I would also buy The Oppressively Real Guide to Writing and Publishing, and/or a book compiled from Making Light posts on the topic. I hope someday to change the 'would' to 'will'.
Posted for what it's worth in my small group of readership, since no one else on my f-list has done it.
I had this really surreal feeling when I went to go donate to Red Cross online and then I remembered the last time I'd done that it was for something a little closer to home. (Normally when I donate to organizations it's check or cash.)
Just... horrible. Not that death is ever good.
Apropos of nothing else in this thread: I just got my copy of Making Book from the nice UPS lady about an hour ago.
My only complaint is that there's not enough of it. :)
(I'm about halfway through.)
I have to say that I'm down with Kanji of the year.
Of course there's no such thing as an opera buffalo. They were all killed off...
Oh. Buffo.
Never mind.
Forget everything about the actual service offered; I just can't get over that web page design. I don't think I could do business with anyone with a web page that looks like that.
Xopher: Seriously, there's a link between childhood stuttering and forced right-handedness?
Wow. Put that in my 'plus' column for my dim memories of starting out a leftie. (My mother had this habit of rewriting history, so I don't know if I'm misremembering or she is, see...)
Paul: This seems to be reasonably accurate.
I know that the basics of what people I personally know would like include things like child custody passing to a surviving spouse, automatically being considered the next of kin in various circumstances (medical care/decisions, inheritances, etc.), and joint adoptions. Being able to be part of insurance benefits is a plus for people, too (spouses are family; roommates are not).
Lenny, I'd agree with you if it weren't for the three facts:
1. Scopes.
2. "Community standards"
3. They'll claim morality and religion are separate things.
Very unfortunately, this country has managed to weasel its way around the separation of Church and State by that third argument.
I suspect that if it's fought strongly enough that it'll at the least get overturned later, but at this point I would not actually bet on it.
My personal reaction is to explain to the nice Mr. Allen that should he get that bill passed, I will be boycotting all products manufactured at and/or distributed by companies in Alabama, and explaining exactly why to the companies.
Like, say... Sony. Who has a major manufacturing plant there. And since I can't know in advance which products might have been made there...
There's also Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, and Mercedes-Benz; Saks is headquartered there.
Reason isn't going to work, but Alabama is on a big push to attract more big business, so pocketbook threats might.
I'm not generally judgemental of other people's tastes and fantasies... But clearly this type of fantasy belongs nowhere but in the privacy of your own homes.
No one said you had to read it.
Kylee, that information is in the appendices, of course. Duh. :-P
JvP: 'squee' is a sound fangirls make. I presume that's the same thing T was referring to. It's sort of a wild, high-pitched sound of delight.
The test was not suited to my normal way of double-checking, which is to not only look at the URLs and the wording but the mail header info. So I didn't answer three of the questions because they would have been into header territory. (I got the other 7 right.)
But as a rule I just assume all links in email where it matters (meaning finances are on the line) are bogus and go straight to the site if I actually want to follow up for whatever reason, and that's what I tend to recommend to people.
Strangely, the fact that I don't consider it likely I'm going to see my place of residence fall victim to a terrorist attack is the reason I think "Homeland Security", the colour alerts, the Patriot Act, etc. are stupid ideas.
Well, not the only reason, but it has a lot to do with it. "Stop scaring people and actually do something effective", more or less.
I've been meaning to tackle my take on the food question.
The problem is, it's hard to describe, because what I do as a writer, vs what I'll read and enjoy (or tolerate) as a reader, don't always overlap.
For instance, I love that Steve Brust includes quite a bit of detail about at least one meal in any given Vlad book; Vlad's a good cook, he grew up in a restaurant, he ought to notice such things even if he weren't also a gourmand. Most of his ingredients are recognizable to me, and where they aren't real-world items, they're presented in a context that makes it fairly obvious what they are.
I also like the way Cherryh handles food and meal descriptions in the Foreigner books. Since food rituals are very important to the aliens and it's even been a point of contention in the slightly uneasy peace they have, it ought to sometimes take center stage; since humans can't eat all atevi food, obviously it can come up in that context as well. Poison's a weapon sometimes used, too. Food and meal descriptions usually make use of these facts therefore.
On the other hand, I hate when I am reading some High Fantasy book (which you can put on the list of reasons I read so little HF these days) and they make a huge deal about the food using these obscure names for items that are Just Like Ours only It's Not Earth. Superfluous description of the food is pointless, too, regardless of setting. You know:
The rolls were made of stone-ground i'fskdl -- the same grain grown in the fields the hero could see from where he sat. With each roll, a small daub of animal fat and a spicy dip was included. Not everyone partook of the dip, of course; it was composed of ground hiakljfds -- a plant with a hot, juicy fruit that could be pulped for its spice -- and could cause the eyes of even a strong man to water. It was unusual for it to be served this late in the season; perhaps J'Kjlkfds had had a good harvest. Along with the rolls, frosty glasses of jlfdkld were poured, mist forming above the deep crimson liquid as it was exposed to the chill autumn air...
Someone please shoot me now for writing that.
Now, since my main series is a modern setting, food is mostly used as a backdrop to conversation or thought. I don't go into great detail (except once, pointedly, and that's a tangent for another thread I think), but you may end up with a rough description of a meal by the end of a conversation, filled in as actions around the dialogue.
What I've written in my more traditional fantasy world has been very close to that, though I haven't done any sort of Big State Dinner yet, which might lead to my elaborating more. I do go into a bit more detail than in the real world books, mainly because, well, I too suffer from "rename a vegetable" syndrome, but not much more than that. And if I ever do write a paragraph like the one above in a work that gets printed, I kindly ask all y'all to email me disemvowelled copies until I publically swear to never do it again, unless I'm writing a parody, which I might.
I'm someone who habitually finds sex scenes uncomfortable to read and write, both for the same reason: I don't really need to know the details of how someone goes about making love, unless I'm personally involved with them.
I don't mind knowing the characters had sex. Sometimes, in fact, I actually want to know that (or that they didn't). I don't mind knowing that it was gentle, or rough, or in a disused men's room in a partly abandoned office building, or on someone's couch. What I don't really have any desire to know is who put whose hand where and who moaned G-d's name and who kissed whose stomach and worked their way down, for seven or ten paragraphs' worth of travelogue. And too many sex scenes read that way to me.
Sex is intensely private in a way that very little else is to me. I wouldn't want a lover to describe in detail what I did with him, and I won't do that to my characters, either.
That having been said, there's a sex scene in my second book which goes into virtually no detail but I hope gets the emotion across. I suppose I'll find out when it goes to my beta-readers.
Graydon: I'd be more willing to buy that -- I am in your case, for instance -- if people had just stuck to "Why don't you like tabbed browsing?" Since you're the first person to ask:
To me, tabbed browsing is like putting every piece of paper I own in the same pile and then having to remember where it all is in relation to itself, maybe with a few stickies to help me sort it out, or putting every story note for ever separate world I've ever written or contemplated in the same notebook. I need more separation than that, or I can no longer figure out what I was doing where and when.
When I'm multi-tasking online, I have separate windows that I can partially see the content of all at the same time that to me are more clearly separated and easier to switch between. I very rarely lose my place this way, whereas when I tried a tabbed browser when they were first available, I couldn't ever keep track of it. I get that it works for some people -- nowhere did I say "and the rest of y'all should hate it too" -- but it drives me buggy. When I work on paperwork or collating story notes together or similar things, I take a wide space and spread out the stuff I'm working on, for similar reasons.
The closest I can come to tabbed browsing is the use of 'screen' on Unix systems, and that's only by assigning the exact same screen sessions in the same order to the same tasks: screen 0 is mail, screen 1 is in my HTML directory, screen 2 is in IRC (even if I've been logged off IRC for 2 months), etc. If I change that even temporarily it throws me off when I go back to it. Since web browsing is the changeable beast it is, that doesn't work for me in a browsing environment, and even with my Unix boxen access, I need separate windows for separate machines.
Paul, I see both sides of that coin, as both a frequent web browser and a web page designer.
As a rule, I don't design things with absolutes anyhow, so it's mostly not that big an issue for me, except in terms of the fact that I'm a big browser compliance freak. It's more or less a problem I have with the UI, as I said, rather than the CSS end of things.
But on the other hand, there's the argument that, for instance, you can't change print ads or (paper) book fonts to suit your preferences, so why should you automatically have the choice to change other media's presentations?
Designers really sometimes want absolute control, and that's why CSS has some built-in absolutes. Ideally, the CSS should provide for other possibilities, incorporating respect for people's disabilities and comfort zones, but sometimes the design takes precedence for people, and the designer should be able to set absolutes when they feel that strongly about it.
You know what? Y'all and your horses, you know where to go. I'm sorry I dared to have a personal opinion about my own frickin' browser choices and express it publically. Apparently, my personal dislike of something, even once I explained why I bothered mentioning it, is SO OFFENSIVE and THREATENING to people who disagree with me that y'all feel a need to keep beating the dead horses you rode in on.
Larry (and anyone else who wants to keep talking about my browsing preferences):
That's not the point. The point has nothing to do with whether or not I can choose to turn tabbed browsing off. It was a throw-away comment (hence labeled 'apropos of little else') based on the number of times I have seen "and it's a tabbed browser!" as a selling point to a browser, which since I loathe tabbed browsing is not a selling point to me. More or less, my point -- such as it was -- was that it was like saying "you should get this because f00, bar, bleh, AND you get a free enema!" from my point of view. Because I hate tabbed browsing it's not a selling point to me, and I just find it therefore oddly amusing that people have this tendency (not just here) to throw it in whenever they recommend Firefox. It's sort of like the Ginsu ad of browser choice. NOW how much would you pay?
Why are we even still talking about this? For Heaven's sake, go criticize my CSS choices or something.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 64 |
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