by Richard Timothy | Aug 25, 2010 | Public Service Announcement, Updates Todate
Well, its official, Smirk has a new home! What was once a WordPress only site is now an adolescent… ok maybe infantish .com site. I’m sure you’ve noticed not much has changes… and you are correct, at least on the visual side of things. For now I am sticking with what I know and that the look of things is very similar to how everything looked on the old site. Hurray for template downloads.
However, because I changed my host, this means that my e-mail subscriptions host and RSS feed subscriptions have changed as well.
So this is a little public service announcement to remind people who would were subscribed to the old site, that you will need to re-subscribe to the new site.
The groove thing about the email subscriptions is that you will receive an email of each Smirk I post from here on out. It will be sent to your inbox the second after I post any new Smirk. I’ve done this with a few blogs that I follow regularly and it is rather convenient.
Here is a little walk though for those interested in subscribing:
Enter your email address in the Enter your email address: field in the right hand column of this post, and click on the Subscribe button.
A window will pop up asking you to type some text to complete the subscription and click on the Complete Subscription Request button.
The following message will appear:
The email will have a link that you will need to click on to complete the subscription activation.
For those of you that choose to, thanks for re-subscribing, or even subscribing for the first time if that’s the case. I do appreciate it, and I do apologize for this inconvenience.
If you have any suggestion or comments about the new site please email me at: [email protected]. Thanks all. I’ll have a new Smirk ready for you all tomorrow. Cheers!
by Richard Timothy | Aug 16, 2010 | Observationally Speaking, Updates Todate
I suppose I could follow that up with “so little time,” but I do think that if I were to hire someone I could dictate too it would reduce the ‘so much’ portion of the writing and increase the ‘so little’ time factor. Hmm… no it’s still the same, just someone else would be doing a lot of the work and truth be told, I’d feel a little dirty inside for dictating. Besides it’s amazing how much rewriting I do between getting the thought from my head and onto paper (even if that paper is a visual aesthetic on my computer monitor), and published as a Smirk.
Over the past two weeks, the Smirks have been slowing down a bit. Not because of lack of motivation to write, it’s just the focus has changed a little. I’ve been putting in a lot of focus on getting my novel revised, and part focus has resulted in me putting together a bit of a review committee for my novel… or as I like to call it, ‘The Roy Mastermind Group.’ The group is a committee of willing, able, and literate (which is very important) people that I send my revisions to once a week. They, during that week, review what I’ve written and send it back with grammar corrections, notifications of missing words and bloody long sentences that really need to be shortened down a bit to keep the flow going, and pointing out sections that are confusing and/or need to be expanded on for the sake of reader clarity.
So far it’s been a brilliant and grand help. One of the things I like the most is that it gives me accountability buddies, which are people that I am accountable toward in regards to setting and keeping deadlines. It keeps me on task with writing the novel and in return they have committed to review, edit, and resend by the end of the week. I love them! We also plan on meeting once every two weeks to talk about the process, to share some of the reworked sections and to play around with some ideas that I’ve had in regards to the characters development. We also discuss things that might need to be removed completely, or moved to a later section of the book.
The first meeting was this past weekend and was a rather grand time. I made sandwiches and they showed up with beer. When the beer proved to be too hoppy I opened some wine and we got to work. I would like to point out that if you do choose to try this review committee system out for your own writing, as a general rule of thumb, keep the wine consumption to a minimum until you are finished reviewing and going over notes. The reason being, by the time you’ve opened your third bottle, everyone is in full agreement that the book is “… really, really good and if people don’t they can just…” Yeah, the productivity and effectiveness of the group can sway a bit in those moments.
Another update that I feel is worth mentioning is the Smirk eBook I was going to do of my first 100 Smirks. Well, it is still in the works. However, I noticed as I began going thought the first 100 Smirks that not all of them are Smirks. Some are updates, some were a collection of funny images I had a friend e-mail me, and some use videos. This means there needs to be some rewrites for a few of these because eBooks don’t have hyper-links or allow for embedded videos from YouTube. Yes, it has become a little more complicated that I originally thought. Still, I have the goal to get the Smirk book done and available, and I will… eventually. I’ll keep you all posted as the process progresses further.
One last little update, I’ve started looking at switching everything from my blog’s WordPress url and will be moving it all over to a .com site. I’ve had one meeting about this already and it seems like the next natural progression of my blog. I am a little excited about it and it’s something that I’m looking forward to.
So there you have it, a few updates about things of a Smirk nature… topic anyway. I did have a friend make a Smirk request this past weekend, so I’ll be getting that written and posted in the next day or so.
Image Sources:
Google Images, key words: crucial part of writing, mastermind group, and writing.
![An Edit Editorial]()
by Richard Timothy | Jan 13, 2010 | I Think There's a Point, Observationally Speaking, Updates Todate
Today I’ve decided to focus on finishing my feeble editing attempts on Chapter 8 of my novel. I am going to get it posted before I go to bed tonight. That’s my promise to myself that all of you get to hold me to.
The thing is I’m a pretty good editor when it comes to other peoples work. I do it at work all the time. Yet, when it comes to my own work, I, well, I think I’m kind of a crappy parent. I’m so elated and proud of my writing getting all creative and playful, that I blindly overlook all the naughty things it does in the process, like inconsistent, confusing, and WTF punctuation, and awkwardly or obviously redundant paragraphs. Editors are the world’s equivalent of the strict parent. They make sure your kids eat their broccoli, which is good because they need it, and so does my writing.
Although I am getting better at self editing, I’ve noticed that I produce a series of sounds and phrases that have their own editing definitions while I’m editing my work. Here are a few of them that come to mind:
- The hell? – This is usually said while as my eyes start to squint and my head tilts to the left. It’s the result of realizing that a specific sentence or phrase I am looking at is completely wrong. …See there are times when writing that I’m trying to get out what my brain it thinking about as fast as I can. I commonly miss a few words or if I’m lucky I only type a few minor words out of order. Then there are times when my only option is to kill the whole paragraph and start over because I have no bloody clue what the hell I was trying to say, which happens more than I’d like to admit.
- Wha… bu… tha… phuhh… – This is usually the collection of sounds I make after my “The hell?” statement. These sounds usually begin as I attempt to decipher what I was thinking while I was writing the sentence in question. Sometimes I revert to poorly edited profanity during this phase as well. Things like, “Piece of sh…”, “Son of a bi…”, “Rat bas…”, “Mother fu…”, and then I finish it all of with, “Dang.” It doesn’t help my editing any, but it always improves my mood.
- Oh! – This is what comes out when I figure out what it was I was actually trying to say, or decipher which words are out of order or misspelled as other words that the spell check did not mark and incorrect words.
- Uhh – This is usually a subtle auditory sound said under my breath. My fear is that if I say it too loud I’ll end up distracting myself as my brain attempts to process some rewording that will make a little more sense, or at the very least make the sentence cleaner.
- Ahh – This is usually a louder sigh of relief. It’s my triumph noise, which I make when I fix a problem or catch a simple edit error and fixed it. It’s sort of my own editing ohm.
- God I need an editor – This is usually my wrap up phrase as I finish editing my work. It’s the signifier that I have made it through my editing process and verbally proclaim to myself the obvious truth. Who knows, maybe it’s a subconscious proclamation to the universe to please send me some superhero whose secret power is the love of editing and they just happen to have a desire to be my personal editing Alfred… yeah, something like that.
Well there you have it, have them, some anyway… that’s a few of my editing lingos… lingai?… lingus… there’s some of the noises I make and things I say while editing my writing. I mean sure, I could keep going, but I’ve set a goal for today. It’s time to take another look at my book get making those noises instead of writing about them.
Do you have you own lingo for when your working on something and no one else is around?
Image Source:
Google Images, key word: book editing.
by Richard Timothy | Dec 28, 2009 | Shamless Self Plug, Updates Todate
Well, with the holidays mostly over, let me just start out by saying that I hope you all had a brilliant time off… if you had time off that is. I had a lovely time. I wore pajamas and slippers for three days straight… and I took two bubble baths, so yeah I was in full vacation mode most of the time.
I suppose I could have posted that I was going on holiday for the holiday, but I didn’t really get around to it. On a plus note, I did work on the novel a bit over the weekend and should have the rest of Chapter 8 posted some time this week.
I have updated the About the Author page to give you a bit more info about me… the author. Ok yes that is a bit redundant, but necessary I feel. Also, I’ve added a new page, which I like to call Rich Facts, random facts about me that you either wanted to know but were afraid to ask, or that you never thought to wonder about asking to know, or things you just don’t care about… but should (wink, wink). I’m sure you’ll find something in there that might equate to as entertaining. Although, I think this is going to have to be a work in progress.
Image Source:
Google Image, key word: pajamas
Well, its official, Smirk has a new home! What was once a WordPress only site is now an adolescent… ok maybe infantish .com site. I’m sure you’ve noticed not much has changes… and you are correct, at least on the visual side of things. For now I am sticking with what I know and that the look of things is very similar to how everything looked on the old site. Hurray for template downloads.
