Timewaster's Guide Archive

word count in publishing is NOT...um...a count of the words. What it is is a measurement of how much space/total pages/column inches (for magazines) a work will take up.

It makes a lot of sense in magazine publishing to use (some sort of) standardized manuscript format word count, because if you cheat, it can cause big problems with layout. But I don't see how it matters near as much in novel writing, since books are all different lengths and if you don't hit your multiple of 8 pages (for press purposes) they just add some blank pages in there...

I like that Ken's still not perfect. Tonight I caught him for about the 5th time, and I got the "sulfa drugs" question that he missed! Yay!

He's probably the smartest person I've ever seen on the show. Not because of his answers necessarily, but because of the way he plays the game. He is super-fast on the buzzer, and he doesn't go in for the big risks. He plays as safely as he must. Like tonight, when he was just barely double the 2nd place person's score, so he wagered only $300 on Final Jeopardy (rounding up to the nearest $500 when he got the question right).

That always going for a round number thing though is probably a sign of obsessive compulsion. He's like a Brandon Sanderson character!

Though I've wondered why he doesn't try to go for an odd number that will make his total winning score round to the nearest 10,000.

Ahoy. Anyone going to this next weekend? I'm working the TOKYOPOP booth again. It's supposed to be a lot bigger than Anime Expo, and I found Anime Expo to be pretty large. Comic-Con is more mainstream though, with lots of Hollywood and TV types involved, besides the comics people.

Anyway it will probably be quite interesting as well as tiring.

I was sad to read that BYU's record consecutive no-shutout games streak came to an end last year. Sucky.

I had braces because of hitting my face on a rock in the mojave desert when I was age 2, knocking out 2 baby teeth (the right front one and the one next to that) and damaging (fusing) the developing permanent teeth there. When I was about 10 my front tooth finally came in (crooked), but the one next to it never did (since it was fused above the other one). Around the same time (can't remember if it was before or after) the eyetooth on that side fell out and never grew back (because the permanent tooth was stuck).

I got braces while I was on my mission. It was the suggestion of the mission president's wife. I had never considered it before, really. And the parents probably never considered it because of the expense. My teeth never bothered me but when it was suggested to me I said "sure, why not."

This involved getting an apparatus on the roof of my mouth with a little key I had to crank a couple times a day in order to widen my upper jaw. Cranking this hurt a bit but I was eager to get it over with as quickly as I could, so I did it more often than required. It seems it worked very well. (I never considered that I might accidentally widen it too much... eh heh heh.)

So I got all my teeth all straightened, with plenty of room for that tooth to come down, but it didn't cooperate. Finally after I got home from my mission they discovered that I had an odontoma there--a buildup of tooth material in my gum there, which was keeping the other tooth from coming down. Once I had the surgery and got a post attached to my permanent tooth, they pulled that tooth down over about a week. It went very easily.

So at last I was missing only one tooth. I decided to go for a bridge instead of a post.

Oh yeah, late in high school that front tooth that came in late and crooked had to have a root canal. It was fun. Believe it or not...

What you say!!

maybe this is a decent place to put this...

here's a great line from the (unedited) translation of a manhwa:

"Kill me! I rather die than being a slave of you dirty evils!"

(you may be able to tell that we don't have a single good (from-)Korean translator. the rewriters have to do all the work...)

My confidence in your future success has only deepened after my work on ELANTRIS and your response to it

Meaning he said "this needs to be changed here and here and here and here" and you said "Yes sir Mr. Editor sir!" instead of "I am an artiste! You cannot alter my baby!"

--ah, I have to go. Will post more later.