Updates

Summer is here, and with the changing of the season, perhaps it’s time to refresh things. Buy a new toothbrush. Give the house a good cleaning. And…update your blog?

Yes, definitely. Most of my interaction with my own blog is by hitting the post button or responding to comments. I don’t often check all the other pieces that make up my blog. So here’s my tips for seasonal “blog cleaning”:

1. Make sure your contact info is up to date. How will people contact you and tell you your email address isn’t working? You should update your profile, too.

2. If you link to other blogs on your site in any way, make sure they’re all still updating. So many people disappear from the internet that you can end up with a blog roll that stretches down forever, filled with sites that haven’t updated in over a year.

3. Make sure any links you have are working, as well as any gadgets you may use. Last year my Twitter gadget stopped updating with my tweets. I’m not even sure how long it had been broken for! It’s also no good if you have a link to your latest book and anyone who clicks on it gets a message saying 404: File Not Found.

4. Keep things interesting! Change your format, your picture, themes. Maybe add new pages. (I have to admit, this is the one I often skip…but “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” probably isn’t a good way to run a blog)

Okay, I suppose that’s it, unless one of you has something else to add—by all means, share. Don’t let your blog languish!

Life in the Electronic Age

E-books are a wonderful idea. It’s easy for anyone to get published…which also means it’s easy for anyone to get published, even people who have no idea what they’re doing, but that’s not what I’m here to complaintalk about. This time. No. Rather, the wonderfulness of being able to carry around a thousand books in a e-reader, often (but not always, yet another digression) purchased more cheaply than a print edition, is offset by the fact that you’re buying that copy of the book only for that particular e-reader. Legally, you can’t transfer it to another tablet/computer. Ever. Even if your old one is woefully out of date, you can’t download your purchased e-copies to your new model.

It’s called DRM—Digital Rights Management. It’s designed to protect media producers, whether they be writers or musicians or whatever, making it illegal for you to purchase something and then email it to all your friends so they have copies they didn’t pay the artist money for. In theory, it’s a good idea. Having an e-copy isn’t like purchasing a book in the store. If you loan that out, the person probably isn’t going to spend six hours at a copier to make their own book they didn’t have to pay for. Until DRM came along to lock it out, copying an e-book was just as easy as hitting Ctrl-V.

The only thing is, now you can’t even transfer it among your devices, or give your copy away. I get that piracy is a bad thing and is difficult to deal with, but in an age where computers and game systems last maybe five years before the new model is announced, it’s unfair to consumers to have to trash all their previous purchases if they want a new device. It’s especially sucky when Apple has been accused of price gouging with e-books and the new Xbox One won’t be backwards compatible.

Sadly, this isn’t going to change anytime soon, and things will probably grow more restrictive. Say goodbye to copying songs from your laptop to your desktop to your new laptop. If you break your e-reader, you break however many books you bought with it. Oh, and in the United States it’s illegal to try and get around a DRM scheme (seriously, that’s what they’re called). So have fun with that.

There are Still More Words that are Easy to Confuse

Is it that time again already? I feel like I’ve just done this, but sometimes I see a word and go “no, that’s not what it’s supposed to be” and then I go a little crazy. Well, crazier.

Aught/ought

I think this is another one Lizmentioned months ago. If you’ll remember my post about “nothing”, aught is a version of the word naught that got the n dropped off. But it’s also a completely different word that means “anything whatever”, “any part”, or “at all”. Then we have ought, which basically means should. How do you tell them apart? Um…you know what? People don’t use them much anymore. Let’s just erase them both from existence. That should do it.

Taught/taut

Darn homophones. They make everything so confusing. But taught is what a teacher does (in the past tense). Taut is what a rope does. A teacher with a rope has taught with a taut piece of line. You don’t mess with that teacher.

Reek/wreak

Although the ea digraph has a few different pronunciations (think of read or lead), the ee one only has one, the long e, and because wreak is like the present tense read, these two are also homophones. Reek goes with smell (two e’s, two l’s), and wreak goes with havoc (no clever way to remember this one, sorry, but it has nothing to do with odor so you should be able to keep them straight that way). And for bonus confusion, there’s also wreck.

Bridal/bridle

If a hotel offers a “Bridle Suite” be very suspicious. See, bridle is what goes on a horse. Bridal is what has to do with a wedding. I always thought these words were confusing because bridle has an e in it like bride, but it was pretty easy to train myself to remember which is which. Sadly, I’ve seen evidence that not everyone has done this…

Decadent/decedent

The annoying part of these words is that they sound nothing alike. Deck-a-dent and de-see-dent, because c is an annoying letter that sounds like both kuh and suh and we should just get rid of it. Always, always double check them (and I’m talking to myself here, but feel free to do so yourself).

Genres

A conversation with Andrew brought something to light for me: dystopian and post-apocalyptic are separate genres. Previously I took post-apocalyptic as a sub-genre of dystopian since if you look it up in the dictionary, it’s defined as “a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding”. Post-apocalyptic societies, at least the ones I’m familiar with, generally fit the bill.

But! The literary definition of dystopian is different from the definition of the word. A literary dystopia is a place where a governing body enforces a warped idea of perfection. YA Highway had a really good post about the difference between the two.

So while I thought it was this…

It’s really more like this…

With examples! All YA of course.

I think THE HUNGER GAMES really is both—after an apocalyptic event, a dystopian society rose up. Although they don’t enforce perfection as much as they do obedience, I think it fits.

Anyway, post-apocalyptic does not equal dystopian, although I think it would make sense if it did. That is all.

Write Club

Or technically, WRiTE Club.

DL Hammonds is at it again. From now (well, since last Monday) until June 30, you can send in a 500 word writing sample—under a pen name. Thirty two will be selected. Then in July, the “fighting” begins!

In each fight, a pair goes head to head, with the winner being selected from the votes in the comments. However, you have to remember that this is anonymous, so no vote angling allowed. After round one, the winners keep duking it out until one story is crowned champion. Since the winner is chosen by a panel of authors, agents, editors, publishers, and marketers, it’s a good way to get seen.

If you’re interested, head here and sign up. I haven’t entered yet, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to come up with something before then. Remember: before June 30. Fingers crossed!

Language of Confusion: -fest

I am writing this sentence before actually looking at the words etymologies: please let festive and infest be related. Language owes me this much.

Festive first showed up in the mid-seventeenth century as something specifically related to a feast, with the holiday-merry meaning not coming along until the end of the eighteenth century. It comes from the classical Latin festivus (for the rest of us!), with the same meaning, and festum, which is just festival. And that word comes from festus, the origin word for feast.

Dang. They’re not related after all. Fester showed up in the late fourteenth century from the Old French fester, a pus-leaking sore and no I’m not making that up. Festre actually comes from the classical Latin fistula, which means pipe or ulcer and is even an English word that means "a narrow passage formed by disease or injury".

Infest showed up in the late fifteenth century from the Middle French infester and classical Latin infestare, to attack or disturb, and infestus, aggresive or dangerous. The in- prefix isn’t a stranger around here—it means opposite of in this case. Aggressive certainly sounds like the opposite of a joyous, festive occasion, however that is probably not where that festus comes from. Infestus is actually from infensus, which is related to -fendere, fight or strike, the origin word for defend.

The final -fest word is manifest. These days we mostly know it as a cargo list, but it’s original and now rarely used meaning is evident or easily perceived. Cargo manifest didn’t show up until 1706, but the other manifest came about in the late fourteenth century. It comes from the Old French manifestand classical Latin manifestus, which has about the same meaning. It’s root words are manus, hand, and like infest, the festus that means struck.

TL;DR: Infest is related to defend, not festive. Fester and festival aren’t related to them or each other.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Dictionary.com

Orbis Latinus

A Manual of Latin Etymology, asUltimately Derived ... from the Greek Language By Francis Edward Jackson Valpy, from Google Books

June Goals

June already! 2013 sure has been going by fast. It’s already summer, if not by the date then by the hot, muggy weather.

May was far more productive than April, as you will see:

May Goals

1. Get COLLAPSE out to more beta readers. I do want to fix some things from my reader first, but that shouldn’t take more than two weeks.

Nailed it! Plus I signed up for the WIP It blogfest to meet more potential beta/critiquers. I’d call this one 200% done.

2. Actually follow some more blogs on Tumblr this time. This shouldn’t be that hard! Your weekends are wide open, self!

Yes, I did this. I hoped it would let me meet more people and get more followers, but I’m still stuck at a pitiful four. So I did it, but it’s kind of a fail anyway.

3. Start on rewrite. Maybe. I’m not sure if I’ll have time, but it would stop me from worrying about beta reads. It’s hard sending my baby out on its own!

Also done, with about 20K written in the new version. Another “Nailed It!”

So I did good, although not with all the results I hoped for.

June Goals

1. Finish collecting and giving critiques. This should be easy. I love beta reading.

2. Start posting more at the Spamfiles. I think having more posts will attract more readers. Could it be that other people don’t find spam as amusing as I do?

3. Add 20K more words to my rewrite. Usually first draft writing is easy for me, but I’ve been feeling a little bit of the writer’s block lately. I hope I can do it.

So it’s going good. What does your June look like? Are those of you who are parents drowning in children on summer break yet?