BBC News: 20 of your most hated clichés. The first ten are:
These are fairly heinous. My personal bugbear is "irregardless" because it's NOT A WORD. Then there's conversational fillers "like" and "you know". I don't know, and I don't like, please get a vocabulary.
Crossed the magic 35,000 work mark on Sunday night, it's all downhill from here. The story threads are coming together nicely, though my bad guy did something inexplicable again. He'd demanding a much bigger part than he's supposed to have. Unplanned things are happening to advance the plot and I like how the story is shaping up.
Hubby has created a legend. A St Louis writer, Fatebringer, was used as one of the demonstration user IDs for Hubby's word count widgets. He's gained a cult following, random strangers are tracking his word count and adding him as a writing buddy.
Three of us from the St Louis region invaded that Saturday write-in of the Columbia region, and a good time was had by all. Excellent fried chicken, friendly word wars, a brilliant waiter, and a brief snow flurry on the way down. We're currently beating them on words per person in our regional word war.
BBC News: Dead Parrot sketch ancestor found
An ancestor of Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century. Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which has been translated from Greek manuscripts, contains a joke where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died. "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!" is the reply. In the Python sketch, written 1,600 years later, the shopkeeper claims the dead parrot is "pining for the fjords". The 265 jokes in Philogelos are attributed to a pair of jokers called Hierocles and Philagrius, about whom very little is known.
The Monty Python Parrot Sketch mutated a little over time, the Wikipedia page has an audio clip of it. My favourite rendition was from Margaret Thatcher at the 1990 Conservative Party conference. Hearing her on the nine o'clock news intoning "This is an ex-parrot" in reference to the Liberal Democrat party, whose logo was a stylised orange bird, was priceless.
Traditionally, week two of NaNoWriMo is where it all goes downhill. Plots fail, word counts flounder, characters flail uselessly. Week Two is where it gets "interesting".
Wash: This landing is gonna get pretty interesting.
Mal: Define "interesting"
Wash: [deadpan] Oh God, oh God, we're all gonna die?Serenity, 2005
The same thing often happens on a larger scale with your second NaNoWriMo novel. I made the 50k, but the story was depressing, and I'm never writing chick lit again. My third NaNo was firmly back in the sci-fi camp, and it was an awesome ride, despite starting a week late. I had fun with the fourth one too, which leaned slightly towards fantasy. This is my fifth year doing NaNo and I started week two ahead of my personal schedule with a comfortable cushion of words between me and oblivion.
River Tam: Put a bullet to me. Bullet in the brain pan. Squish.
Serenity, 2005
Monday night my bad guy barged into a scene where he wasn't supposed to be, and seriously advanced the plot. My sidekick has been helping everyone get established, and it's about time for a new character to step in. Things are going surprisingly well and I should hit 30k by the weekend.
Scraped ice off my car this morning, and there was a snow flurry over the weekend. It must be winter. This happens every year, and it's always a surprise. Got a new pair of leather gloves at the weekend, dug my roll-brim Rowan Coccoon hat out of the drawer, and I'm ready.
Nine days working on my novel so far, and I'm one day ahead of my self-imposed 2k a day schedule. Broke the 20k barrier last night after pounding out about 1300 words at the Central Bread Co write in. Mike is pushing me to do a 60k novel this year, but he's already written 75k. The Regional word wars are going well, Indy and Manchester are making us work to catch up.
I got my friend and co-worker into geocaching. I got him into NaNoWriMo, this is his third year. I have my first karate lesson next Monday and he swears he's not going to pick that one up.
Started the heel flap of the Viking socks at knitting morning on Saturday. Flap and gusset heels are not my specialty, I'm determined to keep doing them until I feel good about the technique. Need to learn darning, there's a hole in the foot of one Boudica sock, which is one of my favourite pairs.
Susan opened a spinning shop! I saw some of her hand-dyed fibre at the Weaving Department spin in and it was beautiful. Can't wait to vist!
"To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:"William Shakespeare,
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
"Popped his clogs" is an expression my co-worker hadn't heard before, to clarify it I said "shuffled off this mortal coil" and that didn't help. I love colloquialisms. "The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead" tickles me. We had a hamster in work for a day and it would run so fast on its little wheel that the hamster would do a full revolution, clinging to the tracks.
NaNoWriMo body count:
Three male bandits killed by cudgel and knife
One Victorian female killed by consumption (aka tuberculosis)
Lynx and rabbit killed and eaten in 8th century France
Word count: 12,380
Hubby says I write like a machine, pushing out 2000 words a day. I faltered on Wednesday but I'm back in the saddle and weekends are good for word count. We'll be at the St Charles write-in 11am-2pm at the Crooked Tree coffee house, and the official write-in at Central Bread Co 2pm-4pm.
BBC News: Free the Gunpowder Plot One.
Was one of the Gunpowder Plotters an innocent victim of circumstance? As effigies of Guy Fawkes again go up in flames, is it time to rectify a 400-year-old miscarriage of justice? After the failed attempt to blow up Parliament in November 1605, Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest, was hanged, drawn and quartered, and his parboiled head displayed on London Bridge.
A 17th Century book describing the execution of this "barbarous traitor" sold at auction last year, with the unique selling point that its cover was allegedly made from the executed man's skin. But was the subject of this text really guilty? On the day when the UK marks the anniversary of its most famous attempted coup, a historian is asking some awkward questions about one of those executed for his role in the Gunpowder Plot.
We will never truly know whether Garnet was innocent or not. The Gunpowder Plot Society isn't convinced. They say that Garnet knew of the plot and did nothing to prevent it, making him culpable. Garnet was not one of the thirteen plotters but the Gunpower Plot Society has a profile of him, along with everyone else involved or touched by the plot and an excellent overview of the plot itself.
I'm not convinced Garnet was innocent.
The NaNoWriMo website suffered its usual overload and spent much of the last few days lying on its back twitching. My body count so far is three bandits and a lynx, Hubby killed off three drunk Norwegians on day 2, so we're tied. Came into work on Monday with my laptop for lunchtime writing, and the novel seems to be going swimmingly. If I can keep writing 2000 words a day, I should be done by Thanksgiving. I'm writing chapter two of twelve.
I've even got a little knitting in. This is my Viking sock with two repeats of the big cable completed, and the two skeins of yarn from yarn lust, merino/seacell on the left and merino/silver on the right:
In person they are a deep rich red purple colour, and a sparkly grey and black. I was expecting the merino/silver yarn to be a bit scratchy, but it seems very soft. It's easier to kill a few minutes with the sock than the laptop so the sock is still travelling with me.
