Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Boston weather of the day: snow—actual snow!

Seema and I have been writing some bad, bad words as part of the NaNo rush, but I think my bad words are different from her bad words. For one thing, I haven’t used “cough” even once yet, never mind three times in the same sentence.

At this stage, my NaNo novel is an outline with passable dialogue (except for Jack phoning it in) and a whole lot of bad words where the stunning prose ought to be. The bad words are:

• look
• seem
• be
• turn
• smile
• frown
• shrug
• sigh
• jump
• stand up
• sit down
• raise eyebrow
• nod
• shake head
• motion

My characters need to do something while they’re speaking, so I toss in a bad word wherever I know actual relevant actions should be happening. Now I’m getting to the end of the story, where Snark Conquers Evil and our heroes ride off into the stargate together. And that’s where the trouble starts, because I have to go back and fill in some real action where my characters were just jumping around like crazy people.

Maybe I’ll do the descriptions next, instead.

Fic of the day: Wherever You Roam (SG-1, PG, AU), a short sequel to “A White Dove.”

I’ve always wondered why Emacs didn’t highlight my PHP code automagically. Today I was working on a site and decided enough was enough—I would find a way to get pretty PHP.

Fortunately, there’s a website devoted to this very issue: k-fish.de: Emacs & PHP. He said his favorite was the SourceForge PHP mode for Emacs project so I went with that. Here’s the .emacs code to autoload it:

    (autoload 'php-mode "php-mode" "Yay PHP" t)
    (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '(".php$" . php-mode)
       auto-mode-alist))
    (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '(".phps$" . php-mode)
       auto-mode-alist))

Today is that magic day when a third of the novel is complete. My plot is almost done; soon I’ll need to go back and add the setting. I’m writing in layers, with the dialogue and clunky screen directions first. I wonder if I’ll be able to keep up my current pace once I go back to the beginning and start adding quality to my quantity. Quality takes time.

I’ve had another difficulty nanoing; Bitter!Jack the Muse has been reluctant to come out and snark. Daniel is going fine, and Sam and Teal’c are out of character for plot purposes (my nefarious scheme to conceal the fact that I can’t write either of them), but Jack just isn’t as snappy as usual. I think it comes from watching too much season 6. Jack is phoning it in and the muse isn’t getting enough material to inspire snark.

Maybe I’ll back up to season 4 for a while—the Best of Jack.

Hello Kitty link of the day: Hello Kitty’s blog

Jade wrote a very restrained post on the general mockery of American voters (specifically of the 51% who voted for Bush) in fandom blogging circles. Since I live in Boston, I get to hear that sort of thing all the time. If people don’t know you’re Republican, they’ll say all sorts of things about the evil of the W and the poor fools far away in the Midwest who voted for him. It doesn’t surprise me (much) to see it on LiveJournal, too.

Here in Massachusetts, only 13% of voters are registered Republicans, so the casual attitude that everyone is anti-Bush has some statistical backing. No one expects my state to go red, ever. It’s socially acceptable to mock Bush and to make dire predictions about his second term that, back in Peoria, would play like the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind. Such is life in Boston.

But when addressing Americans in general, the basic assumption should be that 51% of us are pro-Bush (or at least 51% of those responsible enough to go out and vote). So it’s odd to see people talking like they’re in a virtual Massachusetts when really, they’re in a virtual Ohio. There’s no way to tell which sort of voter you’re talking to online without prior knowledge of their political opinions.

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I should blog now while the site is up. Like the B Line (on its third day out of commission), the website has been running less that smoothly lately. Maybe the spammers are getting it down, or maybe Potholes Attacked.

My sympathies to those of you distraught over the election results. I was surprised at how unconcerned I was as the electoral college swung back and forth all night. I just can’t get all riled up about these things like you young’uns. My greatest disappointment was that now I'’ll never find out what John Kerry’s plan was.

I’ll spare Jerie the wordcount updates, but I’ve kept to my NaNo schedule so far.

It’s that time of year again. This year I’ll be writing a fanfic novel for NaNoWriMo. As Seema says, the stuff just writes itself. It hasn’t yet written my quota for the day, though…

This entry inaugurates my new emacs category, which I’ve already stocked with some old emacs-related posts. (Emacs is the infinitely extensible text editor with a soft spot in its heart for elisp.)

The emacs extension of the day is tabbar.el. I was feeling jealous of cool new Mac text editors like TextMate with their drawers and their clickable tab-like buttons. How I wished that emacs had a pop-out drawer, or at the very least, tabs.

So I googled for tabbed emacs, and found the magic elisp file at EMHACKS. (Download it from the tabbar files section.) In just a few short moments, I had tabs!

Although it is documented, tabbar has no handy start-up guide for beginners. With the help of Zhou Chen’s Emacs Tools page, I figured out that I needed to add

(require 'tabbar)
(tabbar-mode)

to my .emacs file just to get the tab bar to show up.

Next, I wanted to do a keybinding to get emacs to switch tabs with command-shift-left-arrow and command-shift-right-arrow, the way Safari and iTerm do. With the help of the emacs function keys info node, I found the right combination for my .emacs file:

(global-set-key [A-S-left] 'tabbar-backward)
(global-set-key [A-S-right] 'tabbar-forward)

[The above may depend on (setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil). If you don’t have that setting, then try M-S-left and M-S-right instead.] You can also assign ‘tabbar-backward-group and ‘tabbar-forward-group the same way, but ‘tabbar-backward and ‘tabbar-forward will scroll through groups as well so I didn’t bother.

I didn’t like the way tabbar assigned my buffers to groups, so I wrote my own version of the tabbar-buffer-groups function and put it in my .emacs file, too.
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The story of crazy writer Daniel Rice begins with this eBay auction. TNH reposted the listing in a more legible form. Although she was unreasonably polite about the amateur’s hopeless efforts to sell an unfinished manuscript for $150,000, he responded with enough craziness to get himself disemvowelled.

Not surprisingly, his auction expired without any bids being made. He’s cut the asking price to $125,000, added paragraph breaks, and a bonus psychotic break over Making Light poster Greg Ioannou at the bottom. Check out the new auction here. You have only 4 more days to come up with the $125,000 to buy this gem.

Being unable to write is a sure sign of being unable to write, yet every day I see people posting gibberish to LiveJournals, writing lists, or forums—gibberish proclaiming their latest novel projects or their countless entries into the slush piles. Spelling can be fixed, but it’s a little late to learn how to form an English sentence when you have three alleged children. My advice to Mr. Rice is to find a new hobby.

Now that was a crowd. The Hugo Awards were given out at Noreascon tonight, with only a few glaring technical difficulties. Though I’m not particularly thrilled by Neil Gaiman as a writer, he made a terrific Master of Ceremonies. He’s quite cute, and the accent doesn’t hurt, either.

I wouldn’t say that the best stories won, but at least the worst stories didn’t win.

WorldCon is big. Very, very big. And yet it’s like Boskone ate the little cake that said “Eat me” and grew to fill the Hynes. (The AC at Hynes was nasty; I think I caught something.) The schedule is similar to Boskone’s, but with more of everything.

Everything doesn’t seem to include TV fandom, unfortunately. If only I could find a panel of Stargate fans, I’d be in fan heaven. Instead I’ve been going to writer-oriented events—writing tips and general info (e.g., elves in mythology, cool science, etc.). I even ran into a fellow non-fen.

I went to a couple of readings: Connie Willis, who filled a small room, and Walter Jon Williams, who had just a handful of people in the same room. In a perfect world, WJW would be as popular as Connie Willis. I’d love to write like he can, and yet, it would be depressing to write like he does yet have so few people show up to my WorldCon reading.