Scriniary

Links:

• Some people in Ohio have been trying to get a video gambling game approved by claiming it’s a game of skill. (Tried to link to an article, but the newspaper’s search results page won’t let me “see more” because a rollover ad covers that button. So, no linkage for them.) Anyway, my boyfriend wrote a program to test whether a game that depends on an 83-millisecond reaction time can really be considered a game of skill. They printed his letter, but left out the link to the game: http://jeremy.smallinfinity.net/games/react/
• CNN or BBC headlines cat macro style. Creepy in many cases: you get headlines about war and murder along with photos of cute cats.

Goals for the past week:
Revise story.
Get some sort of revised synopsis for the novel to make sure the subplots all seem to hang together.
Continue novel critique.
One OWW review.

Done: Story is up on the OWW and some things have been critted. Though not the novel.

Last Sunday, I wrote a synopsis of the novel. I meant it to be 2 pages, but it’s 6 or 7, and it helped me figure out a lot of stuff. After I go over that to check for plot clues, character traits, and setting stuff that need to be inserted earlier than they now appear, I can start writing real text.

Goals for the coming week:
Type up the novel synopsis.
Crit a novel.

I have an unusually busy week planned. All good things, but not conducive to huge goals.

Filed by scriniary at 3:42 pm under weekly_progress_reports
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Links:

• My Book Deal Ruined My Life in The New York Observer:
  

  And even before the potential post-publication humiliation, there’s deadline pressure; crippling self-doubt; diets of Entenmann’s pastries and black coffee; self-made cubicles structured with piles of books, papers and unpaid bills; night-owl tendencies; failed relationships; unanswered phone calls; weight gain; poverty; and, of course, exhaustion.

  So forget the American dream! Getting a book deal seems more like a nightmare.

  Or maybe people should have more reasonable expectations. Still, an amusing article. And what’s wrong with night-owl tendencies?

• Google Maps pedometer – Very cool: Map out a route and it tells you how long it is. It’s 1.86 miles to the bike trail from my apartment, which is just a bit too far. It would only be 1.5 miles on the more-direct route, but there’s no sidewalk and no shoulder. I’m surprised the difference in length is so small, actually.

Goals for the past week:
Revise the story and do some critting.

Ha! I did some critting. OWW, not the novel I’ve been looking forward to getting back to. (Sorry. Will get to it this week and am still enjoying it.)

Did some research for the story, fixed a few things, but didn’t do an actual revised draft.

Also got back to a novel (Seliveon’s book), reading over the outline and notes I made during the zeroth draft and making a bunch of changes to the structure. The last third or so of the book is a huge jumble and I’ve figured out how to make it more coherent. It’s back to being Sel’s story throughout now, instead of trying to cover two different people.

Goals for the coming week:
Revise story.
Get some sort of revised synopsis for the novel to make sure the subplots all seem to hang together.
Continue novel critique.
One OWW review.

Filed by scriniary at 10:43 am under weekly_progress_reports
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My stopwatch is dead. Where’s Sylar when you need him?

Forward Motion’s annual Dvorak challenge has started. I am going to try to get my speed and accuracy up. I type around 50-55 wpm now, with 1-2 mistakes per minute, according to the test I just took. The other day I did a telephone interview for an article and had just as much success keeping up with the conversation as I did when I took notes in qwerty, so I don’t really need to speed up, but I do make too many typos. And typing faster wouldn’t exactly hurt.

Goals for the past week:
Do some critting and finish the story.

Finished the story, didn’t do the critting. The OWW keeps sending me telltales and I keep ignoring them. That’s on my schedule for this evening, though.

Goals for the coming week:
Revise the story and do some critting.

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 12:31 pm under weekly_progress_reports
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My lettuce has sprouted; a few seeds of something else have also started coming up. Or maybe two something elses. (No, I didn’t label my herb container. They’ll become identifiable eventually.)

Links:

• Sci-fi writers join war on terror — The Homeland Security Department is calling on the group to help with the government’s latest top mission of combating terrorism. Weird.
• Selling Out? Says Who? —
  Selling out? Please. Find something else to hate your fellow artists for. Or, if you truly want to get over it, be as happy for your fellow artists’ success as you are for your own. Every time an artist hits it big, it kicks the starving-artist syndrome square in the nuts. If we were happy about that instead of jealous, we might stand a chance at changing the way our culture looks at art. Eventually. I hate the glorification-of-starving-artist thing.

Goals for the past week:
I meant to do some critting, and write a short story. Instead I have only a third of a short story.

Goals for the coming week:
Do some critting and finish the story.

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 2:29 pm under weekly_progress_reports
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