October 2002 Archives

Here are some good books that assist me with my writing:

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

The first section is a brief memoir of his live and how it led to his career in writing. It is interesting to see how his young life went and how he became a writer. It is entertaining and helpful in that "if he could do it, I can do it" way.

The rest of the book encompasses his methods and views on writing. he preaches Strunk & White's The Elements of Style pretty heavily, for obvious reasons. He is self-depreciating, to the point, and delivers some sound advice for aspiring writers.

It covers topics such as writing style, the process of writing, setting up a place for writing, how to get through writing the whole book, and how to write a publishable manuscript, among many other points that are well worth studying. Extremely good stuff. I heartily recommend it.

The Elements of Style (4th Edition) by William Strunk, Jr. & E. B. White

This dinky book doesn't look like much. It is thin and the cover is not flashy. If you skim through it, you will notice that there are no paragraphs and that the entries are short and blunt.

It is also the single best book about the craft of writing. All of those goodies that you learned about how to craft sentences in school are boiled down into a few sections of this outstanding little book.

If you are serious about writing, get this book. I guarantee that most editors own it.

A sudden fiction thing that I've tried writing before. Never been particularly successful at getting the... whatever it is I'm trying to get, but that doesn't stop me from poking at it.

Everyone needs a clock utility for their Palm; that's just a fact. Yeah, there's a little clock you can pull up on the menu bar, but that's not a "real" clock, at least not to me. You need an alarm clock function, plus a timer... preferably several of each...

Well, Dave shot a file to me a few months ago and showed me that BigClock, by Jens Rupp, is exactly what I wanted.

The version he gave me was 2.2, which has worked great but is a bit glitchy at times and flat out refused to respond in the Timer mode today, so I set about finding myself my own copy of the donate-ware.

Turns out that Jens is up to something like v2.83, and I can't say enough good about it. Avoid the extra little plug-ins, they're pointless, but the added functionality in the Timers section is great (for instance, set up your hourly contracter work rate, start the timer, and it'll tell you how much your client owes you when you're done).

Anyway, for palm geeks like me, there's your product recommendation for the day.

If you haven't yet sampled Fox's gonzo space Western, Firefly, its creator, Joss Whedon, would like to make one small request: Please do... and preferably tonight at 8 pm/ET. "This week definitely matters [to the series' future]," the celebrated writer-director-producer tells TV Guide Online. "[Network prez] Sandy Grushow said to me before we ever started that this [show] is going to be a slow grow, and [the World Series] is going to hurt us, which it has. Fox has a lot of shows that are underperforming because of this weird season.

"So," he continues, "I'm not like, 'My future is assured!' But it's also not like the death knell chiming."

Far from it. In fact, Fox just commissioned three additional scripts from Whedon, the mastermind behind UPN's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its WB spinoff, Angel. However, Firefly has yet to get a full-season pickup. "[The script order from the net] is a vote of confidence, and it's a way of not making a decision," Whedon theorizes. "The next few weeks will be important, and this week I'm particularly stressing because I think it's such a good entrance into the world [of Firefly]. That's why I'm all hyped about it.

"It has a number of flashbacks to how the crew got together," he continues, "so it's a really good way to learn how it all began. For somebody meeting the characters for the first time, it's a real insight into who they are. There's not all this [plot] information to process, which is a problem because the pilot was never shown. People are like, 'Um, what's going on?' The idea was never to confuse people."

Just so Whedon doesn't add to viewers' consternation, he quickly notes that the backtracking scenes are not highlights from the debut that Fox shot down. "These flashbacks are to before the pilot," he clarifies. "The pilot was the story of how this crew picked up a few wayward stragglers; [this installment] flashes back to how [the original gang] first found the ship itself, what the ship is and what it means to Mal, because [the ship] really is the 10th character on the show."

Now that that matter has been cleared up, Whedon hopes that viewers will be able to sit back, relax and enjoy the show... for years to come, ideally. For the moment, though, he sighs, "Everything is kind of in flux."

I dig this show. I want it to prosper. I'm also really annoyed that Fox is forcing Whedon to air certain kinds of episodes, where "force" implies a passive aggresive action:

(a) They rearranged the air-dates on the episodes so that the 'easy to view' episodes are all at the beginning.
(b) By not airing the pilot, they've force Whedon to write 'easier' scripts to understand, since virtually no one's seen the pilot.

This means (to me) that the show comes off as less story-oriented, less connected, and much more episodic than the stuff Whedon normally does, which is really a shame, since it's not playing to the strengths of his writing staff. They can write fantastic one-offs, but the truly best episodes are those that tie into the major storylines -- which they aren't able to WRITE right now.

Gargh. Tune it. I don't think you'll regret it.

Remember a few weeks month ago when I was bitching about trying to get MT going on any machine/server that had anything to do with work?

Yeah. Finally got that worked out TODAY. Mandrake, running Apache, FINALLY running all the patches and directives I needed to get the frelling thing to run.

10 minutes later, I had the start of the page.

Then it was 5pm and I realized I'm out of the office doing training until Monday, November 4th.

That insane cackling you hear, echoing the sadistic irony of the scene? That would be me.

While babysitting Katherine tonight, working on a thing for Rey's game with Jackie and doing the last-edit-before-the-queries on Strange Weapons, we turned on the TV and caught some Buffy reruns on F/X.

Season Three. Not the best stuff out there, but still it was pretty damn good stuff. Shocking how much Jackie and I remember from each episode.

Man I miss Oz. He was cool.

Really cool Firefly promo for this Friday.

Just for kicks, I picked up a used copy of Resident Evil a few weeks ago at E/B. I'd heard that the interface was sort of weird (it is), and frankly that's the sort of game I'd rather play on my PC than a console but hell, it was only 5 bucks.

I started fiddling around with it a few days ago.

Holy sweet criminey, but they do know how to crank the freak-out dial up to 11, don't they?

Gah.

I say again: Gah.

While we walked he kept a hand thrust out towards the highway, thumb extended.

"Warding charm," he said in response to my look. "We don't want anyone to notice us while we're out here; this makes sure they won't. Virtually fool-proof except for the actual fools willing to pull over."

"What do you do with them?"

He shrugged, his shoulders sliding oddly beneath the long coat. "Let them see what I really look like. Most of them assume it's some bad acid coming back up or a warning from god or something and take off."

"That's who pulls over?"

He nodded. "Hippies and good samaritans; they're both dying out, though, so it doesn't come up much as it used to. The sixties were a pain in the ass."

Per usual, I reacted to money stress (refinancing the house, which seems to be *knock wood* going fine) by going out and buying something I didn't actually need and could barely justify -- Belkin's G700 PDA Keyboard for Palm m125, m130, m500, i705.

Initially I was pleased by the keyboard itself but let down because it seemed to go into a sleep mode if I stopped typing for more than about five seconds -- I had to take the palm off the keyboard, cycle power and reconnect it to get it going again. Could have been a deal-breaker -- and a real bummer.

Update: it's a known issue interfacing with some models -- easily and quickly fixed with a 48.5k download.

Surprise, surprise: there's even a place to plug my sync-cradle's power cord into the keyboard to let the Palm stay charged while I type. I can write nearly anywhere without relying on my crappy handwriting. Sweet.

Question: What's the last thing you bought just to cheer yourself up, or do you not do that.

It finally occured to me last night that the Buffy crew has been missing a cast member for awhile... a subtle element of the show that makes it somehow 'better' when present and 'worse' when it's not.

That cast member? The high school. MAN it's good to have it back.

Buffy/ Haunted will be rebroadcast on Saturday 10/12/02 from 7:00pm-9:00pm in the Denver area (where some moron at the UPN repeater spilled a jar of mayonnaise on an important keyboard or something during the broadcast).

Brett Favre, Donald Driver, Ahman Green. What do these men have in common?

a) All Green Bay Packers.
b) Collectively spanked the Bears tonight.
c) All members of the illustrious Typhoid Bay Fever fantasy football team.
d) Just earned a truckload of points for said team.
e) All of the above.

For a number of reasons, I haven't been able to follow the NFL games very much this season. Monday nights have lately become the only night I have time to do anything around the house, Sunday night's game is on a channel I don't get, and Sundays themselves, once a bastion of footbally goodness, have been planned out and filled with activities until somewhere around November 1st.

But tonight we tried to get caught up on a few taped shows and while rewinding one, noticed the game was on.

And it had Brett Favre, whom I like.
And it was against Chicago, which is classic.
And it had a lot of guys I'm using on my FFB team.

I don't know if you'd call it relaxing or productive (more on "productive" later), but it felt good to veg on the couch and watch one of the greats of the game.*

I finished up Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome (Jerome Klapka), 1859-1927, available via download at Project Gutenberg. For those not familiar, PG collects public domain literary work and puts them online for free download -- a noble project that's been going on for over a decade.

What's the book, you ask? A travelogue. A comedic non-fiction. The ne'er-do-well of England's response to Walden.

It's a blog, actually.

It starts in a month.

Our demographic surveys indicate that many of you will be employed throughout October and November. Because work tends to interfere with the creative process, our team of negotiators have brokered special deals with your managers and bosses. For the next two months, any time spent planning your novel, writing your novel, or chatting online about your plans for writing a novel, will be considered Company Time and will be paid accordingly by your supervisor. Your employers feel that is the least they can do for you.

Also, they say you can print out your novel on the company laser printer when you're finished.

I really wish I knew what I was going to write. My brain is all cloudy and befoggled.

Just a couple Whedon quotes that tickled me:

"I don't want to create responsible shows with lawyers in them. I want to invade people's dreams."

"I hate it when people talk about 'Buffy' as being campy. I hate camp. I don't enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has single-handedly lowered SAT scores."

Watched the season premiere of Alias on Sunday. Good stuff, and I really like what they seem to have in place for this season -- MAN but they are playing hardball with the poor reporter guy.

We're still developmentally disabled in regards to taping shows this season, though: this time, we managed to have the VCR tape the first twenty minutes set to the WRONG CHANNEL, while we were watching the right one. Realize that we were actually sitting right there while we made this screw up and you'll have some inkling of how lame we are. We regularly taped five to six shows last year with not one hiccup. What happened to us?

Only show we haven't screwed up yet: Firefly.

I'm officially swearing off trailers for The Two Towers. Don't get me wrong: they kick ass and I love everything I've seen so far but I want the highest possible percentage of the movie to be brand-spanking new to my eyes when I see it in theatres on the of-course-I've-already-requested-time-off 18th of December.

That said, Julia has a link up to the latest trailer.