November 2011

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2011.

Mac Writing Tip

November 27, 2011 in Writing Tips | No comments

In OSX Lion you can highlight any word and lightly double-tap with three fingers to bring up a definition.

On my Windows machines I use a wonderful program called WordWeb to do the same thing, though a bit less robust, by highlighting a word and hitting Ctrl-Alt-W

The History of the English Language in 10 Minutes

November 23, 2011 in Recently Observed | No comments

Highly entertaining! And you might learn something too…

Leo Babauta discusses the future of books with Seth Godin

November 18, 2011 in Fellow Writers, Writing Tips | No comments

http://media.thepowerofless.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Seth%20Godin%20interview.mp3

I’m bookmarking this here mainly so that I can go back and listen to the whole thing. Some of the topics discussed:

  • Whether the new world of publishing is scary or not
  • The clear, well-lit path that publishing has been taking for more than a decade
  • How lack of scarcity has changed publishing forever
  • The new role of publishing in the online world
  • How not to wait to be picked
  • How Seth’s Domino Project deals with unsolicited requests from authors
  • How the Domino Project planned to transform everything about publishing
  • How he eliminated cover images, shortened books, eliminated advances, and what he learned
  • Whether collectible editions of books work well
  • Spreading ideas through books, and how paid works vs. free
  • The growing problem of people hating reading
  • Whether you should publish how-to or cookbooks at all
  • What types of books will sell well in the new landscape
  • The problem of getting selected by the masses in the vast sea of millions of published books
  • Why you don’t need that many followers/friends as an author
  • Why the willingness to fail is so important, with so many options available to authors
  • A future where everything that happens is your fault — and whether that’s good or bad
  • The horror stories of Pulitzer Prize winning authors
  • Amazon’s vastly important information about readers
  • Deciding to publish your best ideas on your blog vs. your book
  • Why Seth doesn’t have comments on his blog
  • Giving up the goal of having everyone in the world like your stuff
  • The cycle of productivity, and having nothing next
The original is here: http://zenhabits.net/seth/

A question for physics nerds out there…

November 15, 2011 in Writing Misadventures | No comments

Here’s a beginning to one of my new stories:

In the state of transition, when you’re neither here or there, there’s this ominous blackness.  You’re nowhere, but you are still aware of being – your mind is working – and you sense time passing.  Sometimes it’s only a split second, sometimes it’s several seconds, and sometimes it’s long enough for you to wonder if you’ve just died.

Then there’s light and the world comes back into focus, but not all at once.  It builds itself around you, spreading from you outward, and I really think that gives you a deep clue about reality.  On one hand it could be that you’re actually seeing the process of your senses coming around, or you’re seeing how reality builds itself when you are suddenly observing it.  It’s almost like you’ve caught reality by surprise, and it has to scramble to catch up.

I can’t swear to this, but what it feels like to me is that your heart has to start beating again, and then you take the first lungful of air, and that’s when life resumes.

That’s what it’s like to teleport.

So my question is, if you teleport a long distance, it would go against physics for you to be able to transfer information back and forth faster than the speed of light … so would it make sense that if you were to teleport 4 lightyears away, you would also be teleporting 4 years into the past?

Too Much NaNoWriMo

November 14, 2011 in NaNoWriMo, Writing Misadventures | No comments

Shakespeare Insult Kit

November 12, 2011 in Check it out! | No comments

If you’ve always wanted to come up with insults such as, “Thou artless bat-fowling flax-wench!” or “Thou unmuzzled sheep-biting canker-blossom!” then this bookmark is for you…

Shakespeare Insult Kit @ TastefullyOffensive.com

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