Category: Writing

Remember when I wrote that really long sentence?

Remember when I wrote that 106-word sentence? I wrote another one! Even longer! This week, as part of the class I’m taking (called masterful sentences, oddly enough) we mimicked Hemingway and his +400 word sentence, which you can see here. (Scroll down to #3. I’m not going to post it here-dude, that’s longer than most of my blog entries.).

So part of the assignment was to write a 400 – 500 word sentence-and have it make sense. I did the first part at least. I wrote a 490-word monstrosity.

In the process, I think I broke Microsoft Word.

Writing wrong yet again

So I’m taking this writing class called Masterful Sentences which is about … wait for it … sentence structure. Yeah, you didn’t see that coming.

Anyway, as part of this week’s assignment, I have a choice between “offering corrections to phrase and clauses wherever you see you can improve it” on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or diagramming several sentences from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

That’s sort of like the choice between a chocolate chip cookie and chewing on some crushed glass.

Personally, I don’t think Dickens needs “improving,” and I gave Joyce the old college try. Then I ran back to Dickens, asked for forgiveness, and was extremely proud of myself that I didn’t substitute “Dude, check it!” for “Mind!” in the second paragraph of the story.

Geek Girl Update

While Darcy slipped off the front page, you can see a few excerpts from her interview over at Geek Girl’s Guide.

Dude, that’s one really long sentence

Ha. The magical, mystical, way-too-long sentence. It was part of an assignment where we were given a laundry list of short sentences (He wore a shirt. The shirt was frayed.) about an individual that we had to work into a single sentence.

I don’t feel right about sharing the entire list, but there were sixteen items to work into the sentence. Most of my classmates managed to do that in far fewer words than I did.

Still, I think I had more fun. So here it is, in all it’s 106-word, longwinded glory.

The man stood, gnarled, emaciated fingers clutching a sign held high above his head, the frayed cuffs of his shirt poked from the sleeves of his suit coat jacket, its material shiny with wear, the stubble on his jaw cast his mouth in shadow, but his forehead shone with sweat, while the sign’s letters, a single word–PEACE–appeared penned by someone very young or someone very old, and on all those hot afternoons that August, he held the sign high, only lowering it when the traffic thinned, the rush of blood to his hands making the skin pink and–for a moment–like a child’s.

Words, 106 of them

I just wrote a 106-word sentence. No, I’m not kidding, and no, it’s not going in my YA novel either.

I’m taking a class called masterful sentences, and let me tell you, it’s exhausting to write a 106-word sentence. And as a bonus, Word doesn’t even think it’s a sentence fragment. Of course, we all know how good Word is at grammar. Hey, you, over there! Stop snickering.

Outlook: sunny with a chance

Recovery mode: on!
Snark mode: off (mostly)
Health: improving
Word count: better, if only by 600 words
Goal: 500 words/day or 2,500/week

The above is my post for JaNo this month. My only post for JaNo this month. I am beyond the  prodigal daughter at this point as far as that’s concerned. But! No one’s cut off my access, so I decided to post over there as well.

This post also marks my 300th post on WordPress. Ah, WordPress, how I love you. You’re a blogging platform! You’re a website! You’re lunch!

And we (as in Darcy and I) hope that very soon, we’ll be giving you more WordPress goodness–but it’s all super secret double probation at this point. But stay tuned …

Now that everyone here can go to school/work, pay attention to/be aware of their surroundings, we’ll be in catch-up mode too. I even went to the grocery story yesterday. I walked around kind of dazed, sort of like I was a Muscovite GUM shopper circa 1984 who was suddenly transported to the glories of the decadent west.

It was great.

Now, off to visit my heroine where I left her, which was in a very large hoop skirt with lots of ruffles.

You never know where you might end up

So I was procrastinating doing a little web surfing this morning when I discovered that an essay I wrote a few years back ended up in the syllabus for a creative writing course. To be more specific, it was the Kidd Tutorial at the University of Oregon creative writing program.

I have since been revised out of the course. But I was there, or rather, my essay, Learning to Lie Still, was there, under the lesson topic: THE WRITER IN THE WORLD: as witness, mirror, canary.

Of course, the “half-empty” side of me immediately thought: Hm, maybe I’m the negative example for that particular topic. You know, Personal Essay: You’re Doing It Wrong. Still, to put a positive spin on that scenario, I would still be providing many, many writers a valuable service, no?

Still, I “shared” a lesson with Susan Sontag, Eudora Welty, and Alice Walker, so no matter what anyone said or thought about my meager little essay, I’m completely psyched to have ended up there, if only once.

The geek girl’s guide to creating a collage

Since a couple of people have asked, I decided to do a quick rundown of how to create a collage using Microsoft PowerPoint. It’s not fancy; it’s not really artistic (but then neither am I–fancy or artistic).

I’m using PowerPoint 2007 at the moment. If you have an earlier version, the directions may differ slightly.

  1. Open PowerPoint. You can use the default slide that appears as your starting point.
  2. Delete the title and subtitle text boxes.
  3. Right click on the slide.
  4. Select Format Background.
  5. Select Picture or texture fill.

From here, you can select one of the texture fills that come with PowerPoint or select your own wallpaper or image file as the background. For one collage I made, I used an actual photo of swimming pool water.

To continue:

  1. If the background is too dark, adjust to transparency to lighten it.
  2. Select Insert –>Picture to add images* to your collage.
  3. Once it’s complete, save the collage as its own image. Select Save As … and in the Save as type: field, select an image file type, such as JPEG.

You’ll receive message asking if you want to save only the current slide or all the slides in the presentation. Select current slide.

Now you have a wondrous image file of your collage that you can post on your blog or use as your desktop wallpaper as inspiration.

*I use royalty-free stock photography for many of my images. One of my favorite places to search is istockphoto.com. Dollar downloads: doesn’t get much better than that.

Oh. Dark. Thirty.

So the alarm went off a little earlier than it has for the past two weeks. The dog didn’t budge. She barely raised her head. But I felt the psychic waves rolling off of her:

You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.

I was up in time to see Oreo do her stretch-walk out of Miss B’s room. And we did our morning routine, albeit much earlier than the past few weeks:

  • Dog, out
  • Pets, fed
  • Coffee, brewed
  • Exercise, commenced
  • Computer chair, stolen by cat

Oh Dark Thirty isn’t all bad. I listened to Michael Hauge’s talk on character arcs during the commute today, then grabbed his Six Stage Plot Structure.

I may not have quite as many words as some of the others on JaNo (5,131 at last count), but I’m feeling strangely fine.