Forum: Author Hangout

everything under the son.

EB, really? Was she a whiner or a moaner, under the son?

No, kidding of course; I'm fairly sure that Whinedozer is an acid reference to everyone's most beloved, reliable, rock-solid, user-friendly Word processor. I don't recall having that problem with a word-count dump... and I've never touched Word since version 5.1 for the Mac.

As for the constant emails, aren't you broken-in and submissive, yet, in the face of Google, eBay, Amazon, and ... hell, all of 'em constantly bombardin' yer in-box? I think my "dump ratio" is running one keeper for every 10 spam that get auto-flensed.

As for the point that NaNo is a forced march, I think one saving grace is that it pounds into one's head the necessity for writing fast and free-form, letting it flow, without stopping to edit (or breathe). Which may possibly result in two things: a completed draft (!), and a pile o'crap needing a chain saw and a hatchet to edit/rewrite into something digestible.

This year is going to be my 17th NaNoWriMo. I do all my writing, as I've done everything else for more than twenty years, on Slackware Linux. I've never had any problems with the NaNo submission interface.

I note that NaNo is actually using the Unix wc for their official word counter - the results it gives me are always identical to the ones I get on my own machine. This is occasionally handy, like last year when I cleared the goal by only a few words with less than two minutes to spare, and was able to submit without worrying that the official count was going to come up a few words short.

My first novel-length work came out of NaNo. After 16 years, a bunch of victories and more losses, it doesn't have the motivating effect that it used to, though. NaNoWriMo has taught me that, a) I'm capable of writing 15,000 words in a day, and b) nothing bad happens if I don't. So I've developed a tendency to procrastinate until near the end of the month, and then try to catch up in a sprint in the last week. Sometimes I make it, sometimes I don't.

One thing it has instilled is the habit of writing every day. It's not at NaNo rates, but it's something every day. Even when I'm camping out in the middle of nowhere, miles from power or decent network access. (I missed one day this year. I just lost track of time, and when I looked it was after midnight and I hadn't gotten my writing done.)

Nope, neither Heaven or Hell. More likely the purgatory of self-publishing were the digital work sinks into the ever-swelling tides of oblivion.

What you end up with is not a novel, not anything. It's slop, but with possibilities.

Well, to be honest about it, most first drafts fall somewhere between exalted excrement and curdled crap, with nuggets of good shit scattered throughout. That's why Eve invented red ink (python blood on a sharp stick) after she read Adam's first attempt at a travel journal (post-Eden).

So this year is a forced march; four days' worth keyed & counted, nearly 8K words.

Tolerate no excuses for brain freeze: just grab a scene from the plot list and start with a sentence, any sentence. Once the clog is pried loose, the rest flows. Don't look back. Never edit. Don't shove a finger in the hole lest you drown in a shower of doubt. It will clarify later, the good bits appearing like islands in a sea of red ink.

=GB=

That's why Eve invented red ink (python blood on a sharp stick) after she read Adam's first attempt at a travel journal (post-Eden).

So what language did Eve write in..?

Given she is the 'first' woman (if you discount lilith) she predates all known language...

So what language did Eve write in..?

She was created with innate knowledge, as proven by the first words from her mouth after realizing she'd been screwed by the Snake: "Oh, Shit!" (That's a translation, of course. The exact words are lost to history.)

So what language did Eve write in..?

Given she is the 'first' woman

Another of Adam's females was Up. That is where we get the saying "Up and Adam!"

Another of Adam's females was Up. That is where we get the saying "Up and Adam!"

OMG, an Atom Ant referrence?! Joy, sometimes you impress me. Not often, mind you, but sometimes.

OMG, an Atom Ant referrence?! Joy, sometimes you impress me.

Shaggy made the reference, not I.

Worse, you've now admitted to being impressed by him... :)

I am one of the Luddites that uses MS Office.

That makes you a masochist, not a Luddite. :)

OK, I hate to show my ignorance but in the seven moons of Saturn is NaNoWriMo

It's National Novel Writing Month. It's a writing challenge: Take the month of November and write a 50,000-word novel. It doesn't have to be good; it just has to be 50,000 words. The idea is that having a tangible goal and official permission to write crap can break the mental block that keeps people from just sitting down and writing a novel.

There's a website at nanowrimo.org, but be warned that they rolled out a new website this year, and it's horrible by design, on top of being broken in numerous ways, with no apparent progress towards actually fixing anything.

it's horrible by design, on top of being broken in numerous ways, with no apparent progress towards actually fixing anything.

Agreed. It seems to follow the new web design site and client paradigm of super cool wherein there are no visible menus; icons lay scattered about with no labels; and when one accidentally finds a link that goes somewhere, it's actually a dead end with no link back. It's like a giant corn maze with no map and no logical path, and if users begin to catch on, the designers update it.

It's like a giant corn maze with no map and no logical path, and if users begin to catch on, the designers update it.

As you say, navigating the sire isn't easy. One thing that did seem strange is that they encourage if not insist that authors randomise their stories before submitting them to be word counted. Which means one could simply submit random drivel and be counted as a contributing author.

Why anyone would do that is beyond me, but allowing it seems stupid.

they encourage if not insist that authors randomise their stories before submitting them to be word counted.

Actually the new site is quite different: it's an honor system. The participant (I, me) simply drops a number into the form and updates the total. I've not read any reason for the change. But, in fact, there is no confirmation.

Your point about streaming 'drivel' into the previous form is valid. The 'randomizing' was due to the tin-foil hat loonies who screamed that the NaNo event conspirators had set up the process to steal their precious words. I'd imagine that a few loonies even suspected an algorithm in play to unscramble their scrambled submission, to facilitate theft.

At any rate, then and now, it's all a self-driven quest, to be honest with oneself or not. NaNo is a fun 'nudge' toward self-discipline. For me, the most valuable aspect is enforcing the need to sit down, choose a scene to develop, and then to grab a sentence out of the air to start the flow. Once the fatty hairball is dislodged from the drain trap, a stream flows and Muse only knows what direction the scene will take. But at least it flows and words pile up in the bit bucket.

Actually the new site is quite different:

Obviously I'll take your word for that but note that the new site is where I found that information. So if the requirements have changed they have failed to properly update the site.

That's unsurprising; the new site is a complete shitshow. It's possible that they're describing something that the site has in the fantasy world they live in where the new site isn't a huge pile of shit missing numerous critical features that the old site had and months away from being ready for public use.

But there is in fact no verifier this year; I've actually been registered as a winner since early on the 1st, because I put the wrong number into one of the unexplained boxes when creating the project, and, despite my fixing that immediately, the site still thinks I'm a winner. Others have had similar problems because of accessibility issues. There has been no apparent progress towards fixing this - or, really, any of the other major bugs.

But yeah, in past years you could paste whatever random spew you wanted into the verifier, and it'd accept it. It was automatic; there was no one reading or judging your writing. All it was doing was counting runs of non-whitespace between whitespace (using the Unix wc, to judge by its behavior).

There is, partly for practical reasons and partly by intentional design, no quality control on what you write for NaNo. The main prize for writing a 50,000-word novel for NaNoWriMo is you have a 50,000-word novel. Cheating on that isn't cheating anyone but yourself.

The main prize for writing a 50,000-word novel for NaNoWriMo is you have a 50,000-word novel. Cheating on that isn't cheating anyone but yourself.

That, or a 50K word shopping list, or 50K telephone directory, or 50K instances of "Mary Had a Little Lamb." NaNo, despite all the website hype to the contrary, is an excruciatingly solitary exercise in self-flagellation. Even group write-in's wherein folk gather to jostle one another for available plug-ins, finds them hunched over in solitary writing. I find it a bit jarring. Writing is NOT a group activity, and like a size 13 foot in a size 7 ballet slipper, it weren't never meant to be.

each contributor writes a story starter than passes it on for the next contributor to continue.

Sounds fun, and I've seen those. There's been a book or two of a story done by some collaborating Sci-Fi authors, as I recall, that originated that way. But of course it won't do for NaNo, unless all intend to claim the total word count (hey, why not?).

That, or a 50K word shopping list, or 50K telephone directory, or 50K instances of "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

If that's what you really want to have, I guess.

I've found write-ins useful because they designate a time for me to sit down and focus on actually writing, instead of trying to watch Netflix at the same time, or getting distracted by all the other distractions a laptop connected to the Internet provides. (I usually don't connect to any WiFi that might be available at write-ins, except sometimes to update word count at the end.) The benefits to my word count have been enough to justify the time and hassle of packing my computer up and driving somewhere just to write for a couple of hours — because it means I actually write for a couple of hours.

But I don't think I'm going to any this year, because they took away my regional forum, which was the one means I had of communicating with my local NaNo community, and replaced it with a useless crippled chat feed.

The benefits to my word count have been enough to justify the time and hassle of packing my computer up

My Alphasmart Neo portable keyboard & word processor (it's NOT a 'puter nor a tablet) has a full size key layout, a word count feature, and when I take it to a meeting I need not jostle elbows to claim a plugin. (three AA batteries, a year's service) Back at home, a USB cable streams the work into my 'puter. Costs $20 to $40 on eBay. Price is worth it just to avoid accidentally losing/dropping the expensive laptop.

I earmarked a whole afternoon for writing earlier this week but my net output was about 700 words

Try using a larger net..?

I stand corrected. What can I say, I've been drinking.

You're not alone in enjoying a good licker...

Not the most recent situation that has 'allegedly' occurred.

After the "all knowing, all seeing, all powerful" got pissed at a small number of humans, he flooded the entire earth, killing everyone except Noah and family, thus was genocide invented by the "god who loves us", so using your example, Noah's family must have committed incest generation upon generation in order to repopulate the earth...

Hmm....

Even if you believe in evolution, logically, there would have had to have been a lot of incest going on among the first generations of humans.

I don't think evolution requires 'belief' any more than I think glacial erosion requires 'belief'.

As for the incest thing, it has continued to be a popular family pastime for generations past and is likely to continue for generations to cum.

I don't think evolution requires 'belief' any more than I think glacial erosion requires 'belief'.

It's possible ob observe and measure glacial erosion. No so with evolution.

No so with evolution.

So Noah and family included European, Scandinavian, Mongol, Arabic, Negroid, Asian etc etc... If not, then those traits evolved...

Or Noah et al had nothing to do with it and they just evolved...

Little Red Riding Hood.

"Grandma, what a big cock you have...!!"

"All the better to fuck you with."

"Not so fast....!! First you gotta eat me..!!"

You isolate a population of short-lifespan critters and watch how it changes from the type. Done it myself.

There is speciation, As described by Darwin, which is what you observed.

Then there is the modern theory of evolution (all life "evolved" from sing cell organisms.

Unless you have observed an insect become something that is not an insect, you haven't observed evolution in any sense meaningful to the modern theory of evolution.

My experiment verified the principle of biological drift.

No, it would take a hell of a lot more than Just quantity of biological drift for an insect to become an amphibian. You can't even demonstrate empirically that there isn't a finite limit to the kind of biological drift that is observable.

Besides that kind of drift is mostly subtractive, the removal of genes from the gene pool. So logically, there has to be a limit.

There are plenty of plants which have drifted from purely terrestrial to amphibian.

Yes, but they are still plants.

Are you being deliberately dense?

I'm not talking about a terrestrial or airborne insect adapting to an aquatic life, but still recognizably an insect.

I am literally talking about a bee becoming a frog. genetic changes resulting in a shift from one taxonomic phylum to another.

The former is trivial. The latter is necessary for the modern theory of evolution to be true.

first generations of humans

When our original ancestor gave birth to the first human unless at the same time she had a fraternal twin as a boy, to continue the human race there likely was some beastiality as well as incest so the first human woman could give birth to other humans. Hopefully her genes were dominant and the males she gave birth to were more human than not, so when her human daughters gave birth it was only incest and not beastiality that produced the offspring.

When our original ancestor gave birth to the first human unless at the same time she had a fraternal twin as a boy, to continue the human race there likely was some beastiality as well as incest so the first human woman could give birth to other humans.

Why are the only options a fraternal twin boy or bestiality?

All it takes is a brother, or the girls father... No beast necessary, let alone the improbability of bestial intercourse resulting in viable progeny.

All it takes is a brother, or the girls father... No beast necessary, let alone the improbability of bestial intercourse resulting in viable progeny.

The first human is born from something less evolved, according to evolution as I understand it. If there were a human brother or father the first human would have been at best the second human. It is the chicken or the egg question. The first chicken hatched from the egg of something not exactly a chicken. And the first chickens eggs were fertilized by something not exactly a rooster. Unless the first chicken eggs included a rooster or two to make the hen fertile to produce more chickens.

The first human is born from something less evolved, according to evolution as I understand it. If there were a human brother or father the first human would have been at best the second human. It is the chicken or the egg question.

Only if you insist on a 'hey presto' moment when the first human is born.

Given that there are multiple births occurring, yes one will be 'first' but how to define that isn't easy. It is more likely that numerous births occurred that could be termed 'human' and breeding between them would both advance the changes and marginalise those less 'evolved'. In time those who have evolved to best shrive will do so, the remainder will not.

In the last 150 years the average height of people in industrialised nations has increased approximately 10 centimetres. So which was the first one to average more than 5 centimetres and does it matter?

My theory is that industrial nations have more men's magazines and those are confined to the top shelves, man has evolved by gaining height in order to more easily reach the porn mags.