I just got really good feedback/review on one of my finished projects and want to talk about it but dont know which thread to do that on and also dont want to start a new one lol. Happiness thread will do because, well, im happy (and a bit surprised). over the holiday, i asked my sister to read my 59k word "novel". she read 2 chapters and said it made her uncomfortable and didnt want to read anymore (the theme of losing control of your life made her uncomfortable and the panic attacks my MC has in the beginning brought up panic attacks in my sister....). So she passed the story along to a friend of hers on Discord. I dont know this person at all and they dont know me or my writing. Originally, the friend wasnt liking the theme either and said so in their comment... but then they kept reading and got super invested in the conflict and the drama and binged read it all in a day. There were a few plot details they thought needed to be expanded on (which im revisiting), but they gave it an over all score of 9/10. I have no idea what template they used but they scored it in 5 categories: writing, storytelling, plot (the lowest score of them because they said that some elements they've seen before in other stories), investment in characters, creativity/uniqueness (highest score... they said despite the plot elements they've seen before, the over all message was different and unique to them because there was no "villain" but instead, everyone was the villain in their own way). in addition to the positive, they also left negatives (which i expected) but they said the negatives didnt make them want to stop reading and should be easy fixes. I've NEVER had such an in-depth critique on ANYTHING before! and now i know the "problem" areas and have a clear focus for my edits. i feel like i should do something for this person. like treat them to a meal? i've also never actually spoken to them, but only went by their comments on my doc and screenshots from my sister of this person's critique.
You are a writer, JT. Write the person a sincere thank you note for the time and effort he/she expended on the project. More than a brief "thanks" has become so rare that writing an honest to gosh note acknowledging appreciation for information you'd never had before is more valuable than a short dining experience. It's something the person can read again and think, "I made a difference. Cool."
Happy 2022! Hope things will improve for us all in the new year. May all your word counts increase and your editing be efficient !
The resolution for the new year, print some of my stories so that some day any of my relatives that want to read about a past generation. I write mostly nonfiction, then humor, then biographies of people I meet through life. I filled three notebooks with a little over 70 completed stories. Having not faith in the digital age that anything now on a computer will be accessible in the future seems pretty realistic. When I look back on all the outdated storage forms in the past and realize I cannot even access anything that is more than a few years old. When was the last time you had a computer to read a floppy disc?
Amen brother!! I've seen so many sites suddenly go down with no warning and everything on them was lost in an instant. Some can be accessed on the Wayback Machine, but some can't. I also buy movies I really like (though who knows if DVD or Blu-Ray will still be viable in ten years?) because streaming services are flaky. Sometimes movies or shows just disappear from them. Fortunately, I had all this in mind when I found an mazing site a year or so ago called NovelWritingHelp.com. I downloaded all the articles as PDFs and put them on an external hard drive. Now the site is gone, and doesn't show up on Archive.org, on their Wayback Machine. Really glad I had the foresight to do that (well, and that I ran across the advice many years ago to save anything you really like, because it can all disappear in the blink of an eye in this digital environment). I used to think about how transitory paper is, but now I have things I wrote or drew on paper still around from many decades ago, whereas much of what I've done digitally is gone forever. And I realized, we have paper from centuries ago, close to a thousand years in some cases.
I'm a belt and suspenders kind of gal when it comes to written material: two computers, external hard drive, two USB back up, and everything printed out as well. I'm feeling a little nervous right now because I've got material on my lap top and USB with no other back up of the complete novel because the printer I accessed yesterday was having a spat with the computer and they weren't talking. Off to find the extra USB...
I started to make a crack about taking it to the erotica forum, then realised that on your side of the pond suspenders are what we call braces... over here they are what you would call a garter belt. The US and UK two countries divided by a common language
Dude, that's totally pants! (another term that means something very different depending on which side of the pond you hail from)
Yeah, when one of you UK types announced, "I'll be around to knock you up tomorrow morning," I thought a karate chop to the back of the neck might be in order.
And when you were righteously pissed you were angry.. whersas when we were righteously pissed we were falling down drunk Although pissed off could mean upset...or it could be a passed tense verb form mean he left... moose was so pissed off he pissed off early and as to nipping out for a fag..
thinking about this after i logged off last night i remembered an incident that took place back in the mists of time when i was still in the army... a bunch of us were in America for a joint exercise ( i can't remember exactly where but it was one of those big bases that's like a military town) running into me and a colleague outside the O club the 1st Lt who was our liaison officer told us "Guys, i have to warn you my bird is pissed" In his head he was passing along the perfectly reasonable warning that his colonel (birds in slang because of the silver eagles) was annoyed with us about something . However in our little British heads this totally passed us by, we thought he was telling us that his wife or girlfriend ('My Bird' in British slang at the time) was drunk inside the club... we presumed that the implication was that we might find her more sexually available than he'd prefer So my colleague nudges me and says "Be a good opportunity to get some" Thinking that he was making a joke that we British studs would take up said girlfreinds drunken availability. however at that time "Get Some" was in the American military either an exhortation to kill the enemy, or more generally to kick some ass...so our poor liaison officer wandered away pondering that the British were indeed crazed visgoths who weren't at all afraid of the wrath of colonels
I know we discourage meming here, but I figure that this one actually contains information potentially valuable to membership. And yes, I checked.
I'm much the same, but I took a different approach. I have multiple computers at home (desktops, laptops, and tablets). I try to keep the two newest desktops updated and synchronized, for redundancy, but I realized that it was a losing battle. A couple of years ago I splurged and bought a Western Digital MyCloud. It's what is generically referred to as an "NAS" (Network Addressable Storage) device. It's basically a mini file server that sits in a closet next to my modem and router, and all the computers can connect to it either by WiFi or by ethernet. It's more than just an external hard drive. It is, in fact, TWO external hard drives, but configured as a redundant array. That means anything I write to it is being written to both hard drives at the same time. If one hard drive goes down -- in theory the other is there to save the day.
It's amazing how much a fresh coat of paint does to spiffy up a dingy apartment. I'm starting to like this place.
Reviving this thread. Going do an upper body workout at the gym. I had major surgery on my chest 5-6 weeks ago and I’m finally recovered enough to lift weights again. Pumped about it.
Hoping I can get back to it soon too. I've been going through a weird series of injuries and re-injuries to my legs and back that have kept me unable to work out for months now. Lost all the gains! I seem to be recovering now though, and hope to be hitting the basement gym again soon.
Update on the gym: I am made of flubber. How did I get this weak this quickly? good god. I’ve only been away from the gym for two months
I hear ya! I've been through this several times now, and I always have to start real gentle-like, using nothing but the rubber-bands I normally use for warmups and walking. Add resistance to the bands day by day, and it starts to come back pretty quick. A couple of weeks and I'm ready for light barbells.
