October 2006 Tuesday, October 31, 2006
All Novel’s EveI don’t usually start my novel right at midnight. Oh, sure, I have in the past. But I usually toss those words out and start over. (Though I have to admit as a swimmer I never had a false start in all my meets.) So tonight I have to start because I agreed to go to a midnight write. Which means I have to know what I’m doing, at least enough for the first thousand words or so. I’ve been thinking about characters and maybe an arc. I was thinking if the novel is going to be focused on candy, it should have a character in it that loves every candy I detest. I was also thinking there should be a quest ... that my main character has to be searching for something or trying to do something. You know, something. I haven’t figured out what it is. I haven’t decided anything past the first sentence and scene. If that doesn’t work, I guess I can always start over! Thursday, October 26, 2006
Creating Great BlogsWhen I was pulling my FAQ for Candy Blog together, it seemed that some of my readers think that I’m a top blogger and I might have some authority on the subject. Well, I’m not so sure about that, but I’ve certainly learned a lot through trial and error over the years, enough to share some of that with others. So here are a few of my thoughts in a series that I’ll post over the next week or so. Stake out a Little Corner The following are some technology basics that you should keep in mind when setting up your blog.
Next week I’ll talk about Layout and Templates. POSTED BY Cybele AT 2:02 pm Curious News • Sunday, October 15, 2006
The Titling of a NaNovelI haven’t decided what to write for NaNoWriMo this year. All I have is a topic. Candy. (It’s about time I wrote a candy novel.) I thought the whole thing with starting with a title back in ‘04 worked pretty well (that was the year of An Alphabetical Order). I also thought I would work in a different genre this year, as I always do. I’m running out of new POVs, so this one might be 3rd Person Limited. The current title is: Limited Liability Chocolate, an LLC But I’ve been thinking of other titles as well, since I’m going for the Comedy genre. (The LLC novel would be a satire, I believe, somehow involving corporations and chocolate, as the title would imply.) A new title that I’m mulling over would go something like this: A Novel That Has Lollipops in It Of course that breaks my rule about having a title that alphabetically sorts high. It’s a work in progress. Thursday, October 12, 2006
It’s not the batterySo last night I was sitting on the couch enjoying some Prik King from Rambutan Thai and watching the premiere of 30 Rock. My laptop was on the dining room table, plugged in, but with the battery removed. We’re watching TV and the damn thing made that loud pop again! The battery isn’t even in the same room, so it’s not the battery. Something’s seriously wrong with it. It still works, doesn’t feel unusually warm to the touch. But a loud pop is not a good sound. I don’t know if it’s going to make it through this NaNoWriMo and the sad thing is that even my desktop computer isn’t working anymore (no strange sounds of that because I can’t even get it to boot). I’m in bad shape. Bad, bad shape. (See previously Not a sound you want to hear from your computer.) POSTED BY Cybele AT 9:44 am Curious News • Thursday, October 05, 2006
Better Sleep Through FormattingEvery year as NaNoWriMo season begins, I get a little stressed. It gets easier and easier to be the ubermoderator for such a big community. But the one thing that I’ve noticed is a good indication of my stress levels is dreaming in October. For the past three years my dreams in October have had large portions formatted as forum posts. Seriously. The dream bits are separate posts. Not specifically text, but somehow, in that dream-way, enclosed within forum code and forum frames. The dreams are not necessarily nanowrimo-related, but just formatted as topics and threads. The dreams this year, of course, started on October 1st. Last night I had no forum dreams that I recall. Will this complacency blow up in my face? If I do not live, breathe and dream nanowrimo, will it still come together? POSTED BY Cybele AT 10:58 am Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Not the sound you want from your computerLast night I was working on my laptop ... on my lap, in front of the TV. I can’t recall what I was working on, probably an email or the forums. Suddenly the computer made a loud POP and I felt the expression of air on my legs. I picked the computer up by the corner of the keyboard and held it like a rat by its tail, fully expecting to burst into flames (it is a Dell, after all). I dare not put it down, lest it catch something else on fire so I held it out for The Man to yank the power cord. It shut off instantly and The Man followed me into the kitchen as I carried it by the corner. Twisting it around and seeing no indication of flames or even any unusual heat or smoke, I put it down on the floor. I felt the top, then the bottom then closed it and sniffed it. All perfectly normal. We took out the battery, which also looked normal and didn’t feel hot at all. After a few minutes of puzzlement, “You heard that pop, didn’t you?” “Oh, yeah. Did it hurt?” “No, not at all, just, you know, I thought it was gonna burst into flames, like they do on BoingBong.” We set it down on the dining room table, sans battery and plugged it back in. It works just fine. The battery wasn’t holding even the slightest charge for the past month or so, so it’s not like running it without the battery is any big deal. You can be sure the first thing I did was copy ALL of my files off to the server. Now I can’t decide if I should get a new battery (which Dell doesn’t even sell on their website any longer) or just spring for a new laptop. My Inspiron 2600 turns four this month. That’s 88 in dog years. POSTED BY Cybele AT 9:24 am |
||
ABOUTCATEGORIESCONTACT
ARCHIVES
|
During November it's all about me writing a novel. Sometimes it's about whalewatching. You know, and then there's other stuff.
|