Return of the Weird Searchers!

Hurrah! After more than a year of not being able to get searches beyond stuff related to resumes for marriage in the Asian subcontinent, the strange search terms have reappeared!

Oh joy, oh joy!

So I check my search terms every once in a while just to see if something hinkey comes along. And today I was rewarded with this gem:

Oh, how I’ve missed these beauts! Lookit that! Ain’t it just grand?

I have no idea who might be a whore as a hobby, but hey, everyone needs a hobby right? Might as well enjoy it, right? And if you can get paid for it to boot, well – show me the downside to this one?

Of course, it might just be someone who’s a whore for hobbies. But admitting you have a problem is the first step, don’t you know. So there you have it! I’ve been sought out by someone who’s a hobby whore or a hobbyist whore, whichever.

Also note the “what are two paragraphs” entry there. I’d say two paragraphs are … well, two paragraphs. One paragraph more than one. A pair. One paragraph and another paragraph. Maybe it’s just me, but did you really need the great Oracle Google for that?

Well, wasn’t this fun?

Have a great weekend everyone, and if you’re interested, my #fridayflash piece is up on my fiction blog. Stop by if you’ve a mind to.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

A New Toy

Well. I have a new toy to play with.

I love software. It’s no secret. Every time I find a new piece of software to play with, so long as it’s free or I can get it for free (ahem), I’ll try it. Within limits. of course, but for the most part, I’m a slut for software.

So I’ve experimented with a couple of email clients over the last couple years. Mozilla Thunderbird, for one. It was okay. At the time I installed it and tried it, it was not only free and not difficult to use, it was the only one which connected to almost all my email accounts. Yahoo mail, of course, is a problem child. They won’t let you connect unless you pay for their email, which stinks, and I won’t do it. So phooey on them.

Anyway, I’ve avoided using Thunderbird because it’s slow (to me), cumbersome, and doesn’t handle Gmail accounts well. Frustrated, I gave up on it. It was easier to use my little WebMail Notifier addon for Firefox than it was to use Thunderbird, and that just defeats the purpose.

So tonight, I lamented to my wife about how much I wanted to be able to work offline and still get my email. My feed readers and other things interfere with actual work I have to do lately, and I need to curtail how much time I spend on the Internet. So I wanted an offline client to check ALL my email. If I sign on to Firefox I’m going to end up losing a couple of hours. I’m undisciplined.

She spent a while searching and offered me two potential clients. One specialized in Gmail, but I have other accounts I want to check too. So I held that on the back burner. Then she told me about Threadsy. Okay, it’s great – she can tell you about it if you’re interested – but I wanted to stay off the browser, not work in it. So strike that.

Then she showed me one she loved. It used to be Microsoft Outlook Express. Now, it’s called Windows Live. It’s incredible.

First, it accepted all my Gmail accounts without problem. There’s a setting in Gmail you need to use to permit IMAPI access, then you’re good to go. It naturally took my Hotmail account without even asking. But it also offered to establish subscriptions for my RSS feeds. That means I could read your blogs, my comments and almost anything else providing an RSS feed, right here in my little Live window.

OH, heaven!

Now, I haven’t set up the subscriptions to either my RSS feeds or any newsgroups. But I have established all my email accounts and got them going. Live was so clever it took the ridiculous tags Gmail uses instead of folders, called labels, and it turned them into folders all by itself for me. So if I’m overwhelmed looking at my Inbox, I don’t have to filter the mail and risk forgetting to remove that filter later. I can just click in the folder of choice and see all the mail in those folders. And as email comes in I can just move it to the appropriate folder and it’s out of my way; then it syncs everything up on the mail server too and voila! My email is solved!

So, if you’re a Windows user, and you like Thunderbird or are on Outlook Express stubbornly refusing to upgrade, you need to look at this. The software’s free; it’s fast; it’s simple to use and set up; it’s interface is clean and intuitive. It’s fantastic, and I don’t generally rave about email clients. But I give this one two thumbs up and can’t wait to dig farther into it to see what else it can do.

Interested? You can download it here. It also offers to install a bunch of other stuff too, but you don’t have to take ‘em. I do, however, recommend Windows Live Writer.

Have fun.

-JDT-

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Best of the Worst

Okay, yesterday I got some good input on the best opening lines in fiction, music and movies from you guys. You did a good job providing me some great openings to books and songs and such. So today, I’m looking for the flip side, the B-side, the side nobody listens to.

What’s the worst line you’ve ever read in a piece of fiction? or scene from a movie? line from a song?

The worst thing you’ve run across. Something which made you groan, roll your eyes, heck, maybe even put the book, song, movie, whatever aside.

It doesn’t have to be the opening this time. Just something really bad you ran across somewhere in your experience. There are a ton of ‘em, I’m sure, and there are going to be some really fun examples given. But, as I did last time, I’m going to kick things off. For me, the worst line I’ve ever read comes from a classic book, written by Dashiell Hammett, in his hard-boiled novel The Maltese Falcon.

His eyes burned yellowly.

Okay, “yellowly” does a couple of great things for me. First, it’s an adverb. I hate adverbs. Second, it’s not even a real adverb. It’s so absurd and ridiculous, I actually laughed aloud when I read it. Then I had to read it to my wife. And she laughed, then groaned, then we laughed some more. I mean … c’mon, Dashiell. That’s bad.

So, that’s my entry. What’s yours?

Sound off and give me a giggle. I can hardly wait.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

One Liners

I read a lot, but not as much as most of you do. Most of you.

Despite my experience with novels and how they’re written – which, while not extensive, certainly isn’t too shabby – I had an interesting experience sort of recently which made me stop and take stock.

Of the elements which hook a reader (or, if you’re a wannabe published writer as I am, an agent or editor) is the opening line. It’s crucial to the success of your novel. A good hook set in a reader’s mouth can reel them in for the whole book, even if the writing isn’t stellar from that point forward. The hook is the element most writers hear they need to focus on, make it as impactful as they can.

I asked an acquaintance of mine – technically, my wife asked him – to read a piece I considered submitting for publication. My friend Sherri had given me her feedback already, and my loving spouse offered me a good deal of her input too. So I thought a tie-breaker would be in order. You know, just see what shakes out from having someone who’s not as familiar with my work look over my story and see what they thought.

I asked him to be brutally honest, and to his credit he was. Of all the very helpful things he pointed out, one of the things he liked least in the story was the beginning (he hated the ending too; not a good combination). Sherri told me the hook was adequate, but not great. Only my gentle wife said it was good.

So I looked at the opening. I haven’t revised it yet. Time is not my friend now, but I don’t want the critiques to go for naught. I will make the changes suggested and see where it goes. But the story, as I wrote it, got a rejection from the only place I submitted it. I could keep trying, but I think I want to improve it first and see what happens.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about the opening hook of my stories lately, since that event actually, and it got me to thinking:

What’s the best opening line to a book you’ve ever seen? What line stuck with you, wedged into your mind so solidly you can’t forget it? What book’s opening sentence grabbed you so viciously and refused to let go until you finished the book? Can you remember it?

Not a big reader? What about movies? What’s the best opening scene to a movie you’ve ever seen? Or a song – what song has the best opening lyrics, the best first line, say, you’ve ever heard?

I’ll start, okay? This is, in my humble and mostly uneducated opinion, the best opening line in all of literature:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

That’s from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower cycle, book one, The Gunslinger. It’s the opening line to the entire cycle, which goes for seven books.

How about you? What gets your vote?

Sound off, and let me know.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

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Post Critique Syndrome

Okay, so most of you are probably aware of the discussion which occurred on my fiction blog over the weekend. I posted a bit of a novel I’ve been kicking around for a few months. It’s the opening. But I posted it as a piece of #fridayflash, which is limited to about a thousand words. I wrote the piece at about 3 a.m. on Friday morning, read it and trimmed to to under 1K, then posted.

And it promptly met with mixed reviews.

Most folks found it entertaining and emotive, but some questioned the direction I chose for the piece. New blog buddy Linda had some excellent things to say. Foremost among those was use of the term “post critique syndrome”. It’s very much like PTSD in some ways. I was shell-shocked, discouraged, a trifle depressed and in the end, just wished I hadn’t posted the piece at all.

But CalliopesPen showed up and offered me some outstanding, glowing words. I sat and basked in them for several hours before I could even realize I had no words to describe how she’d made me feel. Sherri was also encouraging, and my loving wife? Well, she’s always the most amazing and supportive of all. Those who enjoyed it really did. Those who thought it could’ve used a bit less had me on several counts – too much adjective-spicing, too abrupt an injection of the fantasy element (even though this was deliberate, the 1K limit made the couple of sentences I used for that portion of the story severely inadequate), should’ve said more with “less words” [sic].

Then, Linda went a step further. She emailed me a line-edit critique of the piece.

It was amazing how many mistakes I’d made. How much I’d been lazy about the writing portion. I tried to work the piece as both a study in character and a fantasy-western piece, and that just didn’t work, period. I did overuse adjectives. I made sentences more complex than they had to be. Some of the wording could’ve been smoothed out and solidified by just saying the plain, ordinary thing I intended. But no, I tried to get all literati and eloquent, and boing! – weak piece. Big surprise.

In the end, what happened here can be boiled down to this: I tried too hard while not trying hard enough. I didn’t put enough effort into cleaning the prose, and I put too much effort into trying to “write”, like I think I’m supposed to write, like I’ve always told myself I write. Different pieces cry out for different voices to me. I’ve written some which were deliberately lyrical and lilting in tone. I’ve written them punchy and direct. I’ve written in the style of Poe and Lovecraft. I’ve written like King, and like Hemingway. In all of that, I never lost sight of the writing and the style.

In this short bit, I did absolutely lose sight of the writing. I blame those who came by and offered only accolades for previous works I’ve done. (Just kidding.) It inflated my ego to the point I thought I wouldn’t get anything but glowing reviews for this one too. (Not kidding there; my ego was out of control this time. I didn’t even imagine I’d get so many people calling out my flaws.)

Well, I’ve learned my lesson. I got over my PCS, and moved on to the point of being my usual, thick-skinned self (with a little more humble added, me hopes).

I’d love to do another character study, but this time I’m going to stay focused and remember my KISS principle. Finding the best way to say something with as few words as I can is the goal. One of the comments I received stated “I’d never suggest you eliminate adjectives from your writing.” That person is being honest, but for me, the best medicine is the harshest. Taking things to their extreme as much as I can helped me break my addiction to, reliance on, adverbs. This part about the adjectives is the next step. Finding the best noun-verb combination to say what I want to convey is the best medicine for me. It’s just how I work best.

So next Friday, if I have time to do an entry, I promise to make it better, and pay attention to those things I didn’t pay attention to this time. I promise to apply the lessons I learned from all the wonderful people who challenged me to stop trying to pull a fast one, stop thinking more of myself than I ought. Most of all, I promise to apply the lesson of humility I learned. It was long overdue and desperately needed.

So, to Linda, CalliopesPen, Sherri, Louise, Al Bruno III, and every one of the great people who sounded off on the piece – thank you. I needed you this weekend and you delivered. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

So … how was your weekend? What did you all do? Have fun? Ready for Christmas yet?

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

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