Teach Myself Novel Writing in 125 Days
After one month, I've written 27,000 words of my novel. I have another nine chapters to write, though the story keeps growing longer than the outline I mapped out. My current pace of 794 words a day would reach 100,000 in 125 days.
If I were to end the book abruptly -- "and then the meteor struck and they all lived happily ever after in the tragically few hours left to them." -- I would have completed a novella, which by convention ranges in length from 17,500 to 40,000 words. So at a minimum, I can now call myself a novellaist.
If I had stopped the book between 7,500 and 17,500 words, I would have written a novelette and could thus be described as a novelettist. This title is far cooler because it sounds like librettist, a person who writes librettos.
When I started I was obsessed with word count, because I wasn't sure I could carry a story over enough words to constitute an entire novel. My impression from limited research is that a thriller should be at least 60,000 words and no more than 100,000 if you're a first-time author.
As time passes, I'm focusing less on the word count and just trying to tell the story I plotted out in full.
Writing a novel for the first time has been entertaining, though it's already making me a weirder person. Two weeks ago, I went out to eat with some relatives right after finishing a particularly distraught scene in the book involving two of the main characters. I was poor company during the meal because I'd become distraught as well. I was so attached to the characters that I didn't want anything bad to happen to them.
I got over that pretty fast. Now I'm as merciless with my fictitious creations as a kid with anger issues playing The Sims.
Anderson Cooper: 'I Don't Know Anything About Sports'
As the media grappled with Sarah Palin's explanation that she quit the Alaska governor's office because she's not a quitter, CNN host Anderson Cooper had a hilarious exchange with Palin spokeswoman Meg Stapleton. Stapleton tried to use Palin's analogy that in basketball, a good point guard passes the ball and runs off the court in the middle of the game, never to return. The analogy was completely lost on Cooper, for reasons he makes apparent:
Anderson Cooper: You say this is leadership, but how is leading not leading? You're saying she's leading by not leading. She's quitting her job as a leader to do, what, I don't know -- speeches, television show, whatever she chooses to do -- but I mean you can't really call that political leadership.
Meg Stapleton: Sure. Do you say then that a point guard charging down a basketball court is not leading when he passes the ball or she passes the ball?
Cooper: Honestly, I know nothing about basketball. All I know about is politics. Stapleton: Well, let me tell you. When someone is driving down a basketball court -- which is her analogy and I think it speaks well to where she is, and that is I can't affect change right now because of the political climate there -- I'm going to pass the ball. I'm going around it and we still all have the same common hoop, but I'm going around the block and I'm passing the ball at this time because its best for Alaska. Cooper: I'm sorry. I don't know who the hoop is. I don't know who the ball is. I'm confused by the analogy, but I'll let it go, because I don't know anything about sports.
The video's worth watching just to see Cooper's facial expressions around the 4:40 mark as he's exposed to basketball. In fairness to Cooper, he lives in New York City, which doesn't have a professional basketball team, so it would be hard for him to follow the sport.
Watching the Watchers Makes Use of Creative Commons
I've completed the second phase of the Watching the Watchers relaunch, which I began in late May. The site has become a digest of interesting news and commentary from sites that permit redistribution. As you can see, the traffic graph's become a lot more fun to look at lately.
The site now includes stories that were published under a Creative Commons license that permits reuse. If you're unfamiliar with Creative Commons, it's a popular way to allow your copyrighted work -- whether it's text, photos, audio or video -- to be reused by others under terms that you select. On the RSS Advisory Board, we use the license to share the RSS specification, RSS best practices profile and other documentation we author. Some people have used our license to create foreign-language translations of those documents.
Here's a sampling of stories I've republished on Watching the Watchers that came in over the commons:
- End Public Radio Fund Drives
- SEC Must Constrain Abusive Short Selling
- Tweet Could Land Guatemalan in Jail
- A Salute to the Iranian People
I wrote a Java application that looks for weblog content shared under Creative Commons and a PHP web application that lets me manually review stories for potential republication. So far, the richest source of reusable content is coming from WordPress blogs because they include content:encoded, an RSS element explicitly defined as the full text of a weblog entry. WordPress does not use the Creative Commons RSS namespace in its feeds, so my Java application loads the web page associated with a blog entry and looks for HTML markup that identifies a license. Here's an example of that markup:
The contents of this website are licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License</a>.
As I was reviewing stories that came in, I decided to expand the focus of the site beyond liberal news and commentary and make it non-partisan. If I find something compelling that's worth sharing with a wider audience, I don't want to leave it out because it expresses a conservative or libertarian viewpoint or isn't political at all.
Sarah Palin Violates the U.S. Flag Code
The August 2009 issue of Runner's World includes a Q&A with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin about her lifelong interest in jogging. The interview reveals that she took an unreported fall while running with the Secret Service before the vice presidential debate and describes how Sen. John McCain loves being up a creek:
I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, 'I go wading.' Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up.
The most newsworthy part of the story is probably the last question, where she affirms her support for Title IX, the gender equity law that requires schools to offer as many programs for female athletes as for males:
Is there anything else the world should know about you as a runner?
The only other thing I'd like to add is I've been very fortunate to be a recipient of all the efforts people put into Title IX all those years ago where girls got equal opportunity to participate in sports and extracurricular activities because sports growing up were my world. I'm so thankful for Title IX allowing equal access to these opportunities, and I'm a huge proponent of girls being able to realize what they're made of by participating in sports and whatever I can do there I'm going to be doing.
The story includes eight photos of Palin in running attire, and the last one shows that Palin still has a knack for turning a harmless publicity stunt -- like pardoning a turkey -- into a potential black eye.
Palin's violating the U.S. Flag Code, which you can read on the American Legion's site, in how that U.S. flag is treated in the photo. Under the heading Respect for the Flag, the code states, "The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise." There's also a rule against using it as drapery.
Though adherance to the Flag Code is optional, some people take it pretty seriously, as the American Flag wall of shame demonstrates, and a lot of them are in what Palin would consider the "pro-America areas of this great nation." You shouldn't drape it over a chair like a cover you bought at Bed Bath and Beyond.
It's a wonder that Palin hasn't shot her publicity team from a helicopter.
Update: A commenter points out a picture of Palin wrapping herself in the flag that was reprinted in Newsweek and taken by Wasilla, Alaska, photographer Judy Patrick, who has included it in her Palin calendar.
Transformers: Less Than Meets the Eye
Roger Ebert's review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen appears to be considerably more entertaining than the film itself:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Decepticons and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.
Ebert writes more about the movie on his blog:
The day will come when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms. ...
The action scenes can perhaps best be understood as abstract art. The Autobots and Decepticons, which are assembled out of auto parts, make no functional or aesthetic sense. They have evolved into forms too complex to be comprehended. When two or more of the Bots are in battle, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. You can't comprehend most of what they're doing, except for an occasional fist flying, a built-in missile firing, or the always dependable belching of flames.
I'm surprised that Ebert thinks the film will make a huge amount of money. My kids saw the first Transformers but have shown absolutely no interest in seeing them again, thus robbing me of several opportunities to see Megan Fox running in slow-motion. Films that feed dad's nostalgia for childhood don't go over well in my house. No amount of pleading on my part could get the family to see Speed Racer.
Richard Corliss Makes Excuses for Michael Jackson
Before Michael Jackson's death Friday, I wasn't aware that I had any affection left for the King of Pop. Like millions of others, I grew up watching Jackson and the rest of his family grow up. Janet Jackson's my age, and when she played Penny as a 10-year-old on the sitcom Good Times, I was in love. I decided to save myself for her -- not that she appreciated it -- until I finally gave up at age 18.
I'm not the only one who still had some affection for Jackson, but the extent of the tonguebath he's getting from the mainstream media has surprised me. It's one thing to downplay the accusations about child molestation and other inappropriate behavior with children that dogged the last 15 years of his life, but another thing entirely to explicitly make excuses for him. Writing for Time magazine, movie critic Richard Corliss rationalizes that even if Jackson molested kids, he was not a sexual predator because he thought of himself as a child:
Yet Jackson's profound weirdness -- not just the glove or the seaweed hair striping his face but the blanched skin, the pained eyes, the tremulous soul -- hinted that Peter Pan was the wrong role for him. Wasn't Jackson really one of Peter's Lost Boys, stranded between childhood and adolescence, loved by the public yet feeling caged and abandoned, and searching, groping for the Edenic innocence he believed was any child's birthright? ...
When he welcomed handicapped kids to the ranch, he felt he was their equal, and they were friends he could play with, or sing to -- or, he must have thought, love, in the purest sense of the word. The litany of alleged misbehavior in the 2005 trial ... is not unfamiliar among preteens. If Jackson committed these acts, it was not predator-to-prey but peer-to-peer. Having forgiven the father who abused him, could he not forgive himself for bonding with the children who came into his Neverland bed? Could this Lost Boy even understand the difference between hugging and fondling, affection and assault, generosity and lechery?
If you find any other examples of the media making excuses for child sex abuse when celebrities are involved, share the link.
IMDB Strikes Crude with 'Year One' Content Advisory
The movie reference site IMDb has a parents guide feature that's useful when determining whether a movie contains sexual content that would be inappropriate for your children. (Like most Americans I'm much more comfortable exposing the younguns to movies that contain bloodshed than any film that makes even the slightest reference to sex. I blame my Catholic upbringing and spaghetti Westerns.)
The feature is edited by users in the manner of Wikipedia and does not get editorial oversight from IMDb.
When considering whether to see Year One this weekend, I found that the users had been incredibly thorough in describing scenes that had anything to do with sex or nudity. There's so much raunchy material in the movie that the IMDb warning is 1,048 words long.
We didn't see the film.
Social Media
Subscriptions
Blogroll
Projects
RSS Advisory Board
How to Read an RSS Feed with Java Using XOM
The RSS Advisory Board Just Turned 20
Downloading 50,000 Podcast Feeds to Analyze Their RSS
Tara Calishain Explains: What is RSS?
Be Unique And Use RSS Guid Like Everybody Else
Statistics
This blog has been published since Nov. 7, 1999 (a span of 9,143 days).
Thank you for visiting Workbench.
