Archive for Personal

Courage Wolf is my favourite Meme

May 31, 2009 at 2:50 pm · Filed under Personal

I know I mostly keep personal stuff off this site, but I did make a personal category for a reason, and that reason is so I can do stuff like this.

I love courage wolf! It has to be my favorite Meme. There’s just something  about a snarling wolf delivering self help advice that really appeals to me; I feel pumped up and ready to face the day just from reading them.

Prototype

While we’re on the subject, I also really like the “Fail” Meme. It’s not so much that I like the ideas behind it but I really can’t stop giggling while reading them.

fail-camerabird-cat-cagelegendfail

*Giggle*

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My writing technique

May 29, 2009 at 11:09 pm · Filed under Personal, Writing; lessons and posts

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m on an ongoing quest to improve my writing speed; to that end I have created a new system for writing articles, and I’d like to share it with you.

My system works in three very simple steps.

Step one is content creation. The important thing in this step is to just keep writing; it’s quantity over quality at this point. Don’t worry about spelling and don’t worry about pronunciation; you can come back and correct anything you like later.

Step two is where you refine your writing a little bit; all you have to do is go back and correct any spelling mistakes you might’ve made while typing in step one. At this point you don’t have to worry about the clarity of your writing; it doesn’t matter if the article is nonsense, as long as it’s nonsense made out of real words.

Finally we come step three; the final polishing step. You just need to go back and get rid of any superfluous writing you put it while you were working on step one. If you stumbled a few times and went off at random tangents; then this is where you fix them.

And that’s really all there is to it. I know the system isn’t perfect; in particular I have a lot of trouble just writing without slowing down and correcting things; my internal editor just keeps getting in the way, but I have high hopes for the system and I hope to use it a lot in the future.

Thanks for stopping by and listening to me ramble.

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Idea – Typing 300wpm

May 17, 2009 at 2:22 pm · Filed under Personal

I have these good/bad/crazy ideas sometimes, most of the time they’re not related to writing in any way, but this one is.

I am on a long term quest to improve my writing speed. So far this quest means that I can touch type on a Dvorak keyboard and dictate an entire book using Dragon naturally speaking. I’m a lot faster now than when I started out hunting and pecking, but I’m still far too slow for my liking.

Then I stumbled upon this.

For those of you who don’t want to follow that link let me summarise it for you. There is a machine, called a Stenotype, and it lets it’s users type at 300 WPM!

I would love to be that fast. Even if I couldn’t form coherent thoughts at that speed, I would still be thrilled to type a nonsense book if I could do it at 300 WPM.

Let me explain why this is so exciting to me. Let’s assume I had a Stenotype modified for Novel writing and I could type on it at 300 WPM. Let’s also assume that a Novel is 100,000 words long and that for the sake of easy maths I can work for 20 minutes before needing a 10 minute break.

For every half hour period I can write 6000 words (20 x 300)

For every hour I can write 12000 words (6000 x 2)

Which means that I can write my 100000 words in 8.3 hours (100000/12000)

To put that another way it means that I could write a novel every single working day!

Brrrrr, I just got chills at the thought of all that productivity. Now there are some obvious weaknesses with this idea, ranging from the question of whether a stenotype could even be modified as I have laid out, to the question of whether I could think straight while typing faster than I can talk, but I think the potential if everything goes right is enormous.

I can’t possibly be the first person to think of this. I’ld  like it if you could tune in and tell me your thoughts.

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