Writing

As I mentioned last week, I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month. As of writing this blog post I’ve reached 37,000 words in my novel, which I’m quite happy about. I found the first week or so pretty easy to manage, and I consistently went above the official daily word goal. The last week has been a bit tougher. I set a personal daily goal of 2000 words, and I have managed to hit it every day so far. But it’s been tough at times. Many nights I’ll have only written 800 words or so, and think about just calling it for the day since I’m ahead of the official mark. But part of this month is being disciplined on my own; the official goals aren’t that meaningful, they are just a guide. I want to do this with internal motivation, that’s the real challenge. ...

November is National Novel Writing Month, referred to as NaNoWriMo by the cool kids. The official goal of the event is to write 50,000 words of a brand new novel. More loosely, it’s to write 50,000 of some novel (perhaps you’re finishing last year’s, or revising your current one.) Or if you’re not in the novel game, maybe just write 50,000 words. Or write a graphic novel with some constraint. In reality, it’s an event designed to get people writing and to build the habit of writing every day. The word goal is just to encourage you to silence your inner editor for a while, and let your brain throw crap on paper. ...

I was on one of my favorite subreddits today, /r/learnmath (of course I sort by New), and a question came up that ultimately came down to understanding order of operations. These always frustrate me because they stem from a poor understanding of how the order of operations work; furthermore, any problem involving order of operations can be fixed and cleared up with an additional set of parentheses. Consider this math problem below – the type I see making its way around Facebook. ...

I’ve been curious how cultural trends adjust our feelings toward various habits people have. The biggest change to me has been that of the hipster blogger, sitting in a coffee shop with their MacBook, doing some personal photo-journalism for the benefit of mankind. I think the common notion of what, and who, a writer is has changed dramatically. No longer is it necessarily someone cramped up in an attic, papers everywhere, a drink at hand; it can be anyone with just about any device. I’m sure there are people out there who write posts from their phone – I know I’ve at least edited a few posts from mine. ...

As I come to the realization that a significant part of both my work and personal hobbies involve sitting at a computer, I have become increasingly wary of the stories I hear about things such as repetitive stress injuries (RSI), and what will likely be the impending damage to my eyes. In an effort to avoid, or at least delay, the former issue I have tentatively purchased an ergonomic keyboard. Specifically, the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard from Microsoft. I say tentatively because it’s not cheap. I may return it, but so far I’ve put a few thousand keystrokes on it and it’s feeling pretty good. This review is meant to get as in-depth as a keyboard review can be when written by someone who has never written a keyboard review. I’ll briefly explain my rough, but sufficient, testing procedure and what I found out. Then I’ll get into some details and comparisons I noted to other keyboards I’ve used. ...

Wordpress (both the .org and .com versions) is rolling out a new native editor. It is a “block” system, and I am entirely unsure how I feel about it. I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and try to write a somewhat complete post using the Wordpress.org back-end, with this new block system, and see how it goes. ...

Yesterday I switched over from using Wordpress.com to hosting my blog on Bluehost and using the official Wordpress blogging environment. The main difference here is when you are using Wordpress.com, there is some gray area about who really has control over the content. You are ultimately at the whims of their hosting structure, and also you must pay through the nose to access the various features of the actual Wordpress blogging platform it claims to deal with. ...

I recently put a short story I wrote on Amazon. It’s called When You Come Back. You can find a link to it here. When I originally wrote it, mental illness was not necessarily on my mind. But, the majority of its readers have told me it resonates with them to a fairly strong degree. So, I’ve put it up for $1 and any proceeds I receive will go towards The Trevor Project, in support of mental illness assistance. If you’re not interested in the short story, or in providing Amazon with some of the overhead that comes with buying a Kindle book, you can donate to them directly. If you want the story in PDF form, you can contact me.

An extension cord walks in on its son, a vacuum (three-pronged cord of course), plugging itself into an electrical outlet. Aghast at what it sees, the extension cord can only cry out: “You shameless plug, you’re grounded!” I’m going on vacation this upcoming week. This original joke is the best I could do. The actual shameless plug is my friend Brandon’s review blog, as well as my competing review of his blog, where I verbally abuse and critique his writing even if I have not experienced whatever he is reviewing. It’s all in good fun.

I’ve been struggling a lot over the past few months in starting a new post, or a new piece of writing for myself, and faltering a few paragraphs in, not sure what to do with myself. A large part of this, as was mentioned in a previous post, is due to my habit of editing as I write. I don’t often plan my writing ideas, put them in some flow chart or other organizational structure, or summarize the points I want to make before I write. This helps keep my writing natural, and keep its place as a release valve rather than work. This also puts me in the position of sitting down with what seems to be a well-formulated idea, only to have it peter out faster than anticipated. I recently had a conversation with someone who pointed out that this isn’t necessarily bad, as it still shows that I’m thinking about these topics. I start to second-guess my own thoughts. It also means that I am still writing, even if the finished product does not get produced as prolifically as I would ideally have it. All this has led me to think about the importance of completing projects in life, and to what extent my large folder of draft documents can be justified and excused. ...