The Blue Candle Society

I had an interesting confluence of spam and grammar recently.  I mean, obviously, most spam has grammar issues, generated as it is by people of low moral character and intelligence.  But this one was interesting, because it commented that this blog had “peaked” the spammer’s interest (well, actually, it said that “The article has really peaks my interest”, but one problem at a time).

Now, you probably all know about Stealth Mountain, the heroic twitterbot that corrects people who tweet “sneak peak” (and is often has abuse heaped upon it for its trouble).  It would be nice if there was a bot out there to correct instances of “peak” that should be “pique”, particularly because I assume this bit of comment spam was also generated by a bot, and I like the idea of bots ranging the internet correcting one another.

But correcting “pique” would be slightly more complicated, since rather than a single, often-wrong word pair you’d need to look for “piques my interest”, “piqued my interest”, “piques his interest”, etc.  It is also a bit tricky since having something “peak” (as in topping out) interest works almost as well as “pique” (as in provoking, from the old French piquer, or prick).  So it could be one of those borderline eggcorns that sort of backs into a meaningful usage.  But then, it is hard to think of a more worthy job for advanced artificial intelligence.

Posted in Grammar Gripery

Longtime readers will recall that the first of many bonechilling story ideas I’ve detailed here had to do with several nuts I found in my driveway, they having evidently quit the job of being attached to whatever vital bolt they were supposed to be on.  As it turns out, one of them had fallen off my wheelbarrow, and the other two had come from the depths of my snowblower, where they had apparently been filling some redundant function, since it got along nicely until it went in for a carburetor overhaul last fall.  But I’m not here to revisit old bonechilling ideas, but to present a new one, which is similar in many ways, but a new twist on an old theme.

I recently had to order a new axle for my brushcutter, because it looked like this, which gives you a nice view of the differential:

So they sent me this, which is all nice and shiny, and has the differential gears tucked away inside where they are meant to be, though the perceptive among you may notice that it is also several inches longer than the old one:

But, but!  Do you see that little baggie taped to the new axle?  That there is a little hitch clip.  Here is is close up, on top of the old axle:

“Well, all right”, you say, “so they sent you a hitch clip just in case you lost the old one during the rather strenuous process of swapping out the new axle for the old one.  The folks at Country Home Products are just watching out for you, Williams.”  But there is no old one, don’t you see?  As far as I can tell, not only is there no hitch clip on the axle, there is none anywhere on the mover.  I can only see two possibilities.  One, I have somehow missed the pin somewhere in the whole assemblage that needs the hitch pin to stay on, and when I use the mower the wheels will fall off when I’m going up a hill about a mile from home and the mower (capable of slicing through two-inch tree trunks) will roll over me while it is running.  Or two, the Country Home people know perfectly well there is not hitch pin on this mower and they taped a little baggie holding one to my axle in an attempt to drive me mad.  “I’m sorry,” they will say in a sympathetic tone if I call, “We didn’t send you a hitch clip.  We don’t even carry hitch clips.  Are you sure you’ve been getting enough rest?  Seeing non-existent hitch clips is a classic sign of exhaustion and brain fever, I’m afraid.  Did you hear about that man in Idaho who went crazy and tried to eat a Volkswagen?  He was raving about hitch clips when they hauled him away.”  It’s going to be a long summer.

Posted in Bonechilling Ideas

Despite the title, this isn’t another of my Lovecraftish posts.  No, it’s one of those posts on the craft of writing everyone looks forward to so much.  Specifically, it is about the realization about how hard it is to get halfway decent at writing and the appropriate pace for that realization.  It seems like it takes most writers a few hundred thousand words of practice to get vaguely readable (I’m not talking about prodigies who can write well right out of the gate here – we can all just agree that we hate those people and move on).  But if the realization of how much work you need to do hits you all at once like a werewolf leaping out of the bushes at you, well, chances are you’ll just quit writing and become a productive member of society.

Not Helpful

No, it is best if the realization steals up on you slowly, something sensed but not seen because it is too formidable, too cyclopean, to fully comprehend.  The nagging sense that you are missing something hideous and eldritch stalking your every step forces you to move faster, to get better at moving.  Only years on, looking back on the naive stumbling of your earlier self, do you begin to comprehend the horror that was driving you on.

Much better

Then, of course, as you see the thing that would have cracked your mind early on, you begin to wonder.  How much of my own mediocrity have I yet to see?  Certainly, now I’m good enough.  But didn’t I think that back then as well?

But that way lies madness.

Okay, that did get a bit Lovecraftomatic.  What I’m trying to say is that without a certain awareness of how “meh” you are, you don’t have the motivation to improve – that awareness is the fuel for your writing abilities as they struggle to escape the gravity of mediocrity and attain the orbit of adequacy.  But too much realization, too quickly, and the vessel of your abilities will rocket off into the sun of, um giving up-itude.  So that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Metaphors are fun!

Posted in General writing things, Metaphor!

2013: Stephen King refuses to go digital with his new book.

2000: Stephen King refuses to have a print edition of his new book.

Not there this is much of a lesson here for the rest of us, I suspect.

Posted in General writing things

For all you visually-oriented folks out there, here’s an interesting tumblr by Jaz Parkinson, who has created color signatures of various well-known books, based on how often a given color shows up in the text.  Like him, I was astonished at how colorful The Road turns out to be.

Posted in General writing things

A while back, I posted about the awesome Digital Public Library of America, source of all sorts of digital archives useful for writers of every stripe.  Seeing as I also like to talk maps and mapping, I wanted to point out a development that increases the awesome – the DPL has partnered with the David Rumsey map collection, so now you can look at the 38,000 historical maps from that fine collection at either site.

If only I had checked this out before writing 90,000 words predicated on a slight histori0-geographical misinterpretation.

Posted in General writing things

I don’t normally link to book reviews here, but this, technically speaking, isn’t a review, since it doesn’t really reference the plot and all.  Plus, it is awesome.  This is how you do it, book reviewers.  If you can’t do a whole review in the style of the author you’re reviewing, how do we know you actually read the book?

Posted in General writing things

I’m all in favor as many people as possible discovering the joys of HP Lovecraft (well known for his spare, lean writing style), so in addition to Patton Oswalt’s famous KFC food review, I wanted to point ya’ll to this awesome series of webcomics, which do a great job of bringing Lovecraft stories to life once again.  There are a variety of classic Lovecraft tales there, such as The Doom That Came to Sarnath and The White Ship.

Posted in General writing things

To continue my tradition of presenting literary games, here is a link to Slate’s Great Gatsby computer game.  It is fun and educational!

Posted in General writing things

This is sort of outside my brief as a leading literary blog, but it is sort of a matter of language, and after all I occasionally dabble in matters of mapping.  And it is a complaint, which is my favorite type of post.

Specifically, what is the deal with “football field” becoming a default unit of length.  Just to be clear I’m talking “American Football” here – I don’t know if this is only an American thing, but I suspect in other parts of the world media reports and the like go on about things being “nearly six football pitches long” or whatever (though maybe not since the sizes aren’t so carefully regulated).

There are two problems, as I see it, with the obsessive need to convert every length into football field equivalents.  The first is that an official football field takes up 120 yards (109 m, for readers in other parts of the world) if you include the endzones.  But of course, the whole thing about football is that the zone of play is 100 yards long (0.46 furlongs).  So when someone says that some new fountain is “over two football fields” long, do they mean better than 200 yards (36.36 rods) or over 240 yards (10.9 chains)?

This uncertainty gets progressively fuzzier the longer the distance, which leads to the next problem.  Does it really help anyone visualize a distance anyway?  I can see talking about things in terms of “blocks”, since that is a distance folks actually experience all the time (though of course the problem is the damn things vary in length), but does anyone hear “nearly 43 football fields long” and think “Oh, I get it now”?  And at the other end, are you really clarifying things when you say “200 yards (2 football fields)”?  I mean, if you know how long a football field is in the first place you know it is about 100 yards long because when you watch a game everyone is always talking about yard lines.

And God help you if you are Canadian, and start thinking about about one of those weird 110-yard (55 fathom) fields, or 150 yards (0.85 miles) with the end zones.

Really, if I had a dollar for every time I heard this weird formulation, I’d probably have $2,000.  And to help you visualize that, if I had that in thousand-dollar bills, I’d have two of them.

Posted in Uncategorized