A few months ago, I made a list of 36 excellent and useful fake names, in male, female, and gender neutral varieties. Continue reading
I started texting my partner to ask if he could “pick up some stuff,” but autocomplete assumed that the word stuff was supposed to be “snakes.”
What I find disturbing about this is that Google utilizes user data to make predictive text more accurate, and that there is apparently enough recorded user behavior to make “snakes” seem like a viable completion for that sentence.
The pandemic has meant that I finally started making homemade yogurt again. A local farm store is doing phone orders and pickups, so we have better access to quality milk than we do yogurt.
I worried that this batch wouldn’t come out because the milk felt hotter than normal, but in ten years of making yogurt, I’ve never had a batch fail “to yog,” as my partner puts it.
In these days of coronavirus isolation, I already miss my Thursday morning writing routine at Dunkin Donuts. Continue reading
Now that everyone and their Uncle Bob has taken a sudden, pandemic-motivated interest in hiking, my hiking pole is also my social distancing pole.
Always remember that a social distancing pole is no substitute for choosing an unpopular trail with difficult parking and little to no markings either on the map or on the ground.
And no, I haven’t poked anyone with it–I would have to sanitize it.
My partner and I discussing the true meaning of Vaffeldagen, aka Waffle Day, aka March 25th:
Me: Vaffeldagen isn’t about the waffles. It’s about the friends we can’t see because of the pandemic.
Partner: The real friends are the waffles you made along the way.
Rereading some of my scenes in Stars Fall Out lead me to develop the theory that I gave one of my secondary-world characters coronavirus. Continue reading
When you Google “goat injuries” for book reasons because you need to get a guy out of an animal pasture so his wife can talk to her would-be-lover about some perjury they’re going to commit…
…and then a week later you still have six browser tabs dedicated to goat injuries, even though you decided not to go all plot devicey like that.
That’s writer life.
Self-preservation determines that I wouldn’t take the last step to walk off a cliff, and I won’t hit the call button either. Continue reading
I’ve long suspected that heavy use of passive voice indicates a passive person.
I’ve had so many times when I’ve pointed out passive voice to people who’ve asked me to look over something and had them respond, “It just sounds more natural that way.”
If one finds it difficult to conceive of taking action, of course passive voice will sound more natural.