Category Archives: General Writing Things

In this age we live in, I occasionally find myself wondering how authors ever managed to perform novel research back in the old days (I mean, I sort of know, since I used to do it, but only for really bad novels).  These days, if I’m writing along and suddenly need to know how a particular machine gun works or the hierarchy of the Lutheran church or how a certain street looked in Saint Paul forty years ago I can just look it up, without ever leaving my seat.  Then it’s back to writing!

But as I work on my latest masterwork, The Killer Vicar of the Twin Cities, I am reminded that there is a dark side to all this technology.

I normally practice the kind of three or four-fingered high-speed hunting and pecking known as “engineer’s touch typing” – that is, typing with just a couple fingers in a kind of ad hoc manner (my right hand has somehow become responsible for more of the keyboard than the left, for example), but pretty fast – fast enough, frankly that my brain can’t really get ahead anyway if I’m doing anything more complicated than transcribing.

I generally look at the keyboard as I type, or at least glance at it now and again, but for a long time I’ve been able to type without looking for short bursts.  Yesterday, though, I discovered that I can actually crank out whole paragraphs while staring off into space, and actually make fewer typos than usual.  The key is typing up a novel synopsis, something  I hate doing so much that I can apparently enter a fugue state in an effort to just get it over with.

So I suppose I could crank out prose much faster, as long as I found it banal and annoying.  Something to consider, I suppose.

Right here.

Last year, I provided some handy nanowrimo tips, so anyone else can be a big ol’ winner, like me.  My tip for this year: you don’t hear a lot about this as far as writing goes, but cats are considered subordinate to human household inhabitants (not by the cats themselves, obviously, but still…).  Therefore, any wordcount resulting from a cat sitting on your keyboard when you get up to brew a hot cup of tea can be freely added to your total, and corrected, if necessary, during NaNoEdMo.

Sadly, my cat sat mainly on my space bar, so the eleven pages she added to the novel are of limited use, but one of these days she may help me out.

There’s a contest at Fantasy Literature to harness the power of teamwork to come up with every possible urban fantasy cliche possible.  Personally, I think it will be non-trivial to even come up with anything not covered in the intro paragraphs, but it’s worth a try.

This is just a boring old piano, not a computer, but you get the idea

I’ve written plenty of posts about HP Lovecraft, so it only seemed, appropriate to make a nod, today, to Ada Lovelace. the world’s first computer programmer.  It’s sort of literary, too, since Ada was the only daughter that Lord Byron managed to have in wedlock.  They never really met, but if not for Ada’s mother encouraging her daughter’s interest in math and science in an attempt to steer her away from her whackjob father’s peculiar tendencies, none of us would be using the internet today!

An important message for minor characters, anyway, and probably protagonists as well.  It can also be useful to stay close to the dog, although you have to be careful, since dogs have a way of coming through disasters unscathed that can kill people.

Alison Bechdel has won a MacArthur “genius” grant.  T o celebrate, I wrote a short story fictionalizing the events leading up to the award, but I realized there were no female characters in it, which didn’t seem appropriate.  So I wrote a second draft, which had a couple women in it, but they spent all their time talking about John D. MacArthur.

This is tougher than you’d think, man.