Yes, yes, I know WordPress has solid built-in spam-catching functions; I must simply admit that receiving an e-mail everytime a spammer posts a comment, so that I can decide whether to approve or reject it, is getting tiresome. I could also tighten the features and make it so that these messages are deleted without even asking for approbation first, but given that some of the genuine comments I receive here sometimes get caught in it too—much to my dismay, since I see no reason why (they don’t even contain any links), I don’t want to take the risk.

This is the reason why I’ve installed Spam Karma 2. I had been testing it on another blog that had become a spammers’ target, and so far it’s been working pretty well. This is the second version, too, and there shouldn’t be any “false positives” (genuine posts caught as spam), but if any of you were to experience their comments being blocked and not appearing on the site even after one day or so, please send me an e-mail about it (the address is in the Author section on the right). The plugin sends me a daily digest of blocked spam comments, and I can restore them if I want to, yet it can happen that I miss one.

Y Tags: spam+karma | plugin | wordpress

Well, I did something crazy: I threw away a good 30 pages of work yesterday. On the premises of a dream. And I’m happy about it.

Of course, I’m not going to feed you all with talks of premonitory dreams. No, I just happened to dream a scene that, with some changes, would have fit my novel well. I mulled over it almost all day long (travelling by train to Strasbourg and back gives me lots of time to think), and the more I wondered about it, the more I wondered why I hadn’t thought about it before. Sure, I’d never directly use a scene from a dream—mine are so weird it wouldn’t bear any sense. Bouncing on one in order to enhance an already existing idea, on the other hand, isn’t something I’m afraid of.

Sometimes, I tend to clutch too much to dead wood, to things I’ve written weeks or months ago, wanting to use these elements no matter what because I like them. Indeed, it’s not rare for me to scribble down a scene for which I have inspiration; later on, when what precedes this part of the story is written, I simply add it, tweaking it if there’s need to. However, such scenes may happen to be more bothersome than anything else, especially if I find myself filling the blanks with elements that aren’t very thrilling just so that I can link them to the main body of the story. When I find myself thinking “this development is boring”, this tells me something.

Well, this development was indeed boring, in that it was leading me directly to one or two chapters of “explanations”, which I usually dislike as a reader. My planned summary of these chapters looked good on paper at first, but not so good anymore once I was actually writing them. I don’t like explanation scenes, I prefer give out clues and information here and there along the story. Why I found myself dragged toward such a direction is a mystery even to me.

I don’t have any regrets. There are things an author sometimes has to let go, things that were pleasant to write, but don’t fit the current story anymore. Recognizing when to do so, and with what, is a nifty skill to develop, I think.

Y Tags: planning | writing

A little problem I ran into not so long ago, as I was introducing a character in my novel: what to do with those that are, technically speaking, “people from the street”, and who’re supposed to talk in slang at best, and with much swearing at worst? A street urchin raised to be a thief in a medieval-fantasy town setting sure wouldn’t talk like a noblewoman, nor a beggar like a king (unless they’re exceptions resulting from social descension, and in this case, they need to remain just that—exceptions).

I don’t want to fill entire dialogues with cursing, as it is is rude and not especially pleasant to read anyway, but it is also evident to me that not every character in my book can talk in a nice manner, not when they’re from a social origin that wouldn’t fit this at all. Same problem with slang, which very nature is to make it less understandable to “those who don’t get it”. Simply looking at nowadays’ slang, always changing, is a good enough proof of this. The slang I used to talk at school ten years ago isn’t the same 16-years old talk today, and for them, I’d probably be considered and old schmuck already. This is why I can’t focus too much on detailed slang, else the readers would just not understand my characters’ speech patterns. “Immersion” sure doesn’t mean “being left clueless”.

So what to do? I’ve been mulling over a few solutions, although I haven’t settled on any for the moment, and am still left pondering:

Anyone dabbling with websites should find this tool interesting—it can probably be useful in other fields of application as well. As its name clearly indicates it, Typetester lets you test your fonts not only in different types and weights, but also with different colors of text and background. This way, it becomes much more easier to see immediately if your next stylesheet will make text readable or not, without having to toy with the code first.

Among other things, you can define the font (either from a predefined list or from the ones installed on your computer), its size, the letter and line spacing, the alignment… I’ve tested it for some time today, and indeed, it allows for nice and quick comparisons. The next time I want to change the font on one of my blogs, I’ll know where to go to experiment.

(Link found through A lifetime supply of bravado)

Y Tags: fonts | web-design

Completely by chance, I found this article that dates back to May about the writer’s bump being headed for extinction, and I can indeed relate to this,since I had already noticed, quite some time ago, that mine had gotten smaller than before. Oh, it’s still here… just more discrete, less protuberant. Nowadays, when I work on my writing, I do it directly on the computer, so that I don’t need to “waste time” doing it on paper first, then copying everything in my word processor.

In a way, it’s a little sad. While I didn’t like it when I was still in my teens—I thought it made my finger look weird—I now somehow regret it. It was indeed some “badge of honor”, the proof that I was living with a pen in hand almost from the moment I got up in the morning to the moment I went to bed. I’d write everywhere, whenever I had five minutes ahead and no book under the hand to pass the time. Or I’d draw, depending on my mood. It’s a wonder that I don’t bear some freaky tatoo resulting from all this ink I got on my middle finger due to cheap leaky pens and mixing so many ink colors.

I still use pens here and there, of course, if only to write down an idea, but it’s nowhere near the amount of time I used to write manually “in times of old” (I know when I stopped: in 2002, when I switched from college studies to graphic-design ones, and would use a computer all the time). Same goes for drawing: vector works don’t demand me to prepare sketches for hours in a row. As a nasty side-effect, too, my handwriting has gotten awful; I used to tease my boyfriend about his, but really, mine hasn’t improved at all, on the contrary, since I’m not “practicing” as much as before.

Ah, well. This is one of the sad things about the wonders of the computer: our old writing scars are slowly disappearing!

Y Tags: writer | writing