Reading: galleys and stories
Music: DoCo
TV/Movie: Good Will Hunting
Link o' the Day: World Wide Words

So I did a little figuring and I put together a file with all my past journal postings and discovered that since the beginning I've written something near to 25,000 words minus excessive quoting. I could look at this several ways. I've heard many a folk call these webjournals, blogs, and the like a time sink. Well, hell. What isn't? On the other side of things, I can take a look at the past few months ago, "hey, I've been pretty steady in keeping this thing going minus a few weekends here and there and one week where I was under several deadlines at once. Good job."

So I'll look at the 25,000 words and feel pleased. Heck, that's one quarter of a novel written in half-hour chunks. Sure the spelling and punctuation may be off at times, and I don't always find the best... watchamacallit.... word that I could use. But still, none to shabby.

I received galleys again for "The Roots of Fantasy" as it will appear in the Dragon Moon Press edition of the Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy (mentioned in yesterday's post). I've looked at other Dragon Moon Press productions and seem that they've done pretty good work in the past. What I saw instead was a chapter full of misused em-dashes and the loss of all italics for book and magazine titles. Stuff I had asked to be fixed the last time I was shown galleys. Fortunately I took advantage of the opportunity to discover and eliminate a bunch of comma splices in the text--I just hope they get it fixed. I'd hate to have that book appear in its current state.

I did a little editing tonight after a round of household chores in preparation for Pretty Maggie's last visit tomorrow. (Last visit, you say? What happened? Answer: the weekend after that she moves in... so she won't be visiting any more. She'll be home already.)

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There's been some talk lately on Memory Hole regarding the fanzine lounge at the upcoming Worldcon and the usual topic of attracting new fans to fanzine fandom. I'll be more than interested to see how this conversation goes. My first peek into this world was dropping by the fanzine lounge at MilPhil for a while. I didn't know any, and everyone already seemed involved with their own conversations, so I just sat and read a few fanzines and wandered off again. (I did this a couple of times, actually.) I got over that initial hesitation eventually, although not at Worldcon.

I may see what I can do to lend a hand this year. I've already commited to doing a couple of volunteer-type things this year. Maybe this can be one of them.

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Today's site is an interesting one for you lovers of words and the English language. World Wide Words. I learned about this site today from Rob Sawyer's mailing list (expect a number of new and interesting sites coming from this source--it's a good topic run this week). Anyway, just about everything you can imagine about the English language is discussed here--and it's not American-centric (is that a word? I should find out.). I've only just begun exploring this, there's a lot to see.

Who sez the web is a time sink?

Cheers!