What I’m going to point at today is LJ Book.

I’ve discovered it earlier on this morning, and thought it’d be interesting to share it. While one of the aims of this tool is to generate a PDF of all the posts on a LiveJournal blog (in order for the blog owner to publish it using LuLu or another POD service), another one is the backup of one’s posts. Yes, I do have a small blog on LJ, that I really use for personal purposes only, and it’s good to have a trace somewhere of what I’ve written, in case it someday disappears—which will surely happen sooner or later: nothing on the Internet is truly immortal.

If you’re anything like me, you probably dislike not having this level of control on your own words/webpages. With WordPress or any system that you host on your website, it’s of course easy to backup the database, but what about LJ or other services that don’t offer this function? No more worrying or saving the HTML pages one by one! The output isn’t schmancy-fancy nor full of user pictures and colors, but the text is safe, and it’s what matters.

Y Tags: backup | blogging | livejournal | PDF | POD | writing

I stumbled upon this while browsing the Technorati tag about Writing, and although it’s nothing official, it can be a fun little challenge for those who would be interested by NaNoWriMo, but know they won’t have the time, especially by the end of November. The basic is simple: you have between October 31st and November 4th to write a 5,000 words short story (or less; the rules quite loose here). The interest? Pretty similar to NaNoWriMo’s: giving yourself the challenge and deadline to finally complete a story, only a short one.

Head to the Defective Yeti blog for the details about WriAShorStorWe.

Note: This is to be done in fun, of course.

Y Tags: short+stories | writing

Since I’ve been developing this female character recently, and spotted an interesting thread about it on the NaNo forums (yes, again) yesterday, I’ve started to think of this some more. I suppose that it would be especially valid to examinate female characters written by male authors, yet being a woman doesn’t always mean that we can write our own sex perfectly, so anything would go. What makes female characters annoying? What makes them look like bad stereotypes? What details would turn them into bad or insipid characters, that wouldn’t necessarily produce the same effect with a male protagonist?

One author who definitely turns me off on this specific point is Robert Jordan, like I’ve already mentioned a few months ago in my Likeable Charactes post. All his female characters, without exception, are boring at best, seriously irritating at worst. They all end up looking like each other, on top of it. They’re bossy, ordering everyone around, rolling their eyes while repeating “Men!”, whining when people don’t jump at their command, and, in general, absolutely obnoxious. And smoothing their skirts a lot. I can’t even remember the last time I smoothed my skirt (trying to desperately pull it a little lower after discovering that carrying the heavy laptop bag on my shoulder was making it go higher than intended doesn’t count). In a nutshell, these female characters are just stereotypes from the feminazi end of the spectrum—the other end being filled with the fragile creatures whose most major role can only be to end up in the hero’s bed.

Something very weird happened in the past few days, discretely at first, then more and more quickly: one of my very secondary characters said she wanted in with a more important role, and not only did she demanded that, she also gave me reasons as well as plot and background elements for me to do so.

It’s really an eerie feeling. I’ve often heard that an author can consider having done a good work when her characters acquire a life of their own, so to say, but I never had this happen to me in such a way. This one wasn’t supposed to go very far in the story—in fact, she was even to die in one of the first scenes: a person out of the past, who’d be regretted, but wasn’t involved in the rest of the plot. I don’t know yet if she’d be really essential; she desperately wants in, this I’m sure of. Now that I think of it, she’s anyway not the kind of persona to remain quietly in the background.

Via Blogging Pro: if you go to the WordPress.com page, you’ll see the following message: “Want WordPress.com? Then download Flock”. The necessary link to do so is provided, but just for the record, here’s where to find the download page directly. Once you have installed Flock, just click “Getting Started”, right under the standard navigation buttons, and choose “Get yourself a blog”. There, you’ll have access to the WordPress.com, which will take you to asignup page.