an experiment

Yesterday I had two people, who were never with me at the same time, ask if I knew how many people visited my web site.

I had a response all ready. "The 'web site' is one page," I said. "I haven't even launched it yet. Not until I get the first draft of my novel done. Right now isn't the time to be fiddling with web pages. I need something to talk about first."

Unfortunately for my ego, they both had the same counterpoint all ready to fire back with. "But what about your blogs? You've been running those for over two years now."

"Those are just because I like to write about topical stuff," I said.

This is true. I do not want to be one of those whiny people who are always saying, "Oh, well if you read my blog..." But I write. And writers like to be read. Also, I agree if I'm putting it out there, maybe I should pay attention to who's glancing at it, much less reading it.

So tonight I went on Google Analytics and got tags for both my blogs and my web site. Judging from my comments rate, I'm not expecting to find a secret legion of Eyrea-visiting web denizens. But currently I don't have hard numbers of any kind.

If you have made it this far, I humbly request 30 seconds and two mouse-clicks from you. You don't have to do anything else. Really.

I need to make sure all of the analytics scripts work. One of them is on this blog. The other two are here:

• DIY-eyrea
• katherinehajer as-yet-unlaunched web site

Please click on the above links. That's it! You don't even have to read anything. If you load the pages, it'll show up in my report as a visitor. I'd do it myself, but I suspect Google filters my own visits out. I'll play around and see.

And no, the reports don't tell you who exactly visited or anything fancy/privacy-invading like that. Just how many people visited, where in the world they were visiting from, and how long they stayed. So if you want a personal thank-you (which I would love to give you), please leave a comment to let me know you helped out with the experiment!

teach your word processor how to read

There's more I want to write about document processing (as opposed to word processing). I'd love to get into master-/sub-documents, templates, tables of contents, tables of figures, indexing, lists, and all sorts of other fun stuff. But there are other blog topics out there, and I think it's time to let this series rest.

Last time I showed how to use the basic paragraph style — known as Text Body, Default, Normal, Regular Text, or something like that — for all your basic paragraph formatting. That included the basic font, first-line indents, between-paragraph spaces, line spacing, and just about anything else you would ever need to do with a paragraph. Today we're going to look at heading styles.

I feel like I have to tread carefully here, because I have had several writers, including Published Authors, tell me that they always make separate physical files for each chapter. When I swallow my incredulity and ask why, usually they tell me one or more of the following:

• Book-length document files are too difficult to navigate for edits.
• I won't lose everything if the file corrupts.
• My computer runs faster with smaller files.

I have yet to have an all-out debate with anyone about this, mostly because when I start to their eyes glaze over and they say it's "too technical" for them. At that point I choke back any mention that I have an English degree and learned most of this stuff to stop from going completely crazy when I was teaching English lit to high school students. "Technical." Right. Feh. But my real responses to the above three points are:

• It's not unusual for software specification documents to run to 300 pages or more. I know, I've written enough of them, and so have the ever-professional J-A, the ever-cool Cathy, the ever-prolific Jake, and many others I've met through work and elsewhere. Now, 300 pages is only about half a nice fat beach paperback, to be sure, but formatting-wise, the beach paperback is bound to be simpler. I've never seen a single fiction title with use case diagrams in it, for one. 300 pages of specs is probably about the equivalent of a 900 page book in terms of formatting complexity. Yet we edit them in single files all the time. We have to, or else the cross-references, figure numbering, and other automation won't work right.How we manage this is the how-to portion of this post.
• I can sympathise about the fear of file corruption. Word starts to do this somewhere in the 250-400 page mark, depending on what's in the doc, although I've also had it happen on smaller files. Cathy's FrameMaker horror stories are enough to scare people off technical writing for life (although she always perseveres in the end). But there's a solution to these crises, and it's called backing up. If you back up all those little files (and I know you do), you're going to back up the big ones, right? Right?
• If your computer is running noticeably slower with word processing documents that are completely text and only a few hundred pages long, YOU'RE PROBABLY USING MESSY FORMATTING. Sorry for shouting, but it's true. Think of it from the computer's point of view: is it easier to tell it: "Any time I write a Regular Paragraph, make it indent 1.5cm on the first line only, single-spaced, in Garamond 11pt," and then shut up about it for the duration, or is it easier to tell it for every single paragraph in the book, over and over and over again? That's what makes your file slow. Use styles, and things get faster (your file will likely be physically smaller too with all those extra instructions gone).

how to use headings

See that text just above that says "how to use headings"? That's in a headings style. Yes, even blogs have styles. I didn't have to do any explicit formatting to make it look like that — I just told the blog editor that I wanted a heading, and it formatted it for me. Easy.

Word processors have hierarchical headings. Heading 1s are the top-level. Then Heading 2s are beneath them, and Heading 3s are beneath them, and so on, and so on, usually up to Heading 9. To be honest, I have never needed more than five levels of headings in my work documents. If you are writing a novel, you will probably only use Heading 1 for chapter headings and stop there.

Heading styles are convenient the same way regular paragraph styles are. You decide that all your chapter headings (Heading 1) will start 12cm from the top of the page, be in Gill Sans Ultra Bold 24pt, centred, and will automatically start at the beginning of a new page, no matter where on the previous page the previous chapter ended. Make a line of text Heading 1, and it'll just happen. You only need to set it up once.

The bonus part about headings is that you will teach your word processor to read, at least a little. Word processors have yet to truly understand human language, but they understand hierarchies very well. In OpenOffice, headings show up in the Navigator:

(I didn't add any new-page formatting because I wanted all the headings on a single page.) Click on any of the headings in the Navigator (in Word, it's called the Document Map), and OpenOffice will navigate to that part of the document. You can move from Chapter 5 to Chapter 13 to Chapter 20 to Chapter 6 with ease. Er, but maybe Gill Sans Ultra Bold isn't the best choice for heading text.

Did you notice that the heading I have highlighted in the screen shot has a "+" sign to the left of it? That's because there's a Heading 2 beneath it. If you're writing non-fiction (or heck, maybe even for fiction), you'll be using Heading 2s for sub-headings, and maybe even Heading 3s for sub-sub-headings. You can fold up or fold down headings by whichever level you want to navigate by.

If you can use headings and regular paragraphs, that's enough to create a document that is organised at the most basic level. Most word processors have ready-to-use styles as soon as you open them, so you don't have to edit any styles to get going. Remember, once the styles are applied, you can always format after the fact to suit yourself — or a set of submissions guidelines.

I hope these last few posts will be useful to someone. If you have any questions, please ask in the comments or via the contact e-mail in the sidebar.

it's supposed to be less work, people

From here on in for this series, I will be using OpenOffice (OOo) for most of the screen shots, supplemented by some Google Docs. I won't be using any screen shots from MS-Word — as I've said before, The Eyrea lies comfortably within the greater province of Linux. I will, however, try to give the Word equivalent term if OOo calls it something different.

Okay, let's say you have a short story or a novel you want to write up, and you want to write it up on a computer, in a word processor. You know all about the benefits of word processors, and if you're an adult, you've probably known about them for over twenty years now. Depending on your age, you may have even had to memorise these basic features for a quiz in school. Word processors let you:

• move text around without whiteout, scissors, or glue
• spell-check
• change your mind without having to re-type the whole damn thing (although I've heard many authors claim this is actually a drawback)
• format text so it is bolded or italicised or underlined, or, gods forbid, all three at the same time
• change your font in ways that neither a strong training in calligraphy or the knowledge of switching out the Courier ball for the Elite one on your IBM Selectric typewriter would ever let you do

All of this is fine and well at the atomic level, but there's more to it than that. Look at that list again. Every single item takes place at the word and letter level, the most basic level in a word processing document. Back when I was pounding out high school essays on the Commodore 64, that was fine, but the feature set has expanded considerably since then. Things have gotten more automated.

Move up to considering the paragraph level. Most novels are written in sentences and paragraphs, after all. Take a look at the screen shot of this paragraph*:

(Pay no attention to the half a dialogue you can see in the shot for a moment.) It looks like I hit the Tab key on the first line, doesn't it? I didn't. Instead, I included these format settings in the Text body style  — the style the paragraph is in. Word users will probably find the equivalent called Normal in their files.

See that First line setting, third field down from the top? That's what's making the tab-like indent at the start of each paragraph. Every time I press the Enter key and start a new paragraph, the first line automatically gets indented for me. Notice also that the Spacing setting for Below paragraph is also set so that there is a small gap between paragraphs.

But now I'm ready to submit my manuscript, and one place I want to submit it to specifies they want to see double spacing. Meanwhile, another place wants indented paragraphs, but with single spacing and a blank line between them. No problem: I just save versions of the MS with the style settings changed to provide those details, just using the fields in the above dialogue tab:

Now, some clever person is going to read this and think, "Yeah, but there's another way to do that! Just Select All and format the paragraph!"

You could do that. You could stick pins in your eyes, too. It's true that most full-fledged word processors give the users multiple ways to accomplish the same task. It's also true that some ways are better than others.

If you are doing a Select All + format, it means that you are assuming that your entire MS consists of nothing but paragraph upon regular paragraph. Formatting the paragraph won't work if you have chapter or section headings, because those will get formatted like regular text too. Also, if you didn't quite Select All, or if you somehow managed to get the cursor past the point of the old end-point for the Select All (and that can be done), you will have some paragraphs formatted the old way. Formatting paragraphs outside of styles is both clumsier and more delicate.

Also, go back up to the screen shot of the dialogue box. See how many things you can adjust for a style at once? Fonts. Conditional formatting. You can even make drop caps automatically in OOo. Can you do all that from a Format Paragraph dialogue? Right.

Next up: I'll show how to use and include automatic headings, and show how that makes long documents much, much easier to navigate.

* All examples are written in Lorem Ipsum pseudo-text, courtesy of Lipsum.

consider the act

It would be very hard for me to pick just one favourite part in WS Burrough's book Naked Lunch, but for the film version by David Cronenberg, it's easy. Lee and his wife are crossing a frontier between two countries via car, and get stopped by a border guard. The guard asks Lee what he does for a living, and he replies that he's a writer. The guard asks him to prove it. Lee pulls a pen out his breast pocket and tells the guard he has a writing instrument.

I love that: a writing instrument. Not a machine, not a (shudder) medium, but an instrument.

Writing is old and varied enough that writers can choose from many different instruments. I switch hit: poetry (when it comes) gets written with pencil on three-ring paper, probably because I started making it up when I was three or four and started writing it down myself when I was about six (before that, my kindergarten teacher took dictation when she heard me reciting something interesting).

The short stories, then longer stories, and then novels didn't start arriving in full force until halfway through high school, by which time I'd learned how to type. My brothers and I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas when I was 12, so I've been typing on computers all that time, and my handwriting has always been sufficiently awful that I can't imagine any other way.

Between that and all the business writing I do for my day job, I am very picky about word processors. I want them to do what I need them to do, in a reasonable manner, and then get the hell out of my way. The years of experience between the arrival of the Commodore 64 and now make me suspect that companies that make word processors don't see it that way, but I still hold out hope that someone will see it my way someday.

The following is a roundup of the three major word processors I use on a regular basis for writing. I use a couple of text editors too, mostly when I'm on a lightly-powered machine like my Nokia tablet, but I'm not including them in this survey because when it comes time to edit I always switch over to my laptop.

Aside before the reviews proper: that link to the Nokia tablet blog post? It details how I use my Nokia to write whilst in transit. It's from almost exactly two years ago, and I haven't really changed my setup since. Wow, maybe I've finally found the toolkit I like. At least until something better comes along.

Google Docs

I have to recommend Google Docs to everyone who doesn't have a computer, but can get some computer time with an internet link attached. Maybe you have internet access at your local public library, or maybe you have a friend who doesn't mind if you come over and use their machine for a bit, but you don't feel right leaving your own files on their computer. Or maybe you usually do have home computer access and your own web access, but inspiration struck when neither of these were handy, but a web connection was.

Or maybe you hate computers but need to create a typed submission?

Google Docs lets you upload word processing documents up to 500 KB in size in lots of different formats, and lets you save them in even more formats, including MS-Word and PDF. Bonus: they have hooked it up to Google Translate so you can translate your docs on the fly. I tried the English-to-French translation on an old blog post (those being the only two languages I am reasonably fluent in), and the French sounded decent, although of course not "native." I would say it was good enough for a French speaker to understand, but not good enough for everything to come across correctly. But it might be good enough to give a proper human translator a good jump start.

500KB is plenty of room for the average novel — one that doesn't have a lot of fancy formatting in it, or need to use specific fonts for text. Like any on-line editor, speed and access are both issues, but it's a lot better than some of the alternatives. As for features — again, it's fine for the average novel.

OpenOffice

I've blogged about OpenOffice (OOo) and its features before. For me, it's proven more than adequate for writing with. It supports master/sub-documents, it has style support, and like Google Docs, it's free, free, free. Unlike Google Docs, it doesn't live in hyperspace — you install it on your local machine. The full office suite runs around 100MB  —  not horribly big for today's machines.

I've heard some gripes on-line about OOo's feature set, but truth be told I've never had any problems with it. I wish the template organiser was a little more user-friendly, but that's about it. I don't know about you, but I only update my templates for books about... once every eighteen months? Something like that. I want to change how the default paragraphs work in my writing template, so I'll get to try it out before the next blog post.

Microsoft Word

I haven't used MS-Word for personal writing in years, but I use it at work every day for business and technical writing. Everyone in my department is a power user: we have strict rules around style and template usage. Form follows function: if we're making text big for a communication reason, that reason will be reflected in the style used (because we use styles for nearly all the formatting), and will thus be reflected in the document's structure. The ideal is that someone who doesn't read English should be able to take a look at one of our documents and be able to see the organisation of the content and understand what information may be found where.

And, like the vast majority of businesses in North America, we use Word to accomplish that.

I would never question my company's decision to go that route — I completely understand and support the business logic — but I will question what on earth Microsoft did to Office 2007. Some things are better, but some things are simply awful. It's become even harder to use some of the so-called advanced features, and template organisation is now worse than it is in the freeware OpenOffice. A lot of features I use at least once a week, like updating styles from another document or template (so, you know, a set of documents look like they're a set?) have become obscure and unwieldy.

I used to say that if you already knew Word and were nervous of OpenOffice's learning curve, you may as well buy your own personal copy of Word and write with that. As of the 2007 version, I've reversed that. Just learn OpenOffice. It will be much less painful in the long run, and you can still save as clean, well-formatted Word documents.

What about all those "writer's" word processors?

I've been reading a lot about them, but haven't tried any in earnest yet. Having a word processor just for writers appeals to some egotistical part of me. I've yet to see a feature set that can't be easily accomplished in a regular word processor like OpenOffice or Word, though. It seems like "writer's" word processors are taking advantage of the people who don't know how to use those features.

Starting next post, I aim to try to fix that.

tool up already

If you've ever received an e-mail from me, you've seen my sig. It says, "Humans — the tool users." It's actually been my sig-line since about five years before I even got my first e-mail account — originally it was on a small piece of paper that was stuck to the door of my first apartment, where the name plate was supposed to go. My friends would tell each other to "get off the elevator at the third floor and look for Katherine-style snark" as directions to my place.

The full origins of the sig may get explained in another post sometime, but the reason I'm bringing it up for this post is because of the incredible respect I've learned to have for objects that augment the already-incredible power of human hands (and mouths, and feet, and now brains with the new research in thought-controlled devices). Think about how badly an alien invasion could cripple us if they just disintegrated anything that they could identify as a tool: from screwdrivers to computer keyboards to teaspoons to hairbrushes. We'd be left trying to tune up the defence fleet with shards of flint. I'm not saying we couldn't do it — I once put together a coffee table using a butter knife for lack of a screwdriver, and it held together fine for at least ten years. But it would be a lot harder, and a lot of time would be wasted while all those mechanics searched around for just the right-sized shards of flint.

Or, to revisit that butter-knife example, imagine if the aliens were more bloody-minded than thorough, and just got rid of some tools in any given family of tools. So we got to keep hairbrushes, but combs disappeared. We got to keep slot screwdrivers, but not Phillips screwdrivers. While waiting for new replacement tools to be created, people would try to make do as best they could, and there would be a lot of yanked hair and stripped screw heads.

Still sounds pretty annoying, doesn't it? Then riddle me this — why do people keep using the wrong features for the job in their word processors? I'm not talking about an occasional user who needs to tap out a letter once a year or less. I mean people for whom the word processor is a serious tool: writers.

When Holly Golightly gives Paul Varjak a typewriter ribbon in Breakfast at Tiffany's, he doesn't need to call tech support to install the thing. Instead, he kicks off his shoes jauntily, and a few scenes later is typing up the opening lines of "My Friend." There's no way Paul Varjak would have sat there and said, "Oh, I'm such a Luddite, I wish we could just use quills and vellum like Shakespeare did, I'll have to get one of my techie friends to help me...." No way. The typewriter is his writing tool, and he bloody well knows how to use it and take care of it.

Typewriter ribbons are still sold, although admittedly they are much more difficult to find these days. Pens and notepads are still as easy to find and use as they were in Truman Capote's day. Computers are the tool of choice for many, though, and that means using a word processor application.

And that means, if you are a writing human, you need to get to know word processing applications, because that's your tool.

A couple of odd things are happening, though. For one, there seem to be an awful lot of writing humans out there who never get past the butter-knife stage, and even act disdainful if you tell them there are things called screwdrivers that work even better than butter knives for the purposes of assembling furniture... they just don't want to leave their little newbie comfort zone. Even more inexplicably, certain software companies are encouraging people to not become proficient.

Next post: an overview of the tools that are out there, focusing on ones that are cross-platform (ie: I don't care what kind of computer you have — the tools I will review work with any computer five years old or less in reasonably good condition). 

After that: best practices, tips & tricks, and some ideas for document processing.

what real roads look like

The Netherlands is famous for how much people use bikes, but what's missing from that reputation (at least as people seem to understand it in Toronto) is why so many people bicycle. This is what I've learned from just watching people and talking to my cousins who live over there:

• Bikes are much less of a pain to navigate and park than cars. 
• You can park dozens of bikes in the amount of space that it takes to park two or three cars. 
• The acquisition and maintenance costs on a bike are much less than on a car — an especial concern in these days of wildly fluctuating gas prices.

Notice that "exercise" is not explicitly on the list. Neither is "the environment." More about that in a moment.

Given the above, there is an infrastructure in place in the Netherlands to make cycling a good option. Bicycles have dedicated lanes on the vast majority of streets, which car drivers respect (see photo above). Parallel parking a car in a bike lane carries the same penalties it would for parking in a driving lane, ie: you don't do it. Notice that in that photo at the top, parallel parking in the bike lane would actually mean you were double parking. That's something even most Torontonian car drivers understand is a no-no.

While I'm going on about that shot from my Amsterdam hotel window, notice that the car lanes are only as wide as is required for a typical car. That means the lanes overlap a bit. That means drivers and cyclists have to pay attention to each other and create "safety cushions" around them. And that means no weaving through traffic just because a car-size (or bike-size) gap appears. Life is not a game of Pole Position.

The bike lanes ensure that bicycles are considered part of the overall traffic. Compare that to the Greater Toronto Area, where things are so car-centric some drivers don't even give respect to pedestrians.

Back to Amsterdam: A lot of people switch between driving their car and riding their bike depending on what they need to do and how far they have to go.

Cycling on roadways that encourage it for basic transportation means that everyone who uses a bicycle regularly gets some "free" exercise that they don't have to think about too much. In other words, it's a setting that encourages people to move around instead of just sit around. It also means that most days, in most weathers, there is less incentive to use a polluting vehicle than a non-polluting one. To any climate change deniers out there: cars were established as sources of pollution long before "global warming" became a catchphrase. Even if you are right about global warming, cars will still be polluting, and oil will still be a finite resource. Cycling helps manage resources and clears the air. Period.

For all that, when you mention cycling in Toronto, you get pigeon-holed as someone who is dreaming in technicolour and obviously doesn't have "real" transportation needs. It really is an amazing backlash mentality — this idea that doing something that happens to be environmentally friendly must needs have major drawbacks otherwise.

A lot of people cite the winter snow and cold in Toronto as being reasons why cycling will never catch on the way it has in the Netherlands. I don't buy it. Okay, sometimes it does get too cold or snowy, but that's only a tiny portion of the overall winter season most years, never mind the entire year. Most of the time the weather is nothing a good pair of cycling gloves and a windbreaker won't mitigate. The last day I was in Amsterdam, it was very windy, with bursts of rain that turned to hail a few times, but the cyclists were still out. Of course, braving the weather is something you get better at the more you do it.

From what I've experienced as a Toronto cyclist and driver (and pedestrian, and public transit-taker), true acceptance of bicycles as transportation has two things going against it: drivers and cyclists. Drivers, because too many of them treat cyclists either as invisible or as targets, and nearly all of them seem to have forgotten the rules of the road. I've had a lot of drivers tell me point-blank that roads are only for motorised vehicles, and I've had to remind them that according to our road laws that's actually not true.

Cyclists seem to agree with the drivers' assessment that they aren't covered by the road laws (even though they are), because most of them don't follow the rules of the road at all. Drivers both good and bad can't deal well with unpredictable moves that break the geometry of lane use. As a cyclist, I have actually had drivers roll down their windows and thank me because I was doing things like signalling, sharing the lane correctly, and stopping at intersections. I've also noticed a lot of cyclists riding at night with no reflective strips or lighting on their bikes or themselves. They have no right to complain if people don't see them, and they're breaking the law.

I think part of it just might be critical mass: once enough cyclists get on the road in Toronto, they will have to be paid attention to by the drivers, and the cyclists will have to start behaving. But the critical mass will have to be helped by the environment, and by attitudes. Drivers need to stop endangering cyclists. Cyclists need to stop pissing on everyone who is a non-cyclist (including a friend of mine who claimed that those who took public transportation weren't really helping the environment because they weren't taking any exercise while riding streetcars and subway trains).

Here's Amsterdam's take on that. See the buses using the dedicated bus/tram lanes? Cars use them for passing, but not a lot because they are not supposed to block the way of the public transit. Certainly the buses and trams don't get stuck during rush hour the way they do here.

It's a fucking bike. It is not a moral indictment of everyone around you who is not riding a bike at the time

One last photo above. This is a smaller side street. The bike lanes disappear because the street is too narrow for them (the dashed lines mark where one can parallel park). So the cars and bikes must share the road. And they do.

Seriously now: why can't we?

a quick visit to civilisation

Okay, Torontonians, try this out as a mental exercise. Imagine a place where everything is organised without being draconian, where the citizens are cared for without being nannied, yet where all the grown-ups get treated like grown-ups. Public transit is clean, quick, and usable (even a distance of over 30 km can be easily travelled in less than an hour by frequent-interval, electrically-powered trains). Furthermore, the buildings all more or less go together, even the street food is decent, and people say "sorry" when they realise they accidentally stepped in front of you. Despite all this tidiness, efficiency, and politeness, people are more relaxed than in TO, and it's possible to spend an entire week there without seeing anyone get more than kind of annoyed about anything, at least by Toronto standards of road rage and general irritability.

The truth is there are lots of places in the world like this (arguably Toronto even used to be one of them), but the one I went to visit two weeks ago is called Amsterdam. This particular comparison is apt because Toronto and Amsterdam used to be sister cities, back when that didn't seem like a joke. They even named a street after Toronto. Did we name one after Amsterdam? We have the Amsterdam Brewery, at least. I suppose that's something.

If you click on the link to the photos I took there, you'll notice that it was mostly cloudy while I was there. I only really noticed when I was taking photos (and I hardly took any photos). The rest of the time I was on my way to or from a museum, or on my way to or from a café, or just walking around and... just walking around. I also did a lot of writing. Somehow it just felt better to be writing in a café there than here. I think it was the organised-yet-relaxed vibe.

I want to blog about some particulars in future posts. For now, here's the photos:

the source of lies, damned lies, and statistics

As a Canadian blogger, you have been identified as a participant in a short survey to gain a better understanding of the Canadian blogging environment, as well as to gain your perspective on some of the products you purchased recently. Your opinion is important to us and you will be eligible to receive free products and coupons upon completion of this survey.

That was the opening paragraph of an e-mail I received yesterday. Normally for such things I just click the Report spam button, but I had just read Rude Cactus's most recent post (30 March entry) about doing product reviews on blogs, so I decided to click on the link and see what they wanted to know about Canadian bloggers.

The first thing they wanted to know was what age range I was in (35-44 in case you were wondering). The second thing they wanted to know was my gender. I love messing with survey results as much as the next person, but I was honest this time and put "female."

The page after that had a series of topics listed and asked me to rate how often I blogged about them. The topics were all what I would call "whitebread mainstream" -- celebrities, sports, fashion, things like that. The sort of stuff you see on the covers of magazines at the grocery checkout.

Anyone who's read more than one entry on this blog knows that the only topic I could honestly say I wrote about "frequently" was "Other." The next most-frequent topic I could honestly say I've written about is "technology." Most of the rest of them I had to say "never" to.

Okay, so far, so good. I'm well used to checking the "Other" box on surveys. But then things got strange. Or, if not strange exactly, pathetic.

I got asked which of a list of six fashion magazines I bought, and how often (none, less than once per year).

I got asked what brands of shampoo I had tried in the last twelve months (the cheapest one that won't dry out my hair — surprisingly, it was actually on the list).

I got asked what brand of soap I used (that time I had to put "Other").

I got asked about how I learn about new beauty products.

I have two reactions to the above.

One: I am more than the sum of my demographics. Yes, I do wear makeup, perfume, jewelry. But when it comes to my blog, I have other things on my mind. I just don't think keeping clean and being well-groomed should be things that require a lot of thought.

Two: I was very curious as to what men were getting asked about. Fortunately, I have two blogs, so I got two survey links. I also have two machines I can get to the interwebs on, so I could dodge any cleverness the surveyors might have implemented to make sure people didn't double-answer (although to me the questions were less about statistics and more about recruiting).

So I booted up my laptop, clicked on the other survey link, and answered everything the same except for the gender. For once, the questions were exactly the same. Hey, maybe the company who commissioned the survey makes toiletry products. Or maybe they were just worried about getting to their target demographic so much they didn't care what anyone else thought. As a, um, non-fashion-magazine-reading woman it annoyed me, but maybe most men would just mutter "serves me right for taking a survey" before moving on. What do you think?

My take: I know a common marketing mantra is "if they're talking about it, it's a good thing," but I'm not sure how much having people blog "I review computer software on my blog and they asked me about what freaking shampoo I use," is going to attract market share.  

2nd anniversary

Two years ago the end of March I started this blog, and its sister DIY blog. I was sick of F******* taking over my life, sick of worrying about who could view which "private" content of mine on-line, sick of having to shoehorn myself into someone else's cutesy categories. I wanted my on-line self back, dammit.

Okay, so I made two blogs. So what? What did that give me?

It took a lot of stress away. I like being able to check on my friends with an RSS feed instead of having to log in to a site that continues to bewilder me, no matter how many overhauls they seem to make to it. On Google Reader, Twitter, and other like services, I can scan through for not just what my friends are up to, but what my friends are up to that is of interest to me. You see, I have an amazingly diverse group of friends with lots of different interests (if you're reading this, maybe you're one of them). We don't connect with each other 100%, all the time, and we're all perfectly cool with that. So instead of getting a "status vomit" from F******* on everything people I know are up to, I can just find out what they're up to that I can contribute to and relate to meaningfully.

And, although it's not nice to say, the truth is I can keep up with my real friends out here. One of my annoyances about F******* is that I often found myself friending people that, um.... quite frankly, I didn't like very much. But they were friends of friends, or they were in the same group or club I was, or something. They sent me a friend request, and once I figured out who the heck they were, I realised I couldn't not friend them without some useless angst happening in the real world. The politics of "friending" just added the clutter and dysfunction of F*******, not to mention its general uselessness.

I still have to go back to F******* from time to time, mostly for event invitations. I wish people would just use something like Evite, but hey, to each their own. It works well enough so long as I remember to put the event on my calendar once I RSVP. That's cool.

One thing that still astonishes me, two years on, is how many people don't realise I'm not on F******* except in name. I have completely, absolutely, gutted my account. There is no material information there. For all intents and purposes it looks like a dead account. Even so, I still have people trying to friend me, and still have people saying, "Oh, didn't you see my F*******update?". Obviously they never saw mine, or else they'd know better.

The other thing that I find interesting is how many dedicated F*******ers are down on Twitter. They all say the same thing: it's too much work, and it's too trivial. Yet they all do status updates on F******* (which is the same thing as a Twitter post), and they all read the "latest updates" section. Maybe it's not so much too much work as all the same work one has to do to keep up with F******* anyhow? Personally, I've found Twitter very useful. It makes no pretenses about you being "friends" with anyone (you "follow," you don't "friend"), and it's based on interest, not a "friendship" which may or may not be artificially constructed by the web site.

I'm glad I escaped. It's a lovely on-line world out there. I love the simple things, like being able to choose my own colour schemes and link together my own web space. I love being able to tailor the information flow into something manageable. And yeah, I love feeling like a grown-up instead of a college freshman, since I hated that even when I was a college freshman.

Most of all, I love being comfortable in my own on-line skin.

evil

There are some things that it is reasonable to think that you don't have to worry about as a laptop computer owner. One of those things is that you shouldn't have to fix the partitions on your hard drive just because you pressed the wrong power button when you turned on your machine without wearing your glasses.

That's exactly what happened to me today. This blog is about what happened.

Background

I was up the all of last night battling "flu-like symptoms" (to put it politely), and woke up this morning realising I'd only had two hours of sleep and still felt like crap. In the interests of professionalism I decided to take a sick day. I stumbled from the bedroom to my living room, opened up my laptop, and hit what I thought was the power button. I didn't have my glasses on at the time — I figured I'd put them on and tie my hair back while the machine was booting up, then e-mail my boss to tell her that I wouldn't be in today.

When I returned to the living room, there was a screen saying that Dell Media Player tried to set itself up and couldn't write files to the hard drive. My two immediate thoughts were, Oops, that wasn't the power button and Well, duh, I don't want you to write files to my hard drive anyways, and what are you still doing on my computer? You should have gone away when I ditched Vista 45 minutes after accepting this computer from the shipping company. Remember, The Eyrea is a Linux shop, currently using Ubuntu.

I rebooted the computer by using the correct power button, and got a GRUB 17 error. GRUB, in case you don't know already, is a utility that manages operating system loads. It comes with most home & office Linux distributions, because Linux understands that it has to play well with others. But now GRUB was broken.

Recovering

I was in no physical state to take care of a broken computer, but in between lying down and trips to the washroom I checked out the Ubuntu Forums. This is what I learned: when I hit that button with the house on it instead of the power button, some ill-conceived firmware tried to install a bunch of stuff on my hard drive, even though I hadn't explicitly said "go for it" — I'd just hit the wrong damn button. It had created a new partition on my hard drive and made it the root. That's a lot of power for something with a benign name like "Dell Media Centre." Sounds like it would just play CDs and DVDs, but instead I'm stuck with a non-functioning computer. What gives?

Luckily I had a) my Nokia internet tablet and b) an old live session CD of Ubuntu lying around. the Live CD showed me that a 2.6 GB partition had been created on my hard drive, with an embryonic version of... Windows 95??? on it. This was scary, but the Ubuntu forums had answers.

Turns out I wasn't the first Dell owner to suffer through this, and I was able to find the exact solution I needed. Here's the link if you're interested. I had to download and install testdisk and follow that path to a resolution, but it was easy enough to do. If I'd been healthy, I could have been done in 15 minutes. As always, I'm grateful to the Ubuntu community. On my own, I probably would have taken a deep breath and reformatted the hard drive to fix things. As it is, I lost no data or config settings at all once testdisk restored things.

Prevention

As easy as the solution was, I'd really rather not have this problem again. I'm backing up my files right now — I do that regularly anyhow — but once I know all my data is safe I'm going to have a look around the machine's BIOS and see if there's not a way to disable that button. No-one should have to re-do their partitions with a special utility just because they had bad aim one morning.

And now for the real rant part: I know this sets me up for the cheap shot of "you had a legal copy of Windows, why didn't you just stick with it?". I'd put it another way: if I'm running an operating system, successfully, on a computer for over three years, why should I have to worry that I'll hit the wrong button when I power it up? Linux supports every last bit of hardware on this machine — even though Ubuntu wasn't available as an OEM OS when I bought it, I made a point of making sure its specs matched those of the Ubuntu machines Dell sells in the USA. I shouldn't have to worry that some convenience add-on that was created as a marketing thing for non-techie home users would break my hard drive's ability to boot.

That isn't just a Linux/Windows/hardware thing. The same thing could happen if Microsoft ever comes out with a version of Windows that isn't 100% forwards-compatible for older software (like they already did when they came out with the NTFS format), or if I had greatly tightened the security on the machine — as is standard for machines used in the corporate world. Or maybe I just don't want Dell Media Centre installed. One button push should in no way have the power to wreak such havoc. Remember folks, this is a laptop: if I realise my mistake and try to power down before the worst happens, I probably won't have time. It takes a few seconds to get the battery pack out of this thing. That's not fair to users of any OS.

Postscript: I just looked, and the Ubuntu community spoke accurately — there is no way to turn off the Media Centre button. Looks like I better keep my rescue discs somewhere I can find them easily.

Dell, you've always been a good computer company to me, and very likely I'll buy my next machine from you anyhow, but I'd like to meet the person who came up with this design and hear a very good explanation as to why things were set up this way.

Postscript #2: I just found a link that confirming that if you get rid of the Media Center partition simply because you don't want it, and put Windows over the entire hard drive, hitting the button will wipe your root Windows partition too. So it's not a "Linux thing" at all, but a "hitting this button can cause scary stuff" thing.

all is not vanity

I remember the first time I used hand lotion. I was five years old. My mother told me to hold out my hands, and she squirted a little bit of this cold pink stuff onto each of my palms. Then she mimed how to rub it into my skin, and I copied her. I remember that it smelled like roses. It was wonderful. My mother told me that I couldn't have a bottle for myself, because it was expensive and I was too little, but once ever day or two she would give me more.

What were we doing? Was it an initiation into the beauty cult? A lesson in vanity? Not at all. The truth was right there on my hands for all to see. My cuticles were ragged and bloody, more raw wounds and scabs than regular skin. I didn't want to learn to tie my shoelaces, or write for long periods of time, because it hurt. Scales of loose skin hung off the ends of my fingers as if they were trying to molt.

In high school, one of my guy friends teased me about always having a tube of lotion in my purse, and came up with some suitably adolescent and filthy excuse as to why I'd always have "lube" on me. I told him I'd quit using it for a week to show him what would happen. After three days alone, the knuckles on my right hand were ready. I went up to him before study hall started, said "Watch," and clenched my fist in front of his face.

The middle knuckle cracked into a hundred tiny cuts, as if it had been attacked with a wire brush. The cuts started to bleed.

My classmate never teased me about carrying around hand lotion again, but there are plenty of people out there who are confused about the dividing lines between comfort and vanity, health and indulgence.

A massage can be a treat to someone who is fairly relaxed anyhow, but to someone who is suffering a lot of stress, it can be the difference between being able to turn their neck enough to drive — or not. As I tried to point out above, it's a similar thing with skin moisturisers. One person's "can't be bothered" is another person's bout of eczema.

Recently I decided to try to do something about my nails again. Like my cuticles, they're dry, and they tend to split and break off in chunks once they reach a certain length. I got this stuff that looks, feels, and smells like clear nail polish, but claims to do a better-than-average job of protecting and strengthening the nails. I've only been wearing it for a day, but it's already outlasted every other product I've tried.

Understand, I don't even want long nails — they'd get in the way of all the typing and needlework I do. I just want nails that don't end at irregular angles with tender spots where the quick has been exposed.

The one aesthetic thing the nail protector chemical does is make my nails look unnaturally shiny. I don't especially like it, but it's not a big deal either. On the other hand, it reminds me of a man who was a friend of my high school drama teacher. She said he had a disease that made his nails yellow and blistering. She was mentioning him because we were talking about gendered costume, and she said he often wished that it was socially acceptable for men to wear nail polish. It wouldn't have made his condition any worse, and it would have looked better than how his nails were by themselves. His nails weren't painful per se, but because they looked so bad people often thought he was in more discomfort than he actually was. He just wanted his fingernails to be a non-issue.

For all these examples and more, though, it's amazing how many people will tell people with these medical realities that they are being "vain" if they do something about their pain and discomfort. I've even had people try to have it both ways with my dry skin situation: if I mention how strict I am about applying cream, I'm "vain," but if they notice that I have scratches on my legs that make it look like I've been attacked by a cat (except I wasn't — I just didn't wake up enough to moisturise the itchy spot and scratched myself in my sleep) then I'm "self-destructive."

It's not the means that define the vain and conceited from the simply afflicted. It's the ends. Those who are truly suffering from vanity will make themselves known by more than what's on their fingernails.

30 years' wait over

When I was eight years old, the King Tutankhamun exhibit came to Toronto. It was a big deal. It was the only Canadian stop on the exhibition's North American tour.

I didn't get to go. My best friends in Grade 3 did, but I didn't. So I got to hear about the exhibit, got a book about it as a Christmas gift from an aunt who took herself and said I would have been too little (did I mention my best friends at school went?), got a tin full of death-mask shaped Laura Secord chocolates. I still have the tin and the book. But I was furious that I didn't get to go. Too little? I was a year younger and yet almost half a head taller than most of the other kids in my class.

Funny how things continue to bug you when you think it's little-kid stuff you got over ages ago. As soon as the AGO announced that King Tut was coming back to Canada, I immediately started to try to press-gang various friends and family members into going. I was not going to miss it this time!

The problem with friends and family members is that they don't always have the same bucket list you do. In the end, no-one really wanted to go.

And then I mentioned to my friend Page that I was taking myself to the Tut exhibit. I had even bought an AGO membership so I could guarantee I would get a ticket. The ever-cool Page and her husband MG said they wanted to see it with me. So I had company (and excellent company at that) after all.

The time slot I had picked was Saturday morning, at the opening of the gallery for the day. I baked scones the night before, walked up to Page's & MG's house, and contributed the scones to breakfast (they already had fruit, yogourt, and tea, glorious tea). After eating we hit the subway and were just about awake by the time we got to the gallery.

AGO staff seem to be pretty level-headed and courteous most of the time, but the morning we saw Tut they were great. I had my membership card out to show that the member's ticket I had printed off did indeed belong to me, and they let me go into a special member's-only line. When I said I was worried about losing my friends (in the much longer non-member's line), they let Page & MG join me. Membership does have its privileges. We were the first ones in.

The first half of the exhibit tried to place the Tut artifacts in the larger context of what was going on with ancient Egyptian society, religion, and art. For the first time ever (and I've seen a number of exhibits about ancient Egypt at this point in my life) I could appreciate how the artwork changed, and how realistically (or not) faces were depicted. As usual with ancient Egyptian work, I was in awe of the artisanship that had gone into crafting each piece. Some of the work was unfinished, and it was wonderful to see the rough sketches that were the start of such a formal style of artwork.

The actual King Tut part of the exhibit was laid out like the real-life tomb in the Valley of the Kings. It included archival newsreels of the tomb's discovery — the film that ended with a man wearing a boater discovering he was on-camera and giving the lens a big bow and tip of his hat really touched me for some reason —plus of course lots of artifacts and information about them. This is the first exhibit I've seen which included flat-screen monitors above the display cases showing 3D animation of the artifact in context and additional explanatory text, which I appreciated.

When we were finally done with seeing, reading, and examining everything, we went to the pub across the road from the gallery and had an early lunch. I said that the decor of the pub wasn't really all that different from the pieces we had just seen — it was just mass-produced instead of being crafted by hand. Page has a degree in expressive art therapy, and she said that people stay the same: we keep liking symmetry, we keep being attracted to shiny things. I think that's what attracts me to ancient Egyptian art: it doesn't take much to make it look like it belongs with right now.

A 30-year wait for artifacts 3,000 years old: it doesn't matter. The relevance and the impact stay the same.

fire festival

Last Saturday I went to the ever-cool Cathy's & Darren's annual chili cook-off. All told there were ten different kinds of chili scattered about the kitchen. Two were on the stove, but the other eight were in crock pots.

There are lots of ways to organise a party like this, but here's how Cathy & Darren do it:

• Each set of guests brings a regular-size batch of chili. That is, you don't worry about feeding all 15-20 people who attend. The Cumulative Law of Pot-Lucks will help take care of that.
• Each pot of chili gets assigned a number. Next year, there will also be ingredients lists beside each pot (see below for why).
• Each guest gets a small bowl and a spoon to eat with. The idea is to take a smallish sample of each pot. Reality: Personally, I had about five mini-servings and was stuffed. Still, you can tell a lot about whether or not you will like a chili just by sniffing, so a taste test for everything isn't strictly necessary.
• Each guest gets a ballot, where they get to vote on the hottest chili, the chili with the most interesting ingredients, and their favourite. Ballots are anonymous and get tabulated when the sampling/eating has died down.
• Cathy & Darren made sure there were lots of biscuits, rolls, bread, tortilla chips, sour cream, and dip for palate cleansing/cooling down.

During the chili sampling, people chatted about recent curling games and about how much snow there was where they lived. I sipped a tepid Tim Horton's tea that I'd bought along the way and never got a chance to drink in the car (not enough red lights). At one point someone made a curling joke just as I sipped from my Timmy's cup and saw someone else having a spoonful of chili, and it hit me: Wow, this is so... um... Canadian. In point of fact, a Texan got the popular vote, but somehow that seemed par for the course.

Once we had finally convinced ourselves to stop eating (a non-trivial task, under the circumstances), people wandered to the rec room to play Winter Olympics on the Wii. Outside, it was snowing. What, you thought we'd go out and get all gushy about how pretty the white stuff was? It was freaking cold out there. Winter walks are for tourists. Now is the time to move about indoors.

Things I learned:

• It's been over twenty years since it was my job to cook for my mother and brothers, and therefore it's high time I stop spicing my chili to suit their (ultra-bland) chili preferences. Cayenne here we come.
• It is possible to keep eating after the inside of your mouth goes numb, so long as you are happy.
• I suck at both real and virtual archery.
• I need to expand my collection of industrial music. Badly.

enough to create insomnia

I have never been a morning person. Even as a five-year-old child, I had a hard time getting to sleep at my prescribed bed-time, and I hated getting out of bed. This is not necessarily because I'm asleep in the morning; often I'm awake, but I'd just rather stay in bed. I can enjoy the warmth, the cushiness, and read a book, check my e-mail via my internet tablet, or even just stare out the bedroom doorway and admire how nicely the pale blue-green paint on the bedroom walls goes with the bright red couch and creamy pale yellow paint in the living room.

Ironically — okay, it's past ironically, so cruelly —I have always had jobs which required me to be at work dead early, earlier than most of the other cubicle-dwellers. I'm very fortunate to be at a job I like right now, and one of the things I like about it is that there are enough early starters that no-one comments on when I come in. In previous jobs I was always one of the first ones, and some lark would always praise me for it. It's hard to be gracious and say thank you when you're double-checking your caffeine intake is sufficient and trying not to think of how much you'd rather be lying in at home, finishing the book you're reading.

Supposedly there are Lots of Studies out there proving that larks are more successful than night owls like me. I don't doubt it. They're always waking me up too early, while I have to be careful not to disturb them at night. So I lose sleep while they don't. Think about it — why are noise regulations all about keeping quiet at night, but not in the morning during those last few crucial hours to sleep?

The other things larks do is pile on the list of things that could become Successful Habits if only you got up just a teensy bit earlier. Here's my list of things morning people tell me to do in the morning:

• exercise: 30 minutes plus 10 minutes to change in and out of exercise gear (40 minutes total)
• write morning pages (15 minutes). In real life, every time I try to do this, I fall asleep in my writing-spot and it takes me more like 45 minutes. But let's say 15 to do it as prescribed.
• have a nutritious hot breakfast, cooked fresh, and eat it (30 minutes — 15 to cook, 15 to eat)
• meditate (15 minutes)
• work on my novel (60 minutes)

All that adds up to... 160 minutes, or 2 hours and 40 minutes.

I do not move quickly in the morning. Today, this night-owl's alarm clock goes off at 5:15am. So if I added in extra time to do all that larky stuff, I would have to get up at... 2:30am?

2:30am. That's not a waking-up time. That's a going-to-bed time.

And for the pseudo-larks out there who like to toss their heads, smile smugly, and say, "Oh, that. I always get that ready the night before so I don't have to worry about it in the morning," there's already lots to do in the evenings and on weekends. Adding on to that total another 160 minutes of tasks doesn't help.

So what to do? Work smarter, not harder, I suppose. I have my own list of tricks for how to get things done. What about yours?

my so-called real life

I've been one of those people who's "into" computers since I was about twelve, so I'm not quite sure what's been going on lately, but it's like this: I just haven't been using my computer at home every day.

There, I said it.

What have I been doing instead? All the stuff I would normally do off a computer, just more of it. I've been taking long walks. I've been cooking. I've been reading more books. I've been knitting. I have been thinking about my writing, although I have not actually been doing any — more like visualisation exercises or focused daydreaming. So I feel like I've been writing even though I haven't been.

I've been getting my internet fix every morning when the alarm on my tablet goes off at 5:15am (ugh), and I wake up by checking my e-mail and the weather.

The tablet usage itself might explain what's going on. The tablet only gets powered down when it needs to be rebooted (once, maybe twice a week). Compared to that instant access, starting up my laptop — even though Ubuntu has a decent startup time —seems to take ages. Even though I ditched my desk over a year ago and always compute from the comfort of my living room couch, the tablet is a lot smaller, a lot less demanding.

Do I want to join the ranks of Luddites who only use computers because their jobs demand it, or just to pay bills and reserve library books? Absolutely not. Before I kept everything on a laptop, I kept everything in a single paper notebook, and I know the electronic version is much better for me.

Starting last week, though, I've started to feel the need to put myself out there again. I've been tweeting more. I've been commenting on blogs more. I wrote a rant on my DIY blog, and now have these musings here.

Maybe it's been an involuntary sabbatical. Do you ever feel like you just need to get away from the virtual crowds for a while?

20 years

I was going to post to my DIY blog today about some stuff that I've made whilst getting my writing mojo back. I was going to post here about some writing tools I've been using, old and new, in the hopes that it might help other people along with their own tool-using. I was going to comment on some literary events that started last week, and on some communication oddities I've been noticing. Mostly I was going to return the blog to its update-on-Sunday schedule.

But then I saw the date, and read over at Broadsides that it's not just the anniversary of the Montreal massacre today — it's the 20th anniversary.

So someday, maybe even next Sunday, I'll blog about some of that other stuff.

Today is already full of far more important things.

Please take a moment to remember the women who died, as well as the four who survived, and the ones who tried to stop the shooter.

this year in NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo, the conclusion: this year's NaNoWriMo was for me both a breakthrough and a catastrophe. It was a breakthrough because I finally found an outlining style I liked and that seemed to be effective. It was not a catastrophe because I got so few words done, even though it's true the finally word count was only in the four-digit range — I've already "won" twice and like to think I've proven to myself that I can write 50,000 words in one month.

The catastrophe was that just around the middle of the month, I found out life was imitating art and that some central details to my story had become true for someone I know, someone who had no idea what my novel was about, or even that I was participating in NaNoWriMo. Ethically, I don't have any trouble with, say, taking a cool picture frame a friend owns and describing one just like it in a story (with a different photo in it and placing it in a different room than in real life). But I do worry when my story sounds just like something that actually happened, even if I did come up with my story first.

The one good thing that is coming out of this is that I now have a story on the go that is much less likely to be true. Or, if true, much less likely to have happened to someone I know personally.

I sincerely hope that last paragraph isn't tempting fate (or coincidence) too much.

when support causes failure

Writing, as we are so often told, is a solitary activity. For some people, that makes it more difficult to write. For part-time misanthropes like myself, that's a good thing. Don't get me wrong: for part of the time, I love being with friends and family, giving and receiving affection and attention, helping each other out... but only for part of the time. For the other part of the time, I'm quite happy to be on my own, writing.

When I was a teenager, I was able to write in my journal and carry on a conversation about something completely different at the same time. For example, the journal would be about why high school sucks on that particular day, while the conversation would be about whether or not Echo & the Bunnymen would ever re-form and go on to make more music (aside: I am ever-grateful that they did). I can't do that anymore. Partly it's because I'm no longer able to pull off eccentricity like I did when I was a teenager, and partly it's because my friends no longer feel bad about yelling at me if they think I'm ignoring them.

What this means, though, is that the solitary joy of writing has become even more precious.

That makes NaNoWriMo a problem. On the one hand, support is everywhere: on Twitter, with my friends, on the NaNoWriMo site itself. On the other hand, all that support can be in itself distracting. You're here to help me through my 50,000 word count? Great. I appreciate it. Talk to you 1 December.

There's only one thing worse than having writer's block, and that's having a friend call you up to offer their support just when you were getting in the groove (or, more likely, thinking that you would start making your word quota in five minutes, just as soon as you finished your cup of tea). It makes me think of that Camus story where the famous painter, desperate for some quality work time, locks himself in the cupboard under the stairs and refuses to come out until he's done his painting.

Camus's protagonist dies in his self-imposed isolation, but there's got to be a happy ending that suits the part-time misanthrope and the part-time gregarious parts of me (and you, and all creative people) together. I don't want the support to go away, and I don't want to stop supporting people.

I just want to get the damned novel done, too.

Know what I mean?

and so it begins

This is my fourth NaNoWriMo, which I think gives me enough experience to muse about how different they've all been for me.

The first year I signed up, it was an abject failure because that was The November Everything Happened — my grandmother died, my 17-year-old cat died, and I lost my job all within two weeks. I got through the funeral, the last trip to the vet's, and finding a new job as well as one could be expected (was only unemployed for two weeks, all told), but that didn't leave me with enough energy to write a novel, much less in the remaining days of November.

Two years ago I joined with a bunch of other people who were in the writing group I belonged to at the time. As it turns out, only myself and one other person completed. I was surprised, because there were a number of very strong writers in the group who had signed up, and they didn't finish. It was a good lesson in quality versus quantity, but at the same time it made me want to finish again next year. I have to admit that I didn't use entirely new material per the rules that year. Instead, I wrote fifty thousand new words on a story that already had about seven thousand words done on it. I justified this by not claiming the completion certificate, which according to the NaNoRebel forum is an acceptable thing to do.

Last year I was back, this time with a story that didn't get started until 1 November. I wrote the entire thing in eighteen days of the thirty available, which meant lots of marathon sessions and a photo finish on 30 November (which made me late for a craft event at a friend's but was so worth it! Luckily the ever-chaotic Tara was understanding.)

I tried editing the novel I wrote for NaNo 2008 in the spring, and discovered it needs a lot more than editing — more like a full rewrite. Maybe someday. Right now I want to push ahead with new ideas.

This year I have one five-day weekend and two three-day weekends in November, thanks to a stricter take-your-vacation-or-else policy at work. I'm also creating a phase draft for this year's NaNoWriMo novel, thanks to Lazette Gifford via Johanna Harness. What this means is that instead of pulling away as quickly as I can towards the 30 November goal of fifty thousand words, I've written just over a thousand words just to put myself on the chart, and now have retired to writing the rest of my phase draft. I know the ideal would have been to get the phase draft done before November started (um, next year?), but this is how things worked out. I did use the phase draft as I had it so far to write my first thousand words, and it did make things much easier. At least I have those vacation days to put in some marathons and get caught up.

Happy NaNoing!

getting ready for NaNoWriMo

National Novel-Writing Month is coming up fast, and lots of people are blogging about getting ready. You can join your local NaNo support group, brainstorm ideas, learn about productivity tools, and practise telling your friends that you're busy when what you specifically mean is that you're busy writing*. Some people have also started to talk about outlining (I'm outlining for NaNoWriMo for the first time this year — we'll see how it goes), and about strategies for getting the requisite 50,000 words done in 30 days.

All of those things are important — for the writing part. But there's more to consider.

Housecleaning: This is the last week for the next month that most NaNoWriMo participants will have to do a thorough housecleaning. If you are a writer who can't write in clutter (erm, like me), this is very important. I do not think it's a coincidence that I've been getting more done since I moved to an apartment with a dishwashing machine and ensuite washer and dryer.

Food: For my first NaNoWriMo, I lived on takeout from the local Chinese/Canadian diner. They're a wonderful diner, but I don't think they're meant to be the main source of sustenance for an entire month. Now I have a slow cooker and a collection of casserole recipes that can be made quickly. Real food made from real ingredients is important if you're going to avoid getting sick around the 30,000 word mark. I know if you're half of a couple you can always bribe/cajole/negotiate with your significant other, but the rest of us have to think of these things.

Locations: Working from your usual spot at home isn't always the best. Scout out libraries, cafés, and anywhere else you might be able to write. I just found out that my local library has comfy seating areas with easily accessible electrical outlets. That means I can keep writing there after my laptop batter runs out.

Exercise: If your day job is a desk job, NaNoWriMo can be a drag because you're basically making yourself go home and do what you do at work (even if the output is very different). Taking half an hour to do some exercise is what you should be doing anyhow, plus it lets you take a better break between computer sessions. Which brings me to:

Decide what to do about your commute: Are you going to NaNoWriMo during it or not? I have chosen not to; instead, I'm going to use it for battery recharging and read or knit. Then again, I have heard enough stories of people who have written entire novels on the subway to know that for some people, their commute is their writing time. Something to consider.

* Actually, that's a good thing to learn how to do year-round.