Blogging

Jun

2014

Introducing…The Interrobang‽

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/by-the-dots/
(A little late in the day for this, but I was busy looking over old writing from four years ago and shaking my head at how much it has changed since I write more professionally now…)
And there were are… The trailing off of the sentence or statement… but the punctuation that Dan Brown in particular cannot seem to live without is the interrobang ‽
Did you see that? Or, should I yell/ask, did you see that‽
The interrobang was invented in 1962 according to Wikipedia, and never really caught on much. I had only heard about it a few years ago from one of my co-workers who eventually moved away and is now a sometimes poster on Facebook. To make the interrobang in HTML, like you can right here at WordPress, you need to press a combination of the ampersand, the pound sign (hashtag) the numbers 8253, and the semi-colon. Or, do what I did and copy it from the Wikipedia site and paste it right into the editor‽
For what it’s worth, I never use the combination of the exclamation point and the question mark at the end of a sentence. I consider it bad form, but it is acceptable punctuation, oddly enough.
This post is a bit of a joke, but I hope I informed and entertained all the same. Got a lot going on next week, starting with Camp NaNoWriMo resuming on July 1, so I’m getting my blogging in for the week. How will I get it all done‽

Jun

2014

Thinking of my Writing Journey, Steampunk, and my Blog, So Far

First off, I have a link here to my very first guest blog post:
http://plungingintothenovel.blogspot.com/
K.J. Bryen will be publishing her new book, Lokte in the fall of 2014.
My guest post talks mostly about my writing journey so far and offers some tips that I’ve found are critical to surviving the first months of the self-publishing journey.
However, there is so much more, more than what can be covered in a single post. The entire exercise was quite thought provoking for me. One thought surfaced above all others: I may just have to start another blog!
If I start another blog, it will be dedicated to The Inventor’s Son. Once I start some heavier promoting and get Book 2 out, I’m sure that some readers might want to delve a bit deeper.
I’ve also joined the Google+ community Steampunk Tendencies. Their actual website is http://www.steampunktendencies.com/
When I see how many people are members of this group, and how elaborate their costumes and artwork is, I’m at once encouraged and daunted. Encouraged because Steampunk really does seem to be taking off and becoming more mainstream. Daunted because, compared to many of these people, my Steampunk resume is pretty thin as of yet. It’s such a fun genre, I’m sorry I didn’t get into this sooner.

Jun

2014

What Keeps Me From Sleeping at Night

There’s a variety of things I do that keep me from going to sleep when I really ought to. Just last night, it was already 12:35 and there was someone I had corresponded with on Twitter (because there’s ALWAYS someone to converse with on Twitter, no matter what time it is) that had sent a reply to a reply I sent her, etc. Before that, I did two very productive word sprints, which has an effect a lot like exercising right before bed.
Other nights, I watch tv, and I am not the type that falls asleep while watching television. And sometimes the show makes me so wound up, like the Game of Thrones finale last week, I can’t fall asleep after that.
Once in a great while, I’ll be out late, but I don’t have a huge social whirl, and all of us need to get up early the next day anyway.
It’s also hurricane season, and once I hear about tropical storms forming off the coast of Africa, I tend to watch for Accuweather updates and the like.
Often, I just have to do things at that hour that I couldn’t do all day.
But I don’t like it. I feel like I could do better if I wasn’t sleep deprived.
(This was posted in response to today’s Post a Day http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/sleepy-time/ )

May

2014

Living in Dystopia

(Set that title to the tune of “Living in America” as performed by the late, great James Brown.)

Yes, I put the video there, not that it has all that much to do with this post, but it is funny!
Imagine a post-war America where the president must resign before getting impeached. An America where thousands of soldiers, suffering from PTSD, are coming home to a country divided. There are nuclear power plants that leak. It is a country where there are long lines for fuel, and the internet is only for a very select few. Computers need to be built by hand in garages, and the individual is discouraged from trying to own one themselves, being told that it is “unnecessary” and a “toy” and “too expensive.”
Television, if you can get it, is restricted to a handful of channels, and they are never in the schools. Telephones are only attached to walls or to a cord beside one’s bed.
All bread is soft, squishy and white, and no one has any idea what gluten is. The portions of food are a quarter of the size you are accustomed to, and clothing sizes are much smaller as well. To reheat food, one needs to turn on the oven and hope they don’t burn the plate.
Children go outside for recess and take their lives into their hands climbing on monkey bars and the slides are all metal and gray. Their only means of communication with each other is speaking face to face or the occasional, very risky, handwritten note.
Welcome to the Dystopia of the 1970’s. (I’m sure there’s a lot that I missed, let me know in the comments if you want to!)
Hell, even the people in the Hunger Games books had remote controls for their televisions, didn’t they?

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