Timewaster's Guide Archive

For example, I'm sure the review posted today is by EUOL, not my EUOL. I've nudged a few people, but I think Tage is the person to nudge. Perhaps while you're out there, SE, you could poke him? (As far as admin access so I don't have to point out every single typo via email.) Thanks.

So I was talking to my roommate last night and I realized that there are now less than 2 months till my 30th birthday.   So help me out here, guys. What should I do for my 30th? I want to do something out of the ordinary, yet cheap. (Unless my friends are going to secretly pool to do something really big, which I doubt.) Any ideas?

Or, stacer has problems conversing at parties, especially with particular people.

So, I was at this party tonight, and having a good time, talking to lots of people, etc. I usually do pretty well at parties. Except...

Except, of course, when there's someone in particular I want to get to know better and I work myself up into a huge fear of even talking to him. Plus, this particular one tends to be a quiet sort. So when I first got there he was pretty happy to see me, and we talked for a little while, but after a while there was this awkward silence in which I didn't know what to say next, and of course instead of pulling a standard "how's the job going?" or "how was the pinewood derby today?" or something normal, I talked about how his roommate gave me a ride home the night before and I was right about something that I talked to him about earlier, that there was a southern route between his house and mine. Nonsense stuff, and not the interesting sort.  

And then later tonight, we were walking along and his roommate kept running into things, including a fire hydrant. Which made me think of the girl I tutor, whose friend recently died in a car accident when they ran into a fire hydrant. I may be a good print editor, but the one on my mouth needs help. From my brain to my mouth, that's what happened. Total mood killer, everyone staring at me thinking, "What brought that up?"

Argh. Not a total waste. We were all really tired, so perhaps he was thinking more about how tired he was than how dumb I am. He's going to host a Settlers night with me so that I can learn to play. (I've been wanting to for a couple years but never got the chance.) Does this make me more of a timewaster than before?  

Little freak accident with the whiteout just now. I picked it up tto fix something on this huge project that has to be done right away, and in my hurry I didn't realize the top wasn't screwed on all the way, and it went *everywhere*. My hair, my sweater, my favorite khaki capri pants.  I look like I've been painting.  

And I can't take the time to go and change because I need to get this project done.  

Interesting article.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2099412/

I don't know that I agree. Why can't it just be that feminism is realizing that strong women can also let men into their lives and find fulfillment in that part of their lives as well as their professional and political lives? Or that it is not lesser somehow if a woman chooses to stay at home and raise her children?

So I just spoke in stake conference tonight (the Saturday night adult session). Yikes. I've never really had stage fright for talking in sacrament, but today I kind of freaked out. Not *really* freaked out, but just kind of got nervous. Plus I have a cold, so I was hacking and everything, and it was just hard to think straight. Good thing I wrote the talk out, because normally I kind of do an outline and go from it, but my head was so stuffy it wouldn't have been a good idea tonight.

I'm so glad it's over!

For you professional writers, I have a question. There's this thing in the depreciation handbook that says that if you maintain a library for your business, you can depreciate it. Do any of you do this? How would you go about doing it? I have a whole bunch of books that I think would apply, but they've all been put in service at different times, have different values, etc. I think this would be useful for me, but I'm not sure if it's valid or can be done in the next, um, 8 hours.

Don't really have any specific questions, except that I worry that it isn't cohesive because I made some decisions mid-writing and tried to go back and fix things, but might have missed them. Also, just a little background, because I've figured out some things for Chapter 1 that will be fixed: the reason why Dach gets cursed is because he missed the blessing his father gave his sons when the next eldest son left. Dach doesn't take it as seriously as he ought to, so this is why his father is so upset, and this is why he gets cursed.

Also, do I need the father character? Or could I just kill off the dad pre-story and have the mother come to the marketplace? I was trying to create an emotionally healthy family who is poverty-stricken. Did that succeed? What kinds of details are missing?

How about pacing? (Wow, the questions just seem to flow when I get started.) Am I breezing by moments that should be lengthened? Dragging?

Should I refer to the cobbler's wife as Mistress something instead of by her first name? I have decided so far that only nobility use any sort of surname, as I'm setting it in a roughly early Middle Ages kind of time period, in which the only bynames people would have used would have been related to occupation or location, and usually not even then. Does this work? Or do my young characters come off as disrespecting elders by calling them by their first names?

Shoes/lack thereof are an imagery I'd like to keep throughout the story because she has to have a smith make iron shoes for her later in the story. Is this working so far? I've wondered if I should just make her barefoot, as most people in her station in this kind of world would just go barefoot from late spring to early fall. I think I'm trying to improve the standard of living to include the expectation that shoes should fit relatively well, that clothes should not be threadbare, etc. Is this a trouble spot? Any suggestions on how it might be improved?

I've been struggling with a reason to get her to leave home, especially because she's so important to the work now that her sisters are gone. Poverty seems to me to be a good motivation--her sisters have gone to seek their fortunes, and the cobbler's wife knows where they've gone, thus what I've done so far. But is this incongrous with the single coin? Would the single gold coin pay for more than one pair of shoes? Should I make it a silver penny?