works for you!

*Everyone is doing NaNoWriMo, and I won't do what everyone else is doing.

(I'll be honest, I've not heard this stated, but I have heard it in subtext.)

Fair enough. NaNoWriMo is a bandwagon activity, with everyone and their brother and cousin and sister and aunt doing it, and the peer pressure to jump on the bandwagon is immense. But that doesn't make NaNoWriMo inherently bad, or a reason for other people not to join in -- unless you're trying to start your own bandwagon and pressure  your own peers into joining you.

* NaNoWriMo leads to a glut of bad books in the marketplace.

That's not NaNoWriMo, per se, but all the self-publishing avenues which have realized that there are a lot of people out there who are willing to pay to see their book in print. These avenues know that people who sign up NaNoWriMo are good advertising targets.  The activity produces a sloppy first draft, and the author, still infused with the giddy joy and enthusiasm of producing this work, believes that it is perfect, perfect, perfect.  The author also believes that the self-publishing avenue will judge their work to be good and will help them to publicize it, and that all the world will see their greatness! And it's true that a lot of the NaNoWriMo hoopla feeds this, with teasers such as, "Will your novel be the next great find?"

But of course it won't. My NaNoWriMo novels, along with all my wildfire writing, need revisions, polishing, editing, and a damn good grammar checker. Most everyone is the same way, everyone not named Ray Bradbury, who claimed he only wrote first drafts. The rest of us mere humans need to actually work on the stuff we produce, making it look less like a thing hacked out of wood with an ax and more like an actual carving.  But learning that truth about our writing, learning not to trust the perfection of the joyous first draft, is part of learning to be a commercially viable writer. Dianne Wynne Jones, the British Fantasy Writer, often said that she wrote her stories while sitting in her chair, pen and paper, in a wildfire daze. The family had to work around her as she worked, and put together her wonderfully twisty plots. Less often, however, she talked about what she did with these giddy first drafts, and how she worked them into publishable stories. Even for her, enthusiasm did not replace work -- and that's a message that has to be pounded into every writer's head.
 
Writers must also learn about scams and dishonesty, and how to look at advertising with a salt mine. No one approaches you to give you money. Everyone wants something. But that is something authors have to learn whether they do NaNoWriMo or not.

*What can you learn from NaNoWriMo?

Excellent question. As with all play, especially free-form play, you can learn just by exploring your options and trying new things. You can learn, for example, how to grab some time each day to write. You can learn how to let your characters run free and develop without an outline. Or you can learn, as I did, how to develop and work with an outline. You can learn how to use tropes to simplify your storytelling, and you can learn how to describe things in length. You can learn how to blow past writer's block and how to skip over spots where the story has bogged down (and where the reader is as bored as you are.) There is much you can learn, if you let yourself learn.  For one month a year, you can be a child again, and write just for play, just for fun.

Let's play.

Raw Trip Report

9/6/12

Dear Diary,

Yesterday we got up at 4:30 AM to get to the airport by 7:30 in order to catch a 9:00 flight to Chicago.  After three hours waiting in Chicago, we caught a 4 hour flight to Seattle. I’m glad I paid extra for the slightly more leg room seats.  We needed it.
When we got to our hotel, it wasn’t quite four, and we were already starving. Four in Seattle is Seven at home.  After we got dinner we fell into bed and collapsed.

9/7/2012

And woke up this morning at three. Went back to sleep. Got up at five and got dressed, and went downstairs to breakfast at six, but the restaurant didn’t open until six thirty.
We went back and packed up, and then, with still time to spare, walked two blocks to catch the monorail. It took us straight to the Space Needle, so after peeking through the fence into what we could see of the Chihully garden, we went up the Space Needle.  Spent some time looking down on Seattle. Mount Rainer and the Cascades look like watermarks in the sky behind the city.
At noon we caught the shuttle to the boat, and took an hour to get processed and on the ship.  Then we had to wait for the cabin to get ready.  Spent the rest of the day relaxing and eating and watching the boat sail out of port. Watched a police boat chase a Catamaran out of our path.
Watched the sunset, an orange line on the horizon to the west with dark mountains all around.

9/8/12

Dear Diary,
Woke up again at three.  Forced myself to sleep until five-thirty, when I rose and watched the sun rise while eating a smuggled bagel.  (Well, I didn’t know until I walked onto the ship that we weren’t supposed to be bringing food on or taking it off.)
Today was a sailing day.  We sailed in the open sea beyond the coast.  Sometimes we could see the cliffs and peak of the coast line, dark or gray with streaks of white. Mostly we saw fog, as we sailed in and out of fog patches.  We hit the first right at noon, and it was a like a wall of fog.  It was so thick that we could see nothing beyond the rails, and the ship blasted the fog horn.
In the morning we went to a lecture by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the history of his profession. They were originally created to deal with the problems arising from the alcohol trade.  It was called Whiskey, but “Kickapoo Juice” from Fort …” Which had little alcohol, but a lot of other stuff, including tobacco.
The upper deck was very windy and cold, especially after we went into the cloud bank.

In the afternoon, I slept while Steve worked out.
Tonight we gain another hour.  I’m likely to be awake even earlier.
In the late afternoon the sea got rough, could have been worse. That’s the price of going up through the open Northwest Ocean.
Dinner was formal, with photos and the captain’s address afterwards.  There was free champainge for everyone, and at the end, male dancers performed inside the chandeliers in the concourse. A lot like Cirque de Soil.

9/9/2011

We arrived at Juneau two hours early. We’ll have to tender in, as the dock space is taken up by the bigger Cruise ships, such as the Radiance of the Seas and the Island Princess. Celebrity’s Milleniun. The weather is foggy and moist, a bit rainy. (It turns out that we had to tender in because the cruise ship extended its stay by a month, but too late to reserve wharf space.
The mountain on either side of the harbor are tall, covered with fir trees, and streaked by fast mountain rivers. Juneau doesn’t seem like a large town, after the Ohio towns I’m used to.
After an early lunch, a bacon salad – the breakfast menu hadn’t quite turned over to lunch, we took the tender into town and walked around for a bit. We saw the state capital, a squat brown building about the size of Dayton City hall. The rest of the government buildings covered a short city block. The town library sits on the top floor of the town parking garage. We tried to visit the Red Dog saloon in Juneau, but it was too crowded to admit us. We looked at other things, fought the crowd to visit a few shops, then caught the bus to the Mendenhall Glacier.  Our tour guide was friendly, telling us all about the town and inviting us to her house for dinner.
The glacier was impressive, even if it was well broken up with deep crevasses. It was indeed a bright blue color, which comes from the crystalline structure of the compressed ice. Some chunks were out in the glacial lake, just sitting. Apparently glacial ice does not float as well as regular ice. Good that we saw it before it was completely gone. We saw no one trying to slide down it on their raincoats.
Driving to our next event, there was a porcupine curled up by the road.
The salmon bake was in an outdoor camp.  Good food, but by that time the rain had turned steady, and the singer – a mellow tenor who looked a lot like a friend I knew in college – sang accompanied by the drum of raindrops.  In the gift shop, a pair of two year old twins were attacking each other with stuffed “killer salmon.” Brought back memories. Afterwards, we went and looked at the river and waterfall.
We went back to the ship and vegged for the rest of the eveing, except for a drink in the high lounge.

9/10/2012

Dear Diary,
When we got up at 5:30 this morning, we were already in Skagway, a hour and a half ahead of schedule. And it was still dark.
We grabbed an early breakfast and went out on the dock to catch the bus to the train. That was a wee bit absurd, since the train depot was a block away from the end of the pier – but it let the tour guide introduce us to the driver for the second half of the trip and to put us on the correct car of the train. We rode the train up the White Pass to Frazier, BC, passing through a glacial valley on the way. Then we boarded the bus and went on into the Yukan, and visited a suspension bridge over the river. There was a log cabin on the other side. Then the bus went back down the pass, and we saw the same things from a different perspective.
One unique feature was a suspension bridge, suspended from only the south side. It crosses the intersection of two active fault lines, and thus is only anchored to one side so that the other side can move away from it. I could see where the road had been mended several times, and there was already a one-inch crack at the edge.
The mountains folding up around me made me feel very sheltered, very secure. The tops were snow-streaked, the first snow of the season. The snow was solid in the mountain valleys, scoops along the craggy tops, and in the furrows between the sawtooth mountains. The mountains below were dark and rounded, then below that, covered with the temperate forest.
The glacial valley was windswept, strewn with boulders, craggy. Fireweed (red with pink flowers) and yarrow (white flowers) grew in abundance. Yarrow is good for repelling mosquitoes, some which seemed to be the size of small Cessna aircraft. Fireweed is good for honey.
We also learned that Spruce tips, while edible and vitamin C rich, are bitter – unless made into beer. 
I took a lot of pictures.
After the drive, we went to a place with a buffet lunch that included barbeque ribs and fried salmon, and then had us all pan for gold.  I got about six flakes worth. It was difficult work for six flakes.
Afterwards we shopped, and I bought two pairs of gloves to replace the glove I lost yesterday. I had to use my silk liners as gloves today, and it was cold and my hands are chapping. Then we came back and ate dinner, and as the ship left dock, again, after dark, we watched an aerial artist show. The best were the synchronized bungee-jumping dancers.

9/11/2012

Dear Diary,
Today we saw glaciers and I saw a whale.  Finally.
We woke up early as the ship was just turning into Endicott Arm Fjord and rushed to get into Windjammer along with all the other early risers. It was like a land rush when the doors opened, and I staked a claim near the very front of the ship. Since the Windjammer has glass walls, this gave me one of the best views as the ship worked its way up the Fjord.  We were supposed to go up Tracy Arm Fjord, but there was too much glacial ice in the water. Glacial ice is very dense, and while it floats, it doesn’t move very well. Hitting it is like hitting a boulder, so going into that would bang up the ship.
We were allowed to go into Endicott Arm and approach Dawes Glacier. After breakfast, I went back to the cabin and watched the trip from my balcony. We actually got very close, and with the binoculars I could bits and chunks falling off the face.  I could hear the glacier crack with booms like gunshots, or cannon shots.
Glacier ice is very blue and streaked with grit. The grit shows the path of the glacial ice as it curves to the sea.
The captain was excited to get so close, and went out with the rescue boat to capture some of the 10,000 year old ice. Afterwards, he put it on display on the pool level.
It was indeed cold and windy near the glacier. I’m glad my sister recommended that I bring long underwear. The ship was selling hot chocolate spiced with alcohol, but I got a virgin. It tasted like cinnamon or nutmeg had been added, and was delicious.
After turning about to see the glacier, the boat went out
I saw several seals sunning themselves on the ice floes. And flock of birds. Auks? The one I could see through the binoculars was short winged, black on the tips, with a duck like body and a short beak.
After lunch we went out into the inside passage, but the clouds were low and the fog was thick. I ended up napping for a bit during the afternoon, and then running about doing errands.
We dressed up for dinner. “Formal night” is pretty much “Wear a shirt and a nice shirt night.” I don’t mind. Then we went to a talk by the Canadian Mountie on the Mountie training school. On our way to dinner, I paused to look out the window, and saw a curving head, I think there were knobs, then a spout, then a curved back, and then a nice dark whale tail!  Apparently a pod was swimming past, and I caught the one.
After dinner we got pictures taken.

9/12/2012

Dear Diary,
Today we visited the largest of the Alaskan cities, Ketchikan. We arrived at sunrise, in the fog, and conditions deteriorated during the day. Rain, not mists, and up to 35 mph gusts meant that all the air and sea tours were cancelled.  That included ours. Instead, we went shopping for souvenirs and collecting harm tokens, which became shopping for jewelry. Then we ate lunch and visited two of the three museums in town.
One was a national parks museum, a Tongess Forest discovery center, and the other was the Ketchikan town museum, which shared a building with the public library. The Ketchikan creek ran behind the museum, and it was raging, too rough to see the salmon.
We missed the Totem Heritage Center, because the rain was really pouring by then, and we were cold and wet.
We left the port at sundown, and now it is pouring again and the boat is shaking.

9/14/2012

Day at sea. Packing. Humpback breaching. Orcas or dolphins by the boat. Dudley Do-Right and Due South Mountie talk. 560 feet deep – and two inches.
Ice cream cups on the deck with an Australian named Rodney. He was handicapped, and asked me to get him an ince cream cone, as the ship had finally opened up the machine. It was out of cones, so I put the ice cream in a cup, and then had to walk the entire length of the ship to find spoons. But then I got a cup and we sat and talked, and it was nice.
Exhausted.

9/15/2012

Dear Diary
It’s going home day. We woke up with the ship pulling into the Vancouver Port. The Radiance was already in port, and the Celebrity ship was just pulling in. I took some picture in the dawn light, and we got breakfast, packed our carry off bags, and went to the “Shall We Dance Lounge” to await our time off the ship. When our time came, we went off – and into mass confusion.  Three cruise ships disembarked at the same time, with all the people struggling to get somewhere. When we finally made it onto the shuttle bus to the airport, the driver said, “Welcome To Mass Confusion.”
We arrived at the airport with three hours to make our flight, and needed almost all of it. First we had to check in at a Kiosk, and then we had to go to the desk to get our luggage tags, but the printer had jammed, so the clerk printed a new set.  We then went to the line at next place, where we put our bags on the security belt. Then off to the next check station, where we were asked how many bags did we have? Apparently the security system takes pictures of all the bags, and there were no pictures for the first four. We explained, and were told, be sure to tell customs. Then we went to another room and stood in another long line. By the time we got through that, we had to walk about a mile to get to our gate, and had only half an hour to get lunch. The lunch selections for the people flying to America are much poorer than those for people flying within Canada.
On the flight over, reality returned. We were shoehorned into seats, each of us with a tv screen on the seat in front of us. We could pay for programming, just swipe the credit card, but since we didn’t, we were treated to non-stop commercials and the same half hour sitcoms repeated over and over. We were allowed a drink, gratis, but had to pay for the snacks. After a week of luxury, to be common cattle once again…
We made it home, finally, just after midnight.

Unique Business Proposal

In my inbox this morning, I received the following letter:  

Greetings, 

I would like to discuss a business proposal that has the potential for significant earnings.

I am currently employed with a privately held manufacturing company. My company has demand for a specific material that is vital to its processing operations. We are currently purchasing this material at a price well over the manufacturing cost.

I would like to explore the possibility of having you stand-in as a new supplier, providing this material while retaining the same profit margins. My role would be to introduce you to my company, as the supplier, and to obtain a contract between you and my employer. I have already discussed sourcing possibilities with the existing manufacturer, leaving room for attractive profit margins. What is still required in order to materialize this venture is an individual who is at arm's length to oversee these supply chain transactions. The required capital to purchase our initial order from the manufacturer will be funded strictly from myself and no additional investment will be required from yourself. With that said, we can discuss terms and commission structure in the near future.

I understand that your experience with does not directly relate to my field. However, this venture is more in line with your personal capabilities rather than your professional experience.

Please send a return email to verify your contact number and to schedule the most convenient time to discuss these possibilities in detail. I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Kindest Regards,
Barry Crawford

I don't need anyone to tell me that this a scam or phishing. That much is, well, obvious. Even if the errors hadn't cued me in, or the vagueness of the offer, I would still know that it was bogus in that it appeared to be directed at me, yet didn't have my name in the letterhead. However, it is still an intriguing letter.

What is this "specific material?" Unobtainium? Raw blood for vampire chow? Human organs for wealthy donors? Parts from stolen alien spaceships? What do you think? What would be the most far-out item that a mysterious businessman would want "laundered?"

Dragonwriter

De-whiching Work

The process sounds simple. One, cancel the iUniverse contract for Silent Runners to remove it from the catalog. Two, put the manuscript into Word and give it a quick polish. Three, put it up on Amazon Kindle Select. 4) After ninety days, publish it through Lulu and Smashwords for the rest of the world.

I'm stuck on step two. Someday I will learn that a "quick polish" does not exist. I have now removed over 2000 words, and I suspect that another 1000 will leave before I'm finished.

I have found I have found misspelled words. I have found misused words, particularly which for that. It is an old and very frustrating problem of mine, knowing when to use which and when to that. Is which the limiting word, or that? My current rule is: if you can the word that, and there is no comma, do so. After all, a comma looks like a cliff and witches fly off of cliffs, so you need a comma to use which.

The largest bulk of missing words, however, are Tom Swiftys. "I've got to go," she said hurriedly. The adverb restates what is shown in the quotation, and is therefore redundant. Further, one doesn't need the attribute she said as it can be replaced with something I call an action tab -- an action which is linked to the quote. "I've got to go." She balanced the files in her arms.

You can properly use either an attribute or an action tab. However, I found that I was using both.

Nope, not a quick polish. Not at all.

Put Down the Eye-liner.

In the art of fiction, characters become very real to the reader. They love, they hate, they laugh, they cry. Even though they live in a two-dimensional world, that of words on paper or images on a screen, the characters live in three dimensions in the reader's mind. They love, they hate, they laugh, they cry. How can the author let the reader know how the character feel?

Stealthily, says Ben Marcus, writing for Wordcraft in the January 21, 2012 Wall Street Journal. You don't show the character having an emotional reaction, and you don't state that the character is feeling an emotion. If you do, you risk letting the reader feel manipulated, and nothing kills the relationship between the reader and the character faster than the feeling of manipulation. You show emotion by not showing it. Just describe the sadness of the situation and let the reader infer the emotions.

I don't quite agree with what Mr. Marcus states, but I do agree with what he is trying to say. New writers do put too much emotion in their stories. Too much emo, as the teenagers like to say. Too much drama. Why? It's not because new writers are trying to hit the reader over the head with emotions, or to manipulate the reader's feelings. For the most part, the new writer is merely trying to describe the depth of emotion that he himself feels.

Emotion in a story, however, is a lot like Chili powder. To make a dish taste good, you should add some, but for heaven's sake, don't throw in handful after handful. Don't upend the bottle. Don't even think, "one pinch makes the dish good, so a palm full will make it better." A little spice goes a long way.

A little emotion goes a very long way.

Mr. Marcus seems to argue that the writer shouldn't put in any emotion, but that would be like chili without any spice. And there are stories where the characters move through events, seemingly untouched, very wooden. Those stories leave the reader quite detached. Bored.

The trick, no, the art, is to put in just enough emotion, and to blend it into the story so that it doesn't seem to be there. Like spice, it adds to the flavor, but does not stand out on its own. Don't describe how a characters feels--but say how the character thinks about an object. Give the character responsive actions, such as, "He turned the picture facedown and did not look at it again."

Am I an expert at this? I think I'm getting better. I picked up a novel I wrote decades ago and found that the first few chapters dripped emo. The main character might as well have circled his eyes with kohl and auditioned for a role in a Japanese manga. Too much emotion. I've been slashing it out right and left.
Leaving room for something that all that emo was drowning out--tension.

The Cake is a Lie

The GPS in my car is names GlaDOS, after an evil computer in the games Portal and Portal 2. GlaDOS uses the promise of a reward, cake, to lure her victim, you, into one dangerous situation after another. Just like GlaDOS, my GPS appears to be helpful, but will kill you if she gets the chance. She often routes me right past intersections with lights and turn arrows, and then demands that I make a left turn at a dangerous intersection with no traffic lights and a stream of oncoming traffic.

In truth, however, my GPS is not evil--she's just programmed that way. She calculates her route based on the shortest possible distance, and simply doesn't have the computing power to weigh the safety of one intersection against another. All roads are the same to her, so she is just as likely to route me down a narrow, two-lane, shoulder-less road as down a four-lane highway. I can't put my brain on hold while using the GPS. She's a tool, but I'm the one who thinks.

Spell-checkers and grammar checkers are the same way. They are programs, but they are tools, and you can't put your brain on hold while using them. Often, a spell-checker will not distinguish between a word and its synonym. I once read a story where the characters were horrified to come across a scull. I tried to point out to the young author that she had misspelled the word, and she assured me that the spellchecker had said it was right. Well, scull is spelled properly--if you are talking about a small boat.

The spell checker might help you find misspelled words, especially if you are slightly dyslexic, like me, but it can't replace your brain.

Grammar checkers are worse, I've found. Grammar checkers don't like stylistic writing. An author may use sentence fragments for emphasis, and when writing dialog, both sentence fragments and bad grammar can be deliberate. When the word processing program calls your attention to everything it considers an error, it becomes easy to turn a blind eye to it. The Little Grammar Checker calls wolf once too often, and then you miss something you should have caught. Grammar checkers do not replace proofreading.

Another problem with grammar checkers is the ability to miss grammar problems. For example, in Word, the error in this sentence is caught: "Although the great Depression was the most severe, there has been others." A wavy blue line appears under has. But in this sentence, "Programs like this in the New Deal led by President Roosevelt helps the U.S. recover from the worst depression in its history in 1933," the error goes right past the spell-checker. Although the program can look for subject-verb agreement, or see that a helper verb is the wrong form, it can't see that a sentence should be past tense. Computers are tools, but you should never put your brain on hold.

The cake is a lie--never trust a computer to think for you.