marycrawford | (no subject)

Results of the personality quiz everyone on my flist is doing:

You are an SEDF--Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius.

You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well--even those you have known a long time--because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

...wow.

A few random but enjoyable places to go:

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's addictive Evil Overlord Plot Generator

Gorgeous vintage clothes to drool over

How to swear in 162 languages

The full text of H.W. Fowler's The King's English is here. I intend to read the whole thing so that I'll know when I'm breaking the rules.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's delightful On the Art of Writing is there too. Here's Q on the subject of Jargon, railing against what I would call the 'golden hunter' phenomenon:

An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nay exact, that Byron shall be mentioned again and again. But my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the second sentence turns into ‘that great but unequal poet’ and thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus with Proteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half-way down the page he becomes ‘the gloomy master of Newstead’: overleaf he is reincarnated into ‘the meteoric darling of society’: and so proceeds through successive avatars—‘this arch-rebel,’ ‘the author of Childe Harold,’ ‘the apostle of scorn,’ ‘the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally sensitive of his club-foot,’ ‘the martyr of Missolonghi,’ ‘the pageant-monger of a bleeding heart.’ Now this again is Jargon. It does not, as most Jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes of timidity, which is worse.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You know, I don't think we have 'golden hunter' phenomenon as much in popslash. There's so many names and nicknames, if we used any others even *we* wouldn't know about whom we were talking. And look what you did to my grammar!

Whence this sudden interest in how-to's, I wonder? Not my fault, is it? Also I've got another writing how-to for you, sent it to you just before I saw this post. Check your mail. :)
Wait, if you see this you probably already have checked your mail. Anyway, I may post about it later myself. You know, after I'm caught up with the avalanche of catch-uppy things. ;)

Whence this sudden interest in how-to's, I wonder? Not my fault, is it?

What do you think? *g*

It's a great temptation to go hit the books, no doubt about it. But I've decided that I'm allowed to read how-to-write stuff only if I'm also actually, y'know, writing.

As for the nicknames - I seem to remember trying to figure out how many guys there were in N'Sync and coming up with eight or so. :-)

Thanks for the vintage clothing link! I lecture occasionally on Victorian clothing and have some lovely vintage underwear but this sight has the most fabulous photos to prove it when I say they only looked as if they were wearing black and white because of the photos.

Amorette

You're welcome! I love that site, and I imagine it must be a terrible temptation if you have occasion to wear the clothes. I saw this Edwardian walking suit that I would have loved to own, and she's got all those gorgeous dresses that make me happy just to look at them.

Oh man, that Byron thing was hysterical!! My friend and I were laughing our asses off!

And yes! I owe you email! And I even brought it with me on vacation! I'm just, well, on vacation! :->

So glad you like Sir Q! Here's another great bit about the difficulty of mixing description into the story without boring the reader:

Homer, indeed, stands first, if not unmatched, among poets in this technical triumph over the capital disability of annihilating flat passages. I omit Shakespeare and the dramatists; because they have only to give a stage direction ‘Enter Cassius, looking lean,’ and Cassius comes in looking leaner than nature; whereas Homer has in his narrative to walk Hector or Thersites on to the scene, describe him, walk him off.

I love the sardonic bite of that 'leaner than nature'. And he is so right. Playwrights have it easy. *g*

Do enjoy your vacation and don't worry about email. Sometimes I'm brutally quick to respond and other times I'm slower than a sloth, and that's just how it goes. But I'm touched that you took my email with you. :-)

If it's any consolation, I'm an evil genius too. :)

Believe me - there are worse things to be than an evil genius. A 'Mob Boss' for example isn't very high on my personal list of wanted professions, but according to that test I fit in the requirements just fine. :: looks puzzled ::

And of course I wormed my way through the jargon-text. A few months ago it wouldn't have meant anything to me - but my head-first jump into the writing business changed that as well. You'll better believe it: in my first draft I had it all: the Golden Hunter, the Big Guy, nicknames in narrative, adjectives by the dozen, and so on. My beta-reader made it quite clear that all that is a no-no and I promised her never to use any of it again. But a few days ago I found myself writing 'the broad-chested God of War' and had to ask myself: as opposite to the skinny chicken-chested one?

::head-desk ::

Yes, it's jargon - but sometimes it just creeps into the story.

Okay, that last image wasn't one I reaaallly wanted to see. lol
Some descriptive is needed, but it's how you use it and where that is important.

Barbara

But a few days ago I found myself writing 'the broad-chested God of War' and had to ask myself: as opposite to the skinny chicken-chested one?

Hee! Looks like the Demon!Editor has awakened inside your head. This is what happens after a good beta reader is through with you. *g* Don't let the Editor discourage you from writing, however. We want more H:tLJ fic!

I know what you mean about stuff creeping in. In the Phrakis story, I used the word 'carrysack' for the leather bag Iolaus carries in a few episodes. I didn't realize this was a H:tLJ fanon expression until

ltlj told me. I just picked it up from other fanfics without realizing it. It's not even a real word! (Well, it's not in Webster, anyway...)

I think this is a particular danger when English isn't your first language, because you just pick up words and expressions from everywhere, not always realizing that the source is suspect.