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On Themes…
New Theme! Certain things stopped working on my old theme, Structure. Probably because it was from 2009. I mean…color me surprised, but apparently software — including WordPress themes! — does update from time to time, and if you don’t apply those updates, things stop working. Who knew? So my menus have been not working for . . . a long time. And I was too busy to worry about it, and finally today I just made time and dealt with it. Not that I didn’t like Structure. I loved it. I even had several people comment on it and say that they really liked the “simplicity” of it. And that was what drew me to it. But they wanted . . . a considerable amount of money to update it, because to do that I had to go to the pro version, and . . . well . . . not enough people read this blog for me to spend that kind of money. :) I’m already paying for six domains, and that’s more than enough.
Hopefully, this will be a theme I like, and can be better about keeping up with updates. Assuming they don’t want to charge me to update.
I’m still learning all the bits and pieces of the new theme. Seems that there are many new features of themes since the last time I spent any time playing with it, and I’m still trying to figure out how to get the footnote numbers to start over with each post on the main page, so until I figure that out, well . . . it’ll be easier to click on a title and go read the individual page instead of reading them from the main page. The whole menu situation is still not ironed out because there’s a ton of setup and I just need to figure out how menus work in this new decade of WordPress and just deal with it. For now, there is one menu, “About,” and the sub-pages associated with that. I’ve updated my Podcasts I Listen To page quite a bit, because I finally got the personal project I’ve been working on in my spare time working well enough to want to get it to output pre-formatted content for that page.
Sure, I could make a comment, here, about the whole ‘gosh, it’s been over two years since I updated my blog’ thing, and ‘gosh, what a year 2020 was, huh?’ thing, or even the ‘writing? was that the thing with the blank pages that I’m supposed to fill up with words?’ thing. But that would be calling attention to the fact that it’s been over two years since I updated my blog and offering excuses, which I’m absolutely not going to do; that 2020 was a global hellscape of awful, which everyone already knows; and that I haven’t written substantially since early 2020, but no one but me and my writers group really cares about that, so I’ll not bore you with it.
Suffice it to say, things happened, situations changed, priorities altered. We move forward.
I have been writing, but not on a regular basis. I’m getting back to some stories I started and never finished, and I hope to Get Right On That™ Real Soon Now™ I have lots of ideas for stories and for changes to my neverending novel.
With any luck, I’ll have more to share soon. I’m working on getting my home office set up and usable because as it turns out, I’m now permanently working from home, so there’s that. Once that’s done, I’ll have a dedicated place other than my dining room table and living room easy chair in which to dedicate time to working / writing.
Watch this space. Or don’t. I don’t control you.
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Writing Report, April 2019
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
April didn’t go quite as intended.
On the one hand, I did cross another milestone: I wrote “The End” at the end(?) of my novel(?). Use use the (?)s because . . . well . . . it was the logical “end” of the story, although it does leave things in a rather prickly situation. Which is great if you know there’s going to be a book 2. Not so much if it’s supposed to be stand-alone. But I’ve never envisioned this as a stand-alone. And only once I get it rearranged and retooled will it be a novel. But as it stands as I write this between projects at work on April 30th, it is not a novel. “Novel” implies a sort of structure. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Character arcs. Coherent . . . ness. As it stands, it is 110,000+ words of . . . loosely related anecdotes involving the same characters and in the same universe.
So, yeah, it is not a novel. There are threads left dangling, characters mentioned once and never brought up again, a suddenly appearing thirteen-year-old son of a secondary character who was convenient to use as a hostage in the final confrontation scene . . . Kid doesn’t even have a name. I called him [HAL’S SON].
I discovery-wrote my way into some cool stuff, including finding the perfect location in which to set much of my action (and causing a huge difference in the different parts of the story as I have three locations. The final one is a place that is very Atlanta, which is what I want. If my story could take place anywhere, then what’s the point of setting it in Atlanta other than convenience? Most Atlantans will recognize the location I’ve chosen if they have ever driven through Spaghetti Junction, and those who aren’t in Atlanta can google the location and see the structure I’m describing. So it works out.
Last month, I said, naïvely, that I wanted to finish the thing in April, “so that I can start on the rewrite.”
Yeah.
About that . . .
No. :)
What had happened was . . . I kept coming up with things to change the plot, not augment it. New ideas about how my magic system works. Who can do what and why. (More of) What my adversary’s reasons are for doing what he’s doing. Etc. So I work through those by free-writing them, and then I also have other ideas for stories, and I’ve written those down with enough notes to help me remember everything without inflicting another Skullcosm on myself.
Because that was all infinitely more interesting than continuing to attempt to revise and submit some of my finished stories. I mean, I did spruce up one called “C Is for Clowns that Creep Through the Yard” (alt title: “Coulromisia”) and submitted that as my work to be critiqued for Write Here, Write Now, which starts day after tomorrow (as I type this). It’s one of the darker things I’ve written. We’ll see what the critters have to say. :) But that is the only story I did anything with in April. I didn’t even submit the rejected story from March to another market because, frankly, I forgot. <sigh>
Here’s my report.
April 2019 Writing Report Goal Progress
Finish This Damned Novel– Yay!Rewrite This Damned Novel – . . .
Three More Novel Outlines– Did that as one of my free-writing. So I have enough on all three to participate on a plot break on any or all of them. I think. We shall see which one I pick. :) The problems I have with all three is that they’re too similar to things that already exist, and I need more. Or maybe abandon the ideas if I can’t make them into anything coherent.Write Here, Write Now – I leave tomorrow (as I type this; May 1, 2019)
Read Forty Books – Meh. Maybe if they’re really short books, I can catch up? I have read a lot of short stories and reference stuff. But those don’t count on Goodreads. Well, except the reference books. I have one on autopsies, one on blood spatter, and one on crime scene investigation. You know, a little light reading. :)
Submit Things To Places – May. May is a good month to send Things out. To Places.
- The word I was fishing around for was ‘cohesion.’
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Writing Report, March 2019
Writing As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been using a spreadsheet and a work-scheduling app to track words written and time spent. I decided to do a monthly wrap-up.
March was pretty decent. I crossed a milestone I haven’t crossed in quite a while: I wrote 100,000 words on a “novel.” I use quotes because although I did pass 100,000 words in the Scrivener project where I’m writing my novel, many of those words are not . . . good words. They are, in fact, crappy words. Words that I will end up deleting and rewriting because although they seemed the thing to write at the time, they no longer actually make sense in the full novel as I’ve come to understand it. Scenes I don’t need, repetitions of things I’ve already said, exposition that’s more for me than any reader it might eventually have. And I’m nearing the “end” of the “novel,” as well. I wrote the Big Climactic Scene™ — two of them, actually — and only have a the Final Confrontation with Evil™ where the Hero Triumphs™ but at Great Cost™ and then all that cleanup stuff. You know the ‘Bilbo and Sam go back to the Shire and it’s not the same place they left’ part that has to be written but whether or not I’ll keep it all is up for debate.
I look forward to bringing this sucker to a close in April so that I can start on the rewrite. After I confiscate one of the big white-boards at work after hours and really make myself understand the different plot threads and how they all weave together. I know there are things I introduced that I never came back to. Characters I introduced and then forgot. Characters that I may not even need. And just tonight, I realized that a character I already introduced has a role to fill that cleans up a rather tidy piece of backstory that was bugging me. And would probably stand out instantly to any reader, as well, so that’s good.
Another thing I did in March was to start looking at some of my older stories with an eye toward making them publishable. I got a rejection on a story from a market I want to eventually make it into. The story I sent wasn’t really in their wheelhouse, but it also wasn’t really out of it, either. So it was a gamble, and it didn’t pay off. I’ll be submitting that story to the next market on my list in April, and hopefully getting a second one ready for submission so I can have two out. And then three. And then four. And then . . .
I did really well on writing from a consistency standpoint this month. Reading . . . slightly less so. But I read almost every day. When I visited my mother, I didn’t get any reading done, but I also missed a day or two later in the month because of various other reasons. It means it’ll take a little longer to “level up,” but I’ll get there eventually.
Another thing I did this month was the create yet another spreadsheet (Have I mentioned how much I love Excel? Because I love it a lot.) that will “pretty-print” my little progress table. I tried going from Excel to HTML and it did . . . some odd things. So I abandoned that path and just took a screen shot of the ‘pretty-print’ for March and this is it, right here.
March 2019 Writing Report Goal Progress
Finish This Damned Novel – So. Close. Probably another 7500 to 10,000 words, and I”ll be done. And then the real fun of rewriting will begin.
Three More Novel Outlines – Some of it happened? I have . . . things that resemble outlines of part of two of them. I have thirty-three more days to get something that resembles an outline for at least one of them written before . . .
Write Here, Write Now – I can almost taste Baltimore. It tastes . . . like mouthwash.
Read Forty Books – It was probably not a great idea to pick Jenn Lyons‘ epic 560-page tome The Ruin of Kings as the next book I read, but OMG YOU GUYS IT’S SO DAMNED GOOD AND YOU NEED TO BE READING IT RIGHT NOW. There are seventeen chapters of it up on Tor’s site for you to read for free. I linked to it up there! Go! Click! You can get hooked like I did! I’m sure I’ll catch up after I’m done with it and read lots of shorter things. :)
Submit Things To Places – April. April is a good month to send Things out. To Places.
- I do not say this to ‘shame’ my mother, who will read this. I say it because I genuinely would rather spend time with her than read. And I did read some while I was at her house, but it was mostly web pages, and those are hard for me to track. :)
- Ten Internet Points to anyone who actually gets this. You can spend them precisely nowhere! But they’ll be yours to keep and be proud of for literally minutes to come!
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On Broken Chains . . .
Last week, I posted about scheduling. As of the time of my post, I had written every day for forty days without breaking my chain. (You will begin to get a sense of foreboding, here, based on the title of this blog post.) Two days after I posted that, I came down with an illness. I had gone home to visit my mother for her birthday, and that night, I started feeling really unwell. Recognizing it as the early stages of a recurring illness that I haven’t had to deal with for almost three years(!), I quickly got in touch with my doctor via his web portal and requested an ’emergency prescription’ of the usual antibiotics be sent to my mother’s local pharmacy. His office isn’t open on weekends, but I gambled that he’s like most doctors: unable to leave work at work.
My gamble paid off. :) He came through, and the next morning, I had antibiotics waiting for me at a pharmacy near my mother. Antibiotics that have . . . certain side effects. Not the least of which, in the first day or two, is extreme drowsiness. But even with that, I managed to get my words in even through the pain and discomfort on Friday night and through pain, discomfort, and nausea on Saturday. And then came Sunday.
I had to drive several hours and remember to take my antibiotics, one of which causes nausea (and, being an antibiotic, doesn’t permit me to take antacids with calcium) and causes my mouth to taste like I’ve been sucking on a moldy penny. And the other of which causes a couple of other interesting bodily side effects I won’t go into. LET’S JUST SAY that by the time I arrived home around midnight, I was just not having any of it, for all values of ‘it’ that didn’t involve my immediately going to bed and sleeping. I did try to write. I really did. But all I could think of was how much I hurt and how awful the taste of antibiotic is and how tired I was and how much I didn’t want to go to work on Monday . . .
So I broke my chain after day 43.
But! I didn’t let that get in my way. I felt immensely better (by several metrics, if not by all of them) on Monday (on which I did not go to work), and on Tuesday (on which I also did not go to work, nor to my weekly critique session), so I was able to get some words in. I also have a couple more sites to add to my ‘turn it off at 10 pm’ list. I told you: I know me. :)
So, this is day three of my current chain. Which, if I don’t break it again before then, will reach 43 days on November 13th. By which time, I hope to finally be out of chapter 2 (this chapter . . . OMG) and on to later sections of the novel.
I had one of those ‘really comfortable in bed, just before sleep’ ideas last night, and, luckily (knowing myself as I do), I did not listen to the little voice in my head that whispered, “Oh, just drift off to sleeeeeep. You don’t have to write it doooooowwwwwwn. I’ll remember it fooooooor yooooouuuuuuu.” Uh-huh. Liar.
I believe this is the voice responsible for Skullcosm ‘Nough said.
So I got up and, through bleary eyes fogged by ointment, wrote down the idea, with some thoughts on how it might play out in the novel.
And lo! when I arose this morning, it was mostly coherent (mostly) and still good, so I will incorporate it wholly into my novel.
And there was much rejoicing.
(yaaaaay)
- I suppose I could have just written, “I’m sick and tired and my mouth tastes like dead weasel and I want to go to bed and sleep forever,” 15 times, but it seemed like cheating.
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The Death of LiveJournal
I joined LiveJournal on January 7, 2003, because a group of friends I had been interacting with for ~13 years suddenly all disappeared from our usual platform (over internal politics by the people in charge) and went to LiveJournal. I have well over 3000 blog entries on LJ. I loved the site because of its privacy features and ease of design.
Recently, now-Russian-owned-and-operated LiveJournal explicitly changed their terms of service to require obeying Russian law. This entails “protecting” minors from discussions of “sexual deviancy.” This is code for LGBTQ+ issues. In order to continue using the site, one has to click “agree” when logging in, and if you don’t, Bad Things™ will happen. (i.e., They disable/remove your account and you lose all access to your blog.)
So I clicked ‘agree,’ but I cannot and do not and will not ever actually agree to those terms. So what that means is that I have to find some way to export all of my 3000+ posts from LJ and import them either to here or to my Blogger blog. Blogger is probably a “better” choice in terms of tone, but I prefer WordPress for the control I have.
What I don’t have is a good way to do this all at once. There is a LiveJournal importer, but it has only negative reviews, because apparently although it tries to import comments along with the blog posts themselves, it ends up duplicating the comments. And not just once or twice, but up to ten times, each. This is something I, too, noticed back before I created this site, when I was playing around on WordPress.com. It was ugly and useless, and I never did get everything cleaned up. It’s a big reason why I’m not hosted on WordPress.com and have my own domain, in fact.
What this means is that I must export my posts — sans comments! :( — from LiveJournal to XML files, then import those into WordPress. But on LJ, one can only export 1 month at a time.
I have 170(ish) months of posts, which will generate — you guessed it — 170ish files, and each one will have to be imported into this blog separately.
What this means to all both of my loyal readers is that . . . things may get weird, here. I have no idea what the LiveJournal posts are going to look like when they end up on WordPress. I have no idea what the date stamps will be. I have no idea what WordPress will do with my formatting or my embedded media or my userpics . . . I just don’t know. I’ll have to try a test, and even that may not be a good indication.
What I do know is that I will turn off the thing that automatically tweets, Google+s, Facebooks, LiveJournals, and Tumblrs new posts, because that would get real fugly, real fast.
I don’t know how long this will take. I do know it will require a ton of time. Time I don’t really have. So it will be slow going. And I also know that although I’ve tried to keep my blog here at least PG-13 because it represents the “professional” part of me, should I ever be published and people come here looking for more me (Hey, it could happen!). My LiveJournal . . . is not PG-13. It’s not NC-17, but it’s certainly at least R-rated. So I will just warn you now. :)
As soon as I’m done exporting all my posts and I’m sure that everything is safely saved and thoroughly backed up, I will be deleting my 14-year-old account on LiveJournal. They will receive no more of my money. They will receive no more of my time. They will receive no more of my consideration. I’m done.
Now, to all the people who are going to snidely comment, “LiveJournal is still a thing? I thought it was already dead!” . . . we get it. You’re very funny. But I really like some of the stuff I have on that site. It’s some of my best writing, and I hate to lose all the comments that I got over the years from friends, former friends, and strangers alike. But there’s no way to preserve them. Will I keep every silly one-sentence pun post? Probably not, to be honest. But whether you knew it or not, there is — or was; I suspect this TOS change will drive most of the decent people who are still using the site away — still a thriving community. Perhaps not as active as it once was, but still active nonetheless. And part of me will miss it. But a much bigger part of me hates what it has become, and refuses to use the site on their terms.
Stay tuned for further developments.
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Logos
When I first created this site, I liked this theme I’m still using. It’s called “Structure,” and the logo they had by default was a block-capital S and T connected by the T’s crossbar. I thought how neat it would be to have my own logo in a similar style. I got an icon designer application and spent far too long (probably close to three hours) drawing a 32 x 32 pixel icon, literally pixel by pixel. If you look at the tab on your browser where you’re reading this, you should be able to see that icon. It’s a light gray capital “W” superimposed on a black capital “W”, slightly offset to the lower right.
But I’ve wanted something better since then. Because ugly. Because lack of graphic design talent. Ideally, it would replace or augment the image at the top of the page where it says “WriteWright The blog of Gary D. Henderson.” Ideally.
The other night, I had a new contact through the “Contact Me” widget and went to that site to deal with it. They were encouraging me to upload my business’s logo. The desire to have my stylized W/W icon/logo hit again, so I spent a couple of hours trying to find sites that would allow me to design logos.
Did I mention that I suck at graphic design? I mean, like really. I have a certain amount of artistic ability (I took art classes for years, and didn’t suck too badly), but I stopped trying to develop it when I discovered computers when I was a junior in high school. (Making a computer jump through logic hoops I designed seemed more fun (and easier, and faster, and more rewarding) than drawing, painting, etc.)
I found quite a few sites out there that allow one to design a logo for free. They usually have a selection of “clip art” one can choose from, and then text can be added. I went through quite a few of them, poking at them to see if they had anything I didn’t hate. (Started off on the right foot, at least. “Didn’t hate” instead of “liked.”)
I was surprised when I found something on every site I tried. I stopped after five. Below are my results. Some sites allowed me to download the design; for others, I had to take a screenshot and clip the image. Which is why, for instance, one of them has visible grid lines and a couple more look a bit rough.
That won’t be the case in the finished logo.
While most of them allow you to design the logo for free, if you want to actually use it, of course, you have to pony up. What I don’t know is what “should be” a reasonable price would be for something like that.
So I thought I’d put the potentials up here to see what people think. Because with the whole ‘suck at graphic design’ thing I have going.
I’m not attached to any of these to the point that I couldn’t just delete them and move on. But these do represent what I thought looked best from the alternatives each site offered me.
Let’s begin!
WriteWright Logo from LogoTypeMaker This was the first site I tried. As I flipped desultorily through many uninspired suggestions of clip-art, this one popped up randomly, and looked enough like my original vision that I took notice. It was originally in shades of sickly green, but one of the options they allow is to change those colors, so I did just that. I like the monochrome look I’ve selected for this site, so I stayed with blacks and grays. I would probably play around with colors a bit more and dump the text entirely.
WriteWright Logo from OnlineLogoMaker This one is arguably the closest to my original concept, although I’m not overly fond of the font. (I think it’s the curviness.) But it is the only font they supplied where the W allowed an exact overlap, with all the widths and the angles lining up. I know because I tried every single font I didn’t hate.
WriteWright Logo from LogoMaker On this one, I don’t think I got the colors exactly matching, but the concept I was going for is obvious. Again, it kind of goes with the “W” theme, closer to the first design than my original idea, but it’s kind of appealing, to me. I like the ‘rite’ and ‘right’ added on this one, and would probably keep the text.
WriteWright Logo from LogoGarden Total departure. This site didn’t have any “W” designs that weren’t hideous, but instead of ditching it altogether, I decided to flip through the hundreds of clip-art images they had to see if any of them called to me. They had a whole section for “writing and writers” and the quill pen is a natural enough association that I went with it. Others that drew me were a stylized pen nib, and a pencil reminiscent of the LiveJournal logo. (Neither of which is shown, because ultimately, I got tired of designing logos. Also because the pen nib design could be taken as a stylized depiction of cleavage, which is probably the point.)
Is the quill maybe a little too cliché?
WriteWright Logo from GraphicsSprings Finally, this one is back with the overlapping / nested “W.” The original colors were somewhere in the puce range, but I switched to graytones. Again, I would probably dump the text. This one has a certain . . . “Art Deco”? . . . look that I like. But is it too much like the Volkswagon logo? :)
I did a Google image search for “W” logos. There are a lot of them. Some of them are close to some of the designs above, but then there’s only so many ways you can twist a “W” and have it still recognizable as a “W.”
Anyway, you tell me. I lack the graphic design skill, and frankly, they’re all kind of blurring together at this point. Does anything stand out?
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I Just Don’t Understand
There are a lot of things in this world that I don’t understand. Most of them involve other people. I’m not really all that misanthropic, but the degree to which I am is entirely attributable to people acting . . . weird. Insane. Bizarre. Evilly. Take your pick of modifier.
One thing I really don’t get is spam comments on blogs. Especially small blogs, like mine. I don’t have thousands of subscribers. I have in the range of less than a dozen hits per day except when I make a new post, and then that number triples. So, really, what are they attempting to gain?
This was posted today. On my NaNoWriMo 2012, day 18 post. Which, if you don’t know how NaNoWriMo works, was posted on 11/18/2012. Nearly two years ago.
I enjoy what you guys are usually up too. Such clever work and reporting! Keep up the terrific works guys I’ve you guys to my personal blogroll.The “person” who made the comment doesn’t link to a working website. It literally uses “example.com.” Clicking on the username would take another reader . . . precisely nowhere. So what, exactly, is the point of making the spam comment? No commerce can happen. No malware can infect. No personal information can be gleaned. I block all suspicious comments and moderate all comments from new commenters. I don’t make this a secret at all. So no one would ever have seen it had it not been for this post.
Five other spam comments made since I last cleaned out my spam folder all have spam/malware sites as the poster’s URL, so I can kind of see the point in those, even if I think the person doing it is a waste of DNA and air. But that one up there . . . just wow.
Here is the text of the other five, edited to remove product or website names. Why? Because they amuse me at the same time they baffle me. Would any native speaker of English — or any other language, for that matter — really think these were legitimate comments?
I arrive from the single relatives house remedy was not achievable and i had to battle it alone. At 19 I used to be considered recovered by frequent health practitioner but 4yrs of recovery i can let you know there is no these thing. Simply because I ended binging and stopped purging didn’t mean I used to be healthy or which i experienced the right mindset. I really never feel it ever goes away and i have tried using and unsuccessful countless diet programs since the line involving an consuming condition and diet plan is around invisible. For the initially time I experience I’m able to [BOGUS SPAM PRODUCT NAME] is a good helper for t and do it the right way but that doesn’t indicate it really is not a battle. Acquiring over the scale I worry nearly every time and this previous week seeing nearly 50 % a pound just about killed me but a lot additional poor arrived from good for all those 6yrs.[6/21 on this post]In my knowledge, the selection around the scale flat traces a little bit then [FALSO ESTAFA EL NOMBRE DEL PRODUCTO] is slower. This is attributable mostly to h2o, not fat, rather than muscle mass progress. You actually never make considerable muscle although eating in a deficit. I’ve found that my prior 1-1.5 Lbs for every 7 days decline on the scale has turned into .5 to .seventy five Lbs for each week thanks largely to drinking water expected for muscle maintenance….perhaps a teeny weenie itsy bitsy muscle mass advancement, but very little appreciable that may present up on the scale me thinks…only been undertaking this 30 days or so.[6/21 on this post]Everyone loves what you guys are usually up too. Such clever work and coverage! Keep up the fantastic works guys I’ve you guys to blogroll.|[6/20 on this page; link was to a different FALSO ESTAFA EL NOMBRE DEL PRODUCTO]However, nothing can be compared to an Internet-based outdoor network which allows users to share all of their exciting hunting stories on the web for others to read and discuss. I hunted in Connecticut, still all the old timers swore by Arkansas hound dogs. Game sites are extensive, and it is easy to get lost.[6/19 on this post; link was to a site my company has blocked]The Pumpkin Wizard provides template patters by theme. Make tiny spiders from black chenille stems and attach them to the cobwebs. ” Make sure it’s shouted in a French accent as well.[6/16 on this post (OH. THE. IRONY.); site is a malware ‘gaming’ site.]If I were evil, I’d take money to spam. I mean, it must be lucrative or no one would do it, right? But my bogus comments would be written in standard English. Some of those just hurt my head to read. I guess I could never really be a spammer. I’d twitch too much at the horrible grammar. Although I did laugh out loud at the last one exhorting me to shout something that isn’t made clear in a French accent. Because that’s apparently a thing.
Well . . . all right, then.
<‘Orrible Franch akSONT> «I’m French. Why do you think I have this outrageous accent, you silly king?» </’Orrible Franch akSONT>
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The Naming of Blogs
So, where did the name of my blog come from? I shall tell you, and it’s a short tale.
I needed a ‘professional’ site, unassociated with my other two blogs, where I could blog about all things writing-related. My non-writer friends didn’t want to see that for the most part, and the kinds of things I write about on the other two sites aren’t “professional.” I use language I don’t use here, etc.
I wanted my name as a domain, but some lawyer already owned garyhenderson, so with some trepidation, I looked for and did not find ‘garydhenderson.’ So I bought it. Looked for hosting, and set up WordPress. Within days I was ready to go, having picked what I had been told was the best kind of template to use for writing: black text on a white background, with a simple design and no extraneous pictures or colors or fonts.
But I didn’t want to just call the blog ‘Gary D. Henderson’s blog’ either. I wanted something with pizzaz. Panache. A certain . . . je ne sais quoi.
I love me some puns. And I also love homophones. Words that sound alike but have different meanings and etymologies. Words like pear, pare, and pair. Or pedal, peddle, and petal (if you’re from the south, they’re practically identical).
Or write, rite, wright, and right.
I tried desperately to work all four in, but in the end, none of those sounded like anything I wanted to read, much less write.
And what is a writer if not a wright, of a sort. So: write wright. Or WriteWright.
Since that domain is taken and so is the Twitter account (I tried to get the guy parked on it to let me have it, but he did not answer), I couldn’t fully embrace it other than using it as my blog title, which I’ve done, as you can see.
I also own several other domains relating to the series of novels I’m working on, but they are parked and not pointed at anything right/write/wright/rite now.
All in good time. :)
If you’re at all curious about my other two blogs and how they got their names, you can find the entries here (DreamWidth) and here (Blogger).
This post is in response to The Writer’s Post Blog Hop 2014 #4 prompt, Explain the Name of Your Blog. The host is Suzy Que. Other entries are linked from her blog post. -
BlogLovin Post
This is a post just used to claim this blog as my own on BlogLovin. There’s really nothing to see here. :)
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I Should Be Stopped
I’m trying to design some business cards for WorldCon later this year. I’ve got it down to a couple of designs, the only difference being how the picture of me is oriented with relation to the text, which consists of my email, Twitter, Facebook, and website addresses (that would be here).
Both of them have a picture of me (different pictures), and underneath the image it has my name in full, and underneath that, my Twitter bio, which is this.
Creator and Destroyer of Worlds
But a couple of days ago in a chat with a friend of mine, I said the following.
I invent imaginary people and make them have conversations in my head. I also write.
I don’t know why, but I find this quite funny. My friend, it must be noted, neither laughed nor even reacted, but that is probably because she expects these kind of statements out of me, and believes that any reaction — positive or negative — could be taken as encouragement.
Is it just me, or is that better than Creator and Destroyer of Worlds? It’s a big longer, but . . . maybe I could make it work. I don’t know.
What do you think?
