write like you need it to survive

More importantly, I finished my YAGKYAS story and sent it off to beta.

2012-12-03T05:24:14Z

Also this happened tonight on the spreadsheet where I track how much I write each day:

I only started tracking daily word counts (as opposed to the final word counts of posted fic, for which I have had a spreadsheet for years) a little over a year ago, so I don't have any apples-to-apples data to compare this to. At the start of this year I figured that, from my experience of my writing, it wasn't unreasonable to expect to average about 25,000 words a month; I figured I would take January off from writing goals and try for 50,000 words in November, and--assuming I would be prone to falling short--I would hope to write between 250 and 300,000 words in 2012.

I also figured I would complete the GK wolf-verse before Yuletide got going and write an original novel and, uh, I guess Teen Wolf happened? In any case: I've done a lot of writing this year, I think probably more than in past years, and upon reflection that pleases me. :)

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Further Adventures in Life as a Listie

2011-10-16T21:40:26Z

This morning I added my birthday books from helaaspindakaas (A Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster and Debt: the First 5,000 Years) to my home library catalog, bringing my total of Non-Fiction books owned up to 152. (Arranged by Dewey Decimal call number. Naturally. It's a small collection, not oriented to heavy research.) (Cataloging for Fiction and A/V materials remains shamefully incomplete.)

After doing the necessary shifting to fit them on the bookshelves, it occurred to me to wonder where this put me along my quest toward an Old English Bryant or one of the subdivisions thereof (it being fairly obvious that on the metric scale this put me at .152 Bryants, or a little over one and a half Decibryants).

When I looked up the old scale, though, I was terribly charmed to realize that I have about six and a half Wallshels, as the shifting did in fact start the Non-Fiction collection onto its seventh shelf.

(Which means, I suppose, that my Ikea Flarkes are more or less Bryant-compliant.)

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More different WIP meme

2011-02-14T04:28:51Z

Meme from rubynye: Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.

(This icon: appropriate to every WIP listed, in some respect or another!)

( Welcome to my WIP folder, which is actually just called Text. )

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I have been mentally reasoning this out since, seriously, my sophomore year of undergrad.

2010-09-04T00:53:49Z

(People with actual significant knowledge of syntax look away now.)

My sophomore year I took a syntax class where I sat next to thelionforreal and we wrote each other notes about popslash. We learned that syntax is like a machine for making chocolate chip cookies and yet I somehow got an A-.

My professor was a good descriptivist like most (probably all?) trained linguists, but all the same he assured me confidently that sentences ending in prepositions were ungrammatical--which meant, in his terms, not that they were incorrect according to some sort of style guide but that they would not be naturally generated by any speaker's internalized rules of language. They literally should not exist, and the fact that they did was evidently some sort of massive and ongoing series of errors in speech or writing.

I offered him an example, influenced by the construction that impeded my path back to my dorm that year. "That area is hard to get to." He appeared baffled and then dismissed the sentence, or possibly my argument, as either incomprehensible or imaginary.

Since then, I have thought a lot about the injustice of his position, and I have come to what is probably an obvious conclusion: there are a lot of sentences that appear to end in prepositions but really they don't. They end in words that look like prepositions that are really part of a verb or some other compound phrase.

Prepositions are words that indicate where something is in relation to something else: "the mouse is ______ the desk." Under, over, behind, below, before, beside, at, and so on. If I just said "The mouse is at" then you would presume I had trailed off in the middle of my thought. That would be a poorly formed sentence--something that I might say or write down for whatever reason, but which I would not mentally compose as a complete utterance. (My syntax professor was big on that point--few things people actually say or write are a good reflection of the syntactic process in their brains, he said, because of all the stammers and hesitations and half-repetitions and self-interruptions and so on.) "The mouse is at" would not arise naturally from my syntax as a complete thought--I would have to have thought "the mouse is at the desk" and then suffered some interruption or error en route to producing the actual words. That is an ungrammtical sentence in a linguistic sense. I would have to put a little asterisk next to it on my linguistics homework.

But if I say "the mouse is hard to get at" that is not what happened at all, because "get at" is a verb. It means something different from "get" + "at", and it is perfectly capable of occurring at the end of the sentence. You see what I'm getting at. For example. My suspicion is that the vast majority of sentences ending in "at" or "to" or "with" do so when those words are attached to verbs are perfectly coherent and thus, in linguistic terms, perfectly grammatical--and who gives a damn about Stunk & White and their attempt to make writing style in English conform to the structure of Latin anyway.

Uh. This pointless, pointless rant brought to you by one too many posts from Reasoning with Vampires, also available as reasoningwithvamps_feed. It's pretty entertaining, if a little strident on certain rules of usage.

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Things to watch out for.

2009-06-12T14:19:37Z

Having segued pretty directly from reading Patrick O'Brian (Post Captain, HMS Surprise) to reading Diana Gabaldon (Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, and now Voyager in the span of ... a week or so?) I just spent about twenty minutes sitting at my desk reading Jeremy Hugh Baron's article "Sailors' Scurvy Before and After James Lind: A Reassessment" (Nutrition Reviews, v.67 n.6, pp.315-332, June 2009) and wishing that he'd talked more about lime juice.

(The upshot seems to be, for those desperately interested in scurvy and lime juice, that lemon juice was the vastly preferred preventative recommended by people who actually dealt with actual scurvy cases, while lime juice was subsequently recommended by people ... engaged in growing limes, and was far less effective than correctly-preserved lemon juice. Lime juice came into use much later and was never as widespread, globally speaking, hence getting attached as a nationalist tag to British ships/sailors/etc.)

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