Scriniary

Links:

• Bayeux Tapestry. Animated. With a soundtrack.
• Photos of 300-400 calorie meals. Some of those don’t look too bad; some of them are ridiculous. A baked potato and fruit is not a meal (though I don’t consider baked potatoes food at all, so I might be biased). (Side note: the post doesn’t seem to be advocating that people only eat three of these meals a day, which would be crazy. It’s just a visual representation of x amount of food.)
• Some links (which I haven’t read) to info/debates about RSS feeds and copyright. This came out of a misunderstanding about a blog’s syndicated feed on LJ.

Shameless linking for clicks:

If you’re interested in what I think of my favorite pen, the Zeb-Roller 2000, my SanDisk mp3 player, or our KitchenAid food processor, I wrote some reviews.

Goals for the past week:
Attack those last 3 sticky notes.
Type more revisions for TM.
Write post about beginnings of novels even though I forgot what I wanted to say. (I think I have to give up on that one.)

I’ve also gone over chapters 1-8ish, looking for places where the setting seems undefined and trying to add some specific details. It’s good practice for future projects. I see everything in my head so clearly — not just in my own work but when reading other fiction — that I leave out descriptions because I don’t need it. When reading, I tend to skim descriptions, which also makes it hard for me to remember to include them when I’m writing.

Goals for the coming week:
Some more typing, but critting two novels takes priority this week, and there are two essay type things that I want to write as well.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (One or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 11:34 am under weekly_progress_reports
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Why have they stopped making shampoo for oily hair, and what can I use instead?

Links:

• Who is Sick lets you enter a zip code and see if any of your neighbors have reported being ill. Kind of creepy. At least people have to voluntarily enter their symptoms.
• Better GMail adds some features to Gmail (Firefox extension)
• Writing Historical Fiction (mp3) is more about using details, but interesting.

Goals for the past week:
Write post about beginnings of novels before I forget what I wanted to say.
Two research questions for Trapped Magic.
Type some revisions for TM.

Saturday, I lugged my binder full of manuscript to Border’s and spent two hours dealing with the sticky notes on chapters 11-15, to the accompaniment of the Columbus Guitar Society meeting. I didn’t quite finish — the last three notes require some computer-based searching of the book — but I made significant progress.

I need to get out of the house more for concentrated work time. (Though I did get a lot done at home earlier in the week.) There are too many distractions here — all the stuff to read, plus various things I’m playing with on the computer.

Goals for the coming week:
Attack those last 3 sticky notes.
Type more revisions for TM.
Write post about beginnings of novels even though I forgot what I wanted to say.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (One or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15 (only three left!), Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 5:53 pm under weekly_progress_reports
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Devlin’s Honor is the sequel to Devlin’s Luck, which I liked.

Unfortunately, Honor has all of Luck’s problems [1] and none of its charms.

[1] Chiefly this one: The prose is at times a little lengthy for the content, reemphasizing what was already clear, but without the “at times a little”.

Filed by scriniary at 7:47 pm under Books
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Links:

• Writers, Directors Fear ‘Sci-Fi’ Label Like an Attack From Mars — Anyone know if Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is any good, or just another depressing post-apocalyptic novel?

Goals for the past week:
Write hook for contest, maybe.
Write post about beginnings of novels before I forget what I wanted to say.
Start looking at the novel again.

Got my hook in before breakfast on Friday. I’m glad they extended the number of entries they took; I’m number 213. I really don’t like the end of my hook but couldn’t think of a better one.

Goals for the coming week:
Write post about beginnings of novels before I forget what I wanted to say.
Two research questions for Trapped Magic.
Type some revisions for TM.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (One or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15, Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 2:37 pm under weekly_progress_reports
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What I enjoy most about Jones’ books isn’t the mystery plot — though they are interesting — so much as the characters. That was a good thing for this book, because the plot didn’t work for me and left me unsatisfied (and more annoyed the more I thought about it) at the end.

Valley of the Soul, the third about Dubric Byerly and his employees/friends, was a lot less gory than the second book, Threads of Malice, which made me happy. This one involves the hunt for a possible blood mage who’s been killing sheep, maybe for practice before starting on people.

The characters are great — they’re likeable, but not overly so, and they face real problems with realistic reactions (or overreactions). There was a little bit of the “if the characters actually talked about x, the plot would disappear” problem, but it didn’t seem too unlikely that they would avoid talking about x.

The plot problems:

First — I almost put it down very early, when a character did something a) stupid and b) out of character. Jones is usually very careful about motivations and actions, and this stuck out as something that the character only did because it was required by the plot. I made a conscious decision to pretend it hadn’t happened or that it was a clumsy way of introducing a red herring.

Second — Spoilers behind the cut! (more…)

Filed by scriniary at 5:54 pm under Books
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Links:

• Top 10 Best Places to Get Free Books
• The NYTimes has four articles on heart attacks and heart disease
• fangs, fur, and fey is holding a hook contest. Which I will enter if I decide I have a “light” fantasy and not a “hard” fantasy.

Goals for the past week:
Revise (and submit) ATfD.
Write post about beginnings of novels.

Last week was dedicated to catching up on a bunch of important non-writing stuff. These things will insist on coming up. Also, I have two more book posts to write.

Goals for the coming week:
Write hook for contest, maybe.
Write post about beginnings of novels before I forget what I wanted to say.
Start looking at the novel again.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (Only one or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15, Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 8:06 pm under weekly_progress_reports
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Links:

• France has put its UFO files online
• What makes a writer a professional? – As in, do $4 keyword articles count, why do people write them, and shouldn’t companies want better quality articles and be willing to pay more?

  Links to an interview with a guy (in the US) who writes the $4 articles.

  The timing of this amused me. I recently signed up for a free account on the freelance bidding site Guru.com (I’m preparing to look for documentation assignments) and got a notification about a project to write 1000 articles for a grand total of $1000 to $2500. I don’t know if they got any bids; they certainly didn’t get mine.

• Missing Middle – An article in the Columbia Journalism Review wonders: Since all of the nation’s news networks and most of its top newspapers and magazines are based on the East Coast, “there’s no nationally distributed heartland perspective,” [said a journalism professor in Northwest Ohio]. If a network were based in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, or St. Louis, she asks, “what would its coverage look like?”

Goals for the past week:
Revise (and submit) ATfD. Really almost done now.
Write post about beginnings of novels.

Kind of took the week off, since I started a new job and getting things set up took longer than expected. Also, time I would have spent writing went to reading, which is not a bad thing.

Goals for the coming week:
Revise (and submit) ATfD.
Write post about beginnings of novels before I forget what I wanted to say.
Taxes!!

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (Only one or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15, Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Filed by scriniary at 3:41 pm under journalism, weekly_progress_reports
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