A Really Tough Blog

I found a new blog: Delightfully Scattered Thoughts. It's very tough. The topics it deals with are not light reading. What this woman deals with is so entirely out of my realm of experience that I don't know how to react. Some of this stuff is haunting.

I am not encouraging you to read this, especially if you want the protective 'everything's okay' bubble around your life to stay as it is. If you want a challenge, though, perhaps you could read her blog.

Bleg: My Best Blog Posts

OK, so I have 42 double-spaced pages worth of blog posts I just might be able to revise into something readable or even impressive. I need to narrow this down a bit (25 pages maximum), and would like your help. I'll list the post titles on here and set them up as links and, if you are willing, you click on a sampling and either read them or remember them, and tell me some must-includes and some must-not-includes. Or an if-you-include-this-you-must-not-keep-the-last-paragraph or two. Actually, I won't usually be keeping the last paragraph.

I also need to decide how I'm going to edit these. I realized selecting these how entirely my tone and references rely on these being blog posts. Should I try to adjust them so they read like opinion pieces, or leave in the blog qualities?

I realize this is a lot of reading if you were to go through all of them. Since this is a bleg, don't feel like you need to read them all.

Oh, right, criteria: I want to convince professional writers that I am already decent at writing and also have potential to be even better. They are looking for something we my own opinionated voice, not something formal (ie. academic) or journalistic. I hope that my Fiction and Children's Lit sections will already be pretty strong, but this section will be important too.

Thanks!

;
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Movie Review
Choosing Certainty over Accuracy
Doing the (un)Desirable
My Campus has Exploded (I'm really unsure about including this one)
On Soundtracks
Zombi Attack!
Being Christian in Public
Feminism: A Rant
Dawkins' Style I: Offensiveness
Moonstone the Skunk
How to Make a Casserole

And if you know of other posts that you think we well-executed and think I ought to include, let me know.

7 Quick Takes (XV)

1. If you read the previous post, you'd know that I've been working on a portfolio, for which I have spent the last five nights in a state of writerly productivity. I produced better than 25 pages of a YA novel. It's a longish story. I can't apply to the UBC Creative Writing program with my first choice fiction and my second choice poetry if I want to get in. I think I told you this. So I'm instead going 1) Chilren's Lit/YA, 2) Creative Non-Fiction, and 3) Fiction. (I might bump fiction up to number 1.) This means I had to write actual Young Adult stuff for my portfolio. Hence my working on a novel. I like this novel, though, and I might just finish it. NaNoWriMo is up-coming, and I might take advantage of that. You know how I like Internet bandwagons! Anyway, because of this, I don't have too much to tell you. I might get 7 nonetheless...

2. It's been snowing on and off; it usually melts within a day or less, and a lot of it has been wet, sloppy stuff. I hear we're getting 10cm this weekend, though. The dog will like it, and I'd prefer white stuff to wet stuff. Always have.

3. When I go to work, it's dark out. The sun rises about 25 minutes into my shift, though I'll have been at my workplace for 45 minutes or more by then. Since dawn (ie. light on the horizon, sun not yet visible) is less than 45 minues before sunrise, I actually walk from the main building to my building in darkness. Fortunately there is a light above the ramp, which can be slippery, and the city itself gives off enough of a glow behind me that the pale faces of the buildings are just visible in the darkness. Daylight savings ends this weekend, so the sun shall rise before my shift for the next month or so.

4. Geez, I don't know if I do have seven.

5. I read City of Ember before beginning my writing project. I had watched the movie made out of it before I read it. The book was similar, though not identical. They movie-ified it.

6. I signed up to be a server at church. The meeting for it is on Sunday.

7. I am on a new used computer. That is, it's new for me, but second-hand. They were going to toss it at work, and I scavanged it. Or, more accurately, I was given it by the person who was going to throw it out, as she was aware I had computer issues.

Well, except for a cheat at #4, I have 7. That's all for now, amigos.

Writing 25 Pages aka I Won't Be On Blogger

I need to write the first 25 pages of a young adults' novel ASAP (I have a plot and everything), so I'm going on a self-imposed Facebook and Blogger ban until I have completed something close to 25 pages.

See you then.

7 Quick Takes (XIV)

1. My computer is infected. This was not equivalent to fun times.

I was researching something--I think it was Aristophanes--and went to a website. Apparently, going to unfamiliar websites can be a bad idea. Suddenly, antivirus software bubbles were popping up telling me that my computer was being attacked by a virus, a worm, by Trojan horses. It seemed as though the digital version of Isengard had opened and was descending upon my computer, which was still about a day's march from the Hornburg. (For those who don't understand Tolkein references, go out and watch the movies. I refuse to translate.) I could click here to try and remove it. I did a fair amount of clicking here. And then it occured to me that I had never installed this particual antivirus software, called SoftCop, onto my computer. Why was it trying to protect me? Well, it wanted me to pay $80 by credit card if I wanted to counteract these viruses, but I wasn't doing that. Why would it suddenly descend upon my computer, at the very moment I was in crisis, and say, "Hey, if you register this product and pay $80, we'll protect you from these nasties."? It was almost as though it was in collusion with the viruses...

So I Googled it. This took some time and navigation, as my Web browser was suspiciously hesitant to go anywhere but the SoftCop registration page. For a little while it tried to tell me that I shouldn't go to sites because I was unprotected. Then it re-directed me to the SoftCop page even when I had typed http://www.google.ca/ into the address bar. Meanwhile, new windows kept opening up to explain that some worm-ridden virus riding a Trojan horse was trampling through my hard drive or something like that. Eventually I managed to google the thing, and, lo and behold, it's what they call a "rogue antivirus program." That is to say, it's a package of viruses disguised as an antivirus. None of the viruses it told me about existed. At the very least, they were harmless programs made to look like viruses that SoftCop put there itself. While I was trying to get rid of these pseudo-viruses, SoftCop was installing Trojan horses and backdoors, hidden in all sorts of little corners and never-inspected subroutines in my computer. These were designed to send my private information to its nefarious maker while performing acts of sabotage on my machine. I'm glad I didn't register or pay for the thing, but neither of those were necessary. It did not need my permission to install itself and its party of bugs onto my hard drive.

I spent all of whatever evening that was trying to dig it out of my system. I read on-line tutorials on how to do it, and by the time I was done, there were no more warnings, no more windows, nothing. The tutorials did warn, though, that if I missed just one little piece of programing it had put on, that program could download all of SoftCop again the next time I booted up and connected to the Internet. And sure enough, the next day, SoftCop was back in action. So I did the last thing that binary twit expected. I unplugged the Internet. Just like that. Shut her down. All the backdoors in the world cannot be opened if my computer doesn't have an ethernet cable anymore. Let's see it try to send my information out now!

Of course, my computer doesn't have the Internet now and is still crawling with viruses. I'm afraid to connect my hdd to it, since I don't know if SoftCop is capable of putting viruses on there and spreading it to whatever other computers I use to read it. I read that this thing can destroy your hard drive if you let it run full course, so I don't know what to do. I want to get some files off of it, but in the meantime I'm not turning it on.

I'm writing on my folks' computer now, of course.

Figures. Just when I get a computer of my own...

2. Good news: I figured out how to access my old hard drive. I mentioned I had some trouble with it. Well, after a number of tutorials, a few frustrations, and at least one "duh!" moment, I got on. I can now read four years' worth of my creative and academic writing. Yay!

3. My OGS (Ontario Graduate Scholarship) stuff got to where it was supposed to go on time. It is now out of my hands and my worries.

4. I am applying for a Creative Writing program in BC. It requires that you select three genres, ranked. You will focus in the first with a significant courseload in the second and some courses in the third. I spoke to my Creative Writing prof from uni, and she told me that so many people apply to this program with a straight fiction + poetry preference that it is nigh on impossible to get in with this as your preference. Rather, you ought to have something like Screenplay or Script or Lyric and Libretto or Radio Drama as your first two choices, and then fiction or poetry as your seconds. I think I will go for Children's Literature (which includes Young Adult, which I've read a lot of this summer) and Creative Non-Fiction (in which I might take some of my better blog posts and spruce them up), with Fiction as a third. If you have suggestions on better blog posts, let me know. I think I will include my semi-colon rant, but that won't nearly fulfil my word count specs.
I have some writing to do.

5. At work, I have spent some of my time doing real work: that is, I've been hammering nails in boards. I am not the best at this, and I had to spend some time on scaffolding. This was less than fun for me. I am afraid of heights. There are no two ways about it. My hands shake, my feet crawl, and my sense of balance becomes hyperactive. I can do it. I did do it. But it is rough. Also, I am used to being able to swing my hammer somewhat straight. All my hammering was on an angle, above my head (think inside of a pitched roof).
I also have to be careful about how much time I do work that is not in my job description. I have sense of how long what is left will take so cannot say for certain that I am behind, but I do need to be working more on my actual project. I need to balance being helpful and friendly and pitching in where need truly be with getting my own responsibilities accounted for.
The take-home fact is that I now have a satisfactory number of cuts and scrapes on my hands. I can say that I did some actual work.

6. The dog is hyper and strange. The last one isn't news.

7. Obligatory book take. I have been giving some goes at Heart of Darkness. I have returned to The Cost of Discipleship. That one is a thinker. It's tough. (A non-Christian would not find it tough because they would not take it as something they might have to follow. A Christian must 1) determine whether or not they agree with Bonhoeffer and 2) try to figure out how they'll implement these difficult concepts.) I finished The Faerie Queene's Booke Three. I have scratched the surface of Book Four. I am playing with the idea of reading some Shakespeare. Maybe Timon of Athens or Midsummer's Nights Dream or The Tempest or A Winter's Tale. There are some books in my workplace's library that I wish I could take home. (Our check-out policy is that you can't.) One is a historical one about a little-known early surveyor who mapped out a lot of Canada. Another is a Kangiryuarmiutun-English dictionary. Inuit languages have such a fascinating linguistic structure. I should have taken linguistics courses. Anyway, while I see limitations to this particular language, it is very efficient within its scope. It is also beautiful.
I think that's all the books I'm reading. Tonight I will finish Psalms and so tomorrow night I will begin Proverbs.

Remember to visit the Quick Takes Queen.

What does it say about me that I find this movie terrifying?