- Did a quick redraft on a few of the more problematic sections of WARREN'S WORLD. For some reason I do not understand, if you copy/paste from Word all your apostrophes turn into skludge when posted to the Internet, or, at least, to Angelfire. So you need to copy/paste from Wordpad instead. Strange but true.
- Got a big boost to the hit counter from a comment I left in a Sadly, No! thread a few days ago, but now that song is over... I'm back down to my usual 30 or so a day. More hits really doesn't mean much of anything, though, as none of the new traffickers troubled to leave a comment over here. Some of them lingered for minutes or hours, but apparently had nothing to say. You'd think I wasn't obnoxious, or anything. Course, some of you regulars lurk for minutes or hours too and never leave comments, either, so, it's pretty much business as usual over here.
- Hey, that last bullet point went to a snarkier place than I meant it to. Sorry.
- On the other hand, all around goodfella Tony "12 Pounds" Collett linked to me again. So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.
- At this point, it's between Hillary and Barack (I don't know why people always say 'Hillary and Obama'. Shouldn't it be consistent? If you're going to call her by her first name, call him by his. ) Anyway, while it makes me sad that John Edwards isn't in it any more, and makes me even sadder that Ralph Nader will never be President, still, if it's a choice between Hillary and Barack, I am desperate for it to be Barack. And I don't quite know why, except that Hillary strikes me as being very nearly as calculating and insincere as Mitt Romney, while Obama strikes me as being reasonably genuine. Mind you, his pandering to the devout makes me physically ill, but I guess a Presidential candidate's gotta do what a Presidential candidate's gotta do, in a country too stupid to keep superstitious idiots from voting.
- WizKids is doing their level best to get me back into the HeroClix thing, and their level best is pretty darned good -- Silver Age Aqualad, Silver Age Speedy, Silver Age Kid Flash, Silver Age Wonder Girl (in the Nick Cardy outfit, mmmm yeah), Mercury, Lead and Tin of the Metal Men, Psycho-Pirate, Dr. Sivana, Star Sapphire, Jack and Ten of the Royal Flush Gang, Liberty Belle, and Uncle Sam. Probably the best Flash dial yet (albeit with hands down the worst sculpt ever), and some other goodies as well. So it's a damn fine effort for them. But, it isn't going to work. Still... nice effort, guys. (Although I think you're going a little nuts with the Double Figures.)
- That is all.
- For now.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Bits of string less than three inches long
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So this Boy Scout, couldn't have been older than eleven, is holding up this kinda chubby looking Scotch Pine. It was.... ehhhh... okay...
"Hillary and Barack (I don't know why people always say 'Hillary and Obama'. Shouldn't it be consistent? If you're going to call her by her first name, call him by his. )"
ReplyDeleteBecause if they went by the tradition of just using last names and said 'Clinton' you'd wonder which one (both in the political world, the entertainment realm, etc) and when you say Obama, there's just one right now.
Tony C.
http://mahtwocents.blogharbor.com
I reject that reasoning entirely. In the context, of course you'd know which Clinton you're talking about. I think it's simply sexism... people have no difficulty calling Hillary by her first name cuz, you know, she's a GURL, but with Obama, well, they call him Obama because in general, writing some kind of political article and using a candidate's first name sounds overly familiar. (But only if the candidate is a man.)
ReplyDeleteIt's a way of making a female candidate for high office seem both less threatening and less competent.
I dunno- Tony's logic scans. It's exactly the sort of stupid convention TV news people would adopt.
ReplyDeleteI wonder too, if it isn't influenced by "Obama" sounding, to some ears, even less like a proper last name than "Barack". Maybe that's just me.
I've been converting some Word documents to .htm for posting lately, and I get the same thing pasting into Front Page. Little yellow squares, usually in pairs, at the end of all the paragraphs and around all the place names in the text. I'd love to get back the time I've sent lately deleting them manually. I've gone almost a week without finding a work-around.
Problematic passages in WARREN'S WORLD? care to elaborate?
I've been converting some Word documents to .htm for posting lately, and I get the same thing pasting into Front Page. Little yellow squares, usually in pairs, at the end of all the paragraphs and around all the place names in the text. I'd love to get back the time I've sent lately deleting them manually. I've gone almost a week without finding a work-around.
ReplyDeleteI get that, too... sometimes when I post from a word processor, I will see apostophes, ampersands, and quotation marks turned into little 'question mark' signs, which is annoying. But in this case, what happened was, all my apostrophes turned into gobbledegook. I can't describe it any better than that. But when I went back and copied the Word doc into Wordpad, then copied the Wordpad doc and pasted it into Angelfire, it came out okay. Weird.
I expect that it probably has to do with the font, and an apostrophe in some fonts in Word makes an icon that Angelfire's text editor cannot read, so it substitutes fudgle-kudgle. I guess the more basic fonts in Wordpad don't do that, or something.
Problematic passages in WARREN'S WORLD? care to elaborate?
If you aren't one of the five people on the planet who's wasted several hours you're never going to get back reading my novels, it wouldn't make any difference to you for me to explain. It's various different things, anyway, all of which add up to, there were parts of the book that, upon rereading a few months ago, I felt badly needed a smoother polish. Parts where the narrative didn't flow as well as it could. Hopefully I've smoothed most of that out, now.
I'd already tried the Wordpad pasting dodge, which works, but changes the size and font of the text. Font is easily fixed on Front Page, but for some reason changing the size of everthing pasted back is even more work than deleting all them there yellow question mark thingies, which don't seem to show or hurt anything and which I delete to keep the file size down and because I'm a pedantic nerd who none the less writes run-on sentences.
ReplyDeleteI'm one of those five people who read (and enjoyed) Warren's World. I think you've answered the question to my satisfaction, though.
If you're polishing that, is there any chance those projected novels are going to get written now?
I'm one of those five people who read (and enjoyed) Warren's World.
ReplyDeleteAh, a masochist. Okay. ;)
I think you've answered the question to my satisfaction, though.
To be more specific, along with various 'oh, here's a better way to say that' little tune ups throughout the text, I did something with Maynard. As it was, he was a little too plot devicey for me. I only realized that after several rereadings; as he's based on a real person I used to know, his presence in the novel seemed very natural to me. But if you're a stranger reading it, well, he shows up, drops an assload of important information on Jimmy, and then disappears. So I gave him more closure and a better resolution... I think.
If you're polishing that, is there any chance those projected novels are going to get written now?
Polishing an already largely written work is much less time intensive than writing a new novel length work from scratch. Until all five of my fans want to chip and get me (a) my own Internet connected computer that the kids won't demand time on and (b) about three years' pay so I can take that much time off to devote simply to writing crap nobody actually wants to buy, I'd say the odds are slim.
But if I do get some time, I may finish up REVENANTS and post that. However, you only think that's a good thing. ;)