In dailywritingtips Mark Nichol wrote an article about Beware of Buzzword Bingo. The article discusses the niceties of playing Buzzword Bingo, where you have a 5x5 grid filled with buzzwords and every time one is used in a meeting you mark that word. The first to get five in a row wins. When I was in the corporate world that would be fun, but now I'm a wannabe writer so I think I'll try it here.

Today I read a blog where they dissed the Star Wars movie for the line by Solo, "You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs." I'll agree that it was probably an error by someone who didn't know that a parsec is a distance measurement not a time one. It's usually easy to pick these technical faux pas and when I was young I delighted in doing that.

These days I know that don't know it all and instead I try to figure out as many alternatives as I can. So let's see what I can do:

"Write what you know" is some standard advice to new writers. I came across it again in some blog this morning and I stopped to think about it. Why is it good advice? From what I've read it means to say that write what you know about because you know about it and therefore will write a more realistic story.

Did you ever notice how what you write is not as good as it was when it was still in your head. In your head the ideas are great, the prose and dialogue sparkle and you can't stop thinking about it.

Then you write it down. As soon as it hits the paper or screen it turns to crap. The idea is one you've seen many times before, the words seem as if they were written by a sub-literate monkey who learned English as a third language. Well I think I know why.

The first draft is done. It now flows logically from beginning to end (I hope). Many poor darlings of mine had to be cut and cut so bad they died. Oh well, as with many such they may rise again and new ones will be born.

I figured out why I couldn't finish my story. It was because I didn't know the middle of my story. It's a murder mystery and although I knew who dun it and why but I didn't know how the detective figured it out. Duh.

So I took the dog for a walk. I do that most days but this day I decided to tell the story to the dog - Zena- and that made all the difference. It's hard to tell a story if you don't know the story and when I got to the middle I had to stop. So I tried different ideas and slowly a reasonable middle popped into my head. So now I can finish it and move on.

So I guess it's time to start. I haven't done much on my story but the Open Office window is open and I have done all my chores for the day. Our sys admin has added a fancy editor for these entries so I have to learn how to use it. It does seem to have some rendering problems on this browser but going full screen seems to fix it. 

Is it still procrastination if the challenge doesn't start until the new year? In any case I wrote the last, well, close to the last scene of my current WIP. If it won't make the piece too long I may write a closure scene. If you want to read it you can go to the 2011 challenges section of this site (members only).

I have been playing with my nook. It is fun and a good waste of time. I have done all I wanted with it: converted my stories to epub, found a lot of free content, bought a book from B&N, and checked out a library book. So, it does all I want. And I actually read two stories.

I finally broke down and go a e-reader. It's the Nook from Barnes and Noble. It was my birthday and I had a gift card. So far so good, it's easy to read on though the navigation takes a bit of getting used to. I got a story from the web and converted it to PDF and epub using Open Office. Both read OK. Then today I eighteen epub books from the site: chrome://epubreader/content/catalog.xul . Maybe tomorrow I'll register it and buy something using that gift card. And maybe try to get an ebook from my local library.

This is a place for me to document my attempts to write on a regular basis this coming year (2011). This is not a place to log negative vibes but a place to help me change from a wannabe writer to become a real one.

To accomplish this I will sign up for the write1sub1 challenge. It's at:

The details of this are that: