Call the cliché police

BBC News: 20 of your most hated clichés. The first ten are: * Basically * To be fair * To be honest * Going forward * The fact of the matter is * Let's face it * Touch base * 110% * In the pipeline * The reason being These are fairly heinous.  My personal bugbear is "

NaNoWriMo week three

Crossed the magic 35,000 work mark on Sunday night, it's all downhill from here.  The story threads are coming together nicely, though my bad guy did something inexplicable again.  He'd demanding a much bigger part than he's supposed to have.  Unplanned things are

Nothing original under the sun

BBC News: Dead Parrot sketch ancestor found An ancestor of Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century.  Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which has been translated from Greek manuscripts, contains a joke where a

What Week Two slump?

Traditionally, week two of NaNoWriMo is where it all goes downhill.  Plots fail, word counts flounder, characters flail uselessly.  Week Two is where it gets "interesting". Wash: This landing is gonna get pretty interesting. Mal: Define "interesting" Wash: [deadpan] Oh God, oh God, we're

First Frost

Scraped ice off my car this morning, and there was a snow flurry over the weekend.  It must be winter.  This happens every year, and it's always a surprise.  Got a new pair of leather gloves at the weekend, dug my roll-brim Rowan Coccoon hat out of the

Shuffled off

"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream:

Injustice in 1605?

BBC News: Free the Gunpowder Plot One. Was one of the Gunpowder Plotters an innocent victim of circumstance? As effigies of Guy Fawkes again go up in flames, is it time to rectify a 400-year-old miscarriage of justice? After the failed attempt to blow up Parliament in November 1605, Henry

T plus four

The NaNoWriMo website suffered its usual overload and spent much of the last few days lying on its back twitching.  My body count so far is three bandits and a lynx, Hubby killed off three drunk Norwegians on day 2, so we're tied.  Came into work on Monday

T minus one

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow! Hubby and I will be at the St Charles write-in at the Crooked Tree Coffee House on First Capitol Drive. The St Louis region on NaNoWriMo has officially challenged Columbia, MO, Manchester, England and the entire country of Wales to a Word War. Last year we had

T minus three

I have a plot!  And a cast of characters!  I finally feel like I might be ready for NaNoWriMo 2008.  There is a nice circular "finish where you started" thread going through the story, and my minor characters have definite things to do that advance the plot.  It&