Month: February 2015

A Useful Thing Which I Have Discovered

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(Which has nothing to do with writing, and which most other people have probably known about for ages):

If you’ve got a rice cooker that came with a steamer basket, the steamer basket is very handy for turning uncooked chicken breasts or tenders into cooked chicken suitable for shredding or dicing and incorporating into things like enchiladas or pot pies or any other recipe that calls for cooked chicken bits.

Well, okay . . . this is like writing in one respect:  Don’t automatically assume that the idea you’ve just had is old hat, or is no good because it is old hat.  Because you can always take that old idea and use it to make something new and tasty.

Well, It Was a Weekend

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Two entries ago, I said:

If we’re lucky, Boston will have shoveled out from under its most recent snowpocalypse by this weekend, and won’t get another one while we’re there.

If you were watching the weather reports for the East Coast of the USA over the past few days, you’ll know that we didn’t get that lucky.

We did, however, make it safely down to the convention before the snowstorm started, and made it safely out of Boston again on Sunday.  Which is more luck than a lot of people had, so I shouldn’t complain.

Meanwhile, as of last report, Jim Macdonald and I are still goingto be doing our reading/signing at the UConn Co-op this evening at 7.  If you’re in the area, feel free to drop by.

Today’s Bit of Amusement

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Over at The Toast, “How to Tell if You Are in a Logic Puzzle.”

Because heaven knows, Logic Puzzle Land has only a tangential relationship to Real Life Land.

Obligatory writing reference:  When constructing plots and figuring out character motivations, remember that Fiction Land generally strives to reflect Real Life Land, not Logic Puzzle Land.  There are a few instances where it’s closer to Logic Puzzle Land – the strict-form allegory, for example, or the roman à clef – but those are the exceptions rather than the rule.

(Now that I think of it, that’s a good way to distinguish between an allegorical work and one that merely makes heavy use of symbolism and metaphor:  If the workings of the plot and the actions of the characters appear to be taking place in Logic Puzzle Land, you’re probably dealing with an allegory.)

Prep Work

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Today and the rest of this week are mostly all about getting ready for Boskone . . . getting all the necessary laundry done, formatting and printing out all the stuff for our reading (there are people out there who can read aloud off of their tablet or laptop, but I’m not one of them), getting out this month’s newsletter  (if you’re not a subscriber, you can become one via the signup link in the sidebar, and have the March issue show up in your mailbox when the time comes), and keeping a wary eye on the weather predictions for the next week.

If we’re lucky, Boston will have shoveled out from under its most recent snowpocalypse by this weekend, and won’t get another one while we’re there.

Peeves of the Day

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Because it has been entirely too cold up here of late, and cold weather makes me peevish.

Peeve the first:  Mixing up tic and tick.

A tick is a bloodsucking parasitical insect.  (Okay.  Technically, an arachnid.)  Or the sound made by a clock.  Or a check mark against an item in a list.

A tic is an involuntary muscular movement.

So a character with a facial tick . . . no, I don’t want to go there.  Just thinking about it makes me twitch.  Gives me a tic, if you will.

Peeve the second:  Oh and O.

“Oh!” is the interjection:

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, what a day!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

O is the particle that goes in front of a noun that is the name of somebody or something that is being directly addressed by the speaker:

“O Lord, we beseech thee….”

“Hear me, O King!”

“O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, how lovely are thy branches!”

If we were talking in Latin, O would go with nouns in the vocative case.  In modern English, it tends to show up in archaic or formalized or poetic speech . . . and in the manuscripts of writers who are attempting, with varying degrees of success, to write forsoothly.

To whom I can only say:  If you’re going to do it, get it right.