The Blue Candle Society

Well, I appear to have been blogging for a year now, more or less regularly, so that’s something.  I don’t know that I’ve exactly set the literary world afire, but after all this whole blog thing is as much about me practicing writing and exercising a bit of discipline in doing it as anything.  The blog as a tool for marketing and a gathering place for my thousands of fans can wait a while.  Anyway, it’s been fun so far, and hopefully it will continue to be so.  I was reminded this morning, when I finally started getting a serial I’m writing off the ground (not the new serial Saturday serial, another serial, and I think the fact that I’m writing a bunch of serials is evidence that I may not have this marketing thing down, like I said), that writing really is a satisfying thing, whether anyone else cares about it or not.  When it’s going well, the sun shines brighter and the birds chirp in a more musical fashion.  So here’s to writing, I say, whether anyone reads it or not.  But I hope ya’ll do.  And for the person who found this page while looking for a place selling hand-made candles in Madison county – sorry, but I hope you found something of interest.

Posted in General writing things

Like all proper writers, I appreciate a good pun, but I’ve always been a bit puzzled as to why hair salons are so fond of them.  You can seem to swing a dead cat out there without hitting a “Shear Madness” or “Headquarters” or “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow”.  I suppose it has something to do with the words “hair” and “shear” lending themselves so well to wordplay, although one wonders if after a point a critical mass was hit and people opening new hair salons just thought it was the done thing.

But what am I to make of two establishments I saw recently, “Shear Connections” and “Shear Motion”?  I mean, most of the names with “shear” in them presumably rely on the homonym “sheer” for the pun, which is to say that they play off the different definitions: “unmitigated” on the one hand, and “cutting instrument” on the other (although the latter is technically “shears”).  But “Unmitigated Connections” and “Unmitigated Motion” don’t really make a whole lot of sense, whether you’re talking about a hair salon or not.  So what are they going for, exactly?  I guess, in the case of “Shear Motion”, the name could refer to the strain produced by the pressure of two layers of something are laterally shifted in relation to one another.  That makes a lot of sense, but it isn’t the sort of name that would tempt me into a barber’s chair.  And “shear connection” already means something too, namely a connection made to resist shear but allow rotation.

I think what’s going on here is similar to the phenomenon of eggcorns.  Except, with eggcorns, you ideally end up with something that makes sense, in a weird kind of way.  But then, that’s the sort of problem you end up with, when you don’t pay attention to your words.

Posted in Grammar Gripery

A brief pause on Serial Saturday, here.  I’m poised to hit the one-year anniversary of this blog, and of Serial Saturday, and I’ve neatly finished off two serials just in time for that.  I wasn’t planning on things being quite so tidy; it just worked out that way.  My next serial will return to good old Lovercraftian stuff, though it will be set about eighty years prior to the first serial I did here.  I recently sold a short story (which I will relentlessly promote here as soon as it actually hits the street) in this setting and with some of the characters as in that story, jolly fun Tommy-gun toting illegally-drinking folk, so it was on my mind.  And it all ties in nicely with Legacy, recently published in the Arcane anthology.  I hope everyone enjoys i

Posted in Serials

And not for the obvious aspirational reasons, involving a Utopian future.  I got to thinking lately about various grammar prescriptions as they relate to Star Trek.  For instance, the old saw that one shouldn’t split an infinitive, which some weirdo came up with long ago while laboring under the misapprehension that English should be like Latin for some reason.  Those in the know realize that this particular rule doesn’t have a leg to stand on, but it still gets play.  The thing is, unlike a lot of silly grammar prescriptions that some random person came up with, we have a wonderful counter-example looking us in the eye all the time: Good old Star Trek, and its “Five-Year (Continuing) Mission: To Boldly Go Where No Man (No One) Has Gone Before”.  So fine, an English teacher once told you not to split an infinitive, but what should Gene Roddenberry have gone with instead, smart guy?  “To Go Boldly Where No Man Has Gone Before”?  Blah.  Lands with a thud, amiright?  I’m agnostic on the difference between the old-school “No Man” versus “No One”, but clearly keeping that infinitive together doesn’t work as well.  Of course, the ironic thing is that people often hold up Star Trek as an example of something that breaks the rules without seeming to realize that they’re undercutting themselves.  Of course, such is often the case.

But wait!  Not only does the opening of Star Trek split and infinitive, it uses an adverb!  So let’s “correct” it fully (see what I did there?): “To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before, In a Bold Fashion”.  Is this really better?  Bah.  Of course, that’s the problem with absolute rules.  You can come up with all the examples you like where splitting an infinitive is confusing or throwing in an adverb is annoying, but all it takes is one counter-example to show why the rule shouldn’t be applied mindlessly.

Posted in Grammar Gripery

Another great XKCD post about anaology:

Posted in General writing things

The countess looked up, waving a massive wrench clutched in one gloved hand.

“I don’t know who you are,” she shouted over the idling of the steam-wagon, “but-” she broke off, staring across the lawn. “You! I thought you two were dead!”

I nudged Enzo in the shoulder as he picked himself up.

“Yes, yes,” he said irritably, dusting off his coat. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Nightmare Engine of Doom Part 23 – The Doom of the Nightmare Engine of Doom’

Posted in Serials

I’m beginning to get quite cross with Blogger (TM).  Livejournal is a bit annoying, with its insistence that one have a Livejournal account to comment on other people’s Livejournal posts and so on, but at least they are honest about being an exclusive club and all.  Blogger pretends to be a nice piece of open blogging software, but is ridiculously titchy about who is allowed to comment.

I have Livejournal, WordPress, and Gravatar identities all lined up and ready to go, but about 80% of the time none of them are good enough, and Blogger blandly tells me that there is an “error”.  Occasionally, it will lead me off the blog in question to WordPress.com or Livejournal or whatnot and have me log in, then send me back, all logged in and ready to go and tell me that I “don’t own that identity” when it just watched me prove my ownership.  If it would tell me what the problem was, exactly, maybe I could do something about it, but what can one do in the face of such bland intransigence?  It’s like talking to Bartleby the Frickin’ Scrivener.

So if you know me and you have a Blogger blog, there’s a good chance you’ve missed on one of my patented comments that is so witty and true that it is like to make the angels weep.  Sorry about that.

Posted in Uncategorized

Loyal readers will recall a post from a while back about my difficulties with rich text format.  I had pretty much decided they were due to issues with Open Office, and this post by Patty Jansen confirmed that, and nicely explains the issue.  I recommend it to anyone who submits fiction with any regularity.

Posted in General writing things

I was wearing my new suit when we finally approached Rollo Bernard’s manor house, but it was rather extraneous, what with the fact that I was exhorting the newly-influenced steam-golem with a a large arcane wrench while Enzo rode it’s shoulders cackling like a madman as we jogged toward the gate. So it had been rather unnecessary for me to spend quite so much money on a sharp set of tailored clothes, but I was wearing them anyway as my other shirt had been quite ruined by the steam and the subsequent grease smeared on it as I tinkered with the inert golem and bent it to my will. Continue reading ‘Serial Saturday: Nightmare Engine of Doom Part 22 – We Take the Battle to the Enemy’

Posted in Serials

Happy Pi day to everyone in the US and bits of Canada!  As for everyone else, you should have reconsidered not using middle-endian date format, at least once you realized that April only has 30 days.  No excuse for eating pie for you, I’m afraid.

Posted in Uncategorized