Erich T. Wade

I’ve only been meaning to set up Google Analytics for a year or so, so that’s totally on schedule.

I’ve been curious for a while what my traffic statistics look like, and too lazy to check. I guess now I’ll know.

Yeah, I’m calling it. Time of death is 22,974 words.

I’m going to set This Novel Will Fail (whose secret title is Hypernode) aside for a while, work on Derelict, play some Skyrim, do some reading, sleep, that kind of thing.

So, where to from here? Well, Derelict’s deadline for Draft 3 is December 20, so that’s what I’ll be working on this month. In its current state it’s pared down to not much more than an outline with a few scenes slotted in; yWriter says I need to average about 4k words a day from here forth to hit the word goal, but of course a lot of that is already written and waiting to be slotted in. There will need to be some new scenes drafted – quite a few, actually, as the focus of the book is changing a bit from previous drafts – and a lot of connecting bits still need to be written. After that I’ll be working on Draft 4 from (hopefully) Dec 21 to Feb 20, which is going to be cleanup; there will be a lot of rewriting scenes, fixing the kinds of continuity errors that crop up when you write a book over the course of several years and change the plot direction numerous times. Plus a lot of the current scenes will need to be cleaned up because they’re just not that good, and I left fixing them for a later draft.

I have come to think of first drafts* as the notes from which I will actually write the book. First drafts of stories are very rough for me. I don’t write linearly, so I end up with scenes scattered all over the book, and I’ll write scenes just to see whether they work or not. Then I’ll leave them in the draft, tucked away in the corners, for me to step in later when I’m revising. yWriter’s strength is also its weakness here; its design makes it very easy to write lots of little scenes and squirrel them away in your book, but it’s not as good for taking a section that needs to be complete and just writing through it. What I really want is a way to view and edit multiple scenes or chapters in one editor so that I get the flow as I’m reading through it – like a traditional word processor. I finish reading one scene and instead of breaking myself out to click on to the next one, I just keep reading, fixing things as I go. I can do this by exporting and working in another word processor, of course, but re-importing to yWriter was . . . messy, the last time I tried it. Probably what will happen is, at the end of draft 3, I will export into something like RTF or ODT, and then I’ll do most of the work for draft 4 in OpenOffice. Note that this isn’t necessarily a complaint – yWriter is amazing in a lot of ways, it’s just that it doesn’t happen to be a traditional word processor in addition to a nontraditional word processor. There’s a limit to how much I’m allowed to complain about that, and I think I’ve reached it.

*And make no mistake, with the changes I’ve made, Draft 3 is a new first draft of Derelict. Not the first first draft, but a first draft.

Current music: Same station as yesterday. Still really good. I think it’s time I make a new main Pandora station, where I’m pickier about how much I have to like something to thumbs-up it.

All you people who live in places like California and Japan have permission to laugh at me, because this probably barely counted. It didn’t even bother to knock anything off my shelves. But for the record:

Northwest Arkansas. Earthquake. My desk shook. It was annoying, because I was trying to bookmark something via drag-and-drop at the time.

Also: I am aware that we have actually had several earthquakes in the area over the last several years. Somehow I managed to not notice any of them, which was honestly pretty disappointing.

I knew I wanted to blog about the changes to Google Reader as soon as I saw them, but I also knew that I would need a few days to cool down. So I waited until today to write up my reactions. I got to the end of a thousand words or so, looked it over, and realized that I hadn’t waited long enough to cool down. So you don’t get to read that. For now, suffice it to say that though Reader did need a rework and the ability to share to specific circles was a much-needed feature, we also need to be able to read shared links in an RSS reader.

If you, like I and many other people, are annoyed by the new interface, I recommend the Greasemonkey script Google Reader Absolutely Customizable. I test-drove several and liked this one best because of its customizability. I recommend you also visit the Custom CSS thread and poke around. I dropped in the link recoloring, because the gray links on black text were going to drive me mad. Here, have a before-and-after.

You can actually use that script to make it much more compact if you wish, but I like the bits I didn’t hide.

Sharing is not as easily fixed. There’s a Chrome addon and (for Firefox) Greasemonkey script that seems to restore the old functionality; I don’t know how it works, so I’m hesitant to recommend it in case it relies on db access that Googles going to revoke or something, but I’ll happily test it if anyone else is interested. You don’t want to use it in conjunction with the aforementioned script, as it duplicates much of the functionality in a much-less-customizable way and they don’t always play nice. Also, at least on my ‘Fox, sharing and unsharing items doesn’t work; it seems okay on Chrome though.

Long-term, I think the best bet would be to find a way to import links shared in Google+ as an RSS feed, with links to the relevant discussions as well as to the articles, though I can think of a few issues with doing so off the top of my head. The truth is, sharing to different circles is just too important a change to let go of, but reading through shared links in Google+ is pure hell.

Oh, and one last thing: At first glance it looks like Google Reader only lets you share if you publicly +1 the article, which would be boneheaded for too many reasons to list. It turns out that if you click the “share” button in the top-right, on the black Google bar, it lets you share the currently selected article to Google+ without +1ing it. A “Share to Google+” bookmarklet would be nice, too; I only rarely shared from within Reader.

It’s almost Desert Bus time again. Sweet.

. . . Why does it have to be in November?

Where does the time go? I mean seriously, that just happened. And now it’s happening again.

Now I have to decide whether I’m going to take a stab at a NaNoWriMo book this year. On the one hand, the answer should be “No, I need to finish the book I’m on.” On the other hand, the answer should be, “Yes, I’ve been wanting to take another stab at it for years and this looks like a pretty good year to do it.”

I guess I’ll see. It’s not like I don’t have a half-dozen ideas in the I-could-totally-start-that-now stage.

Hmmmm.

Last night’s dream: I dreamed that the dream I was having had a writer, who was outside the dream (in the fashion that creators are generally outside their works). However, the illustrator was a character inside the dream, and had no existence in the meta-dream in which the writer existed. She was jealous of the dream’s main romance plot, so she locked the writer up in a cell in order to force him to rewrite the dream with one of the characters falling in love with her instead.

As if I don’t already have enough worries about characters taking on lives of their own.

On an unrelated note, Kat wants me to issue a clarification to yesterday’s post. Summer and I were vibrating like hyperactive gerbils: she went into a sugar coma and slept for several hours. I hereby blame my misrepresentation on vibrating like a hyperactive gerbil.

I swear this isn’t just spontaneously a food blog. I’m sure I’ll blog about something else soon.

An old Lifehacker tip pointed me to Recipe Matcher, a site where you can type in what’s in your pantry and be directed to recipes that use those ingredients. Given my current goal, this is really freakin’ cool. And it pointed me to a ridiculously simple peanut butter cookie recipe: all you need is peanut butter, sugar, and an egg.

These are really tasty.

A few notes:

• I took pictures. I swear I did. Apparently the sugar high from these things was so intense that it hit about fifteen minutes ahead of time, because all the pictures look like they were taken by a hyperactive vibrating gerbil.
• The recipe doesn’t say to grease the pan, and I assumed that the oils from the peanut butter would keep the cookies from sticking. This was correct.
• These cookies are really, really soft and crumbly, especially right when they come out. I thought I hadn’t cooked them long enough at first (I went for the low end of the cooking time), but as it turns out I nearly burned a couple of them.
• These cookies are incredibly rich. I accidentally made myself sick on them, and it didn’t take long at all. Also my whole family is vibrating like hyperactive gerbils.

Right! So the stewe was delicious.

It was savory, had a nice mixture of textures, and some stuff that doesn’t apply to all stews as well. The bits of zucchini squash were especially good. I almost didn’t notice the apple in there, but appreciated it when I did. There was a slight spicy aftertaste – this is not a spicy-hot dish, my wife had no issue with it, but the taste was there. I’d recommend it. I’d do it again, but given how I tend to experiment with dishes like this, I don’t think this exact stew will ever come out of my kitchen again.

Here, have a before-and-after-cooking shot of the crockpot:

Our plan had originally been to eat dinner around six or seven, or whenever depending on when we got to go look at a house, but looking at the house got postponed and we got hungry. In the end we ate about 4 PM, the stew having crocked for about 5 hours.

Current Music: Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel. This has been stuck in my head for about two and a half days now, and I think I may forfeit my life if I play it again sans headphones near my wife any time soon.

When I was writing up supper last night, there are two things that completely slipped my mind. First, our crockpot is broken. The last time we tried to use it we checked in at the several hour mark and discovered that it was still cold — well, you know, room temperature really. Not hot, is the point. The other thing that slipped my mind was that, yesterday being Thursday, that makes today Friday, which is (1) the day Summer and I usually go over to my aunt’s house in the morning and (2) the day we’re all eating dinner at my aunt’s, what with her going on a trip tomorrow and all. As it turns out my aunt was planning a roast for dinner, but since we still don’t know exactly when today we’re going to get to look at a house we’re interested in it would be difficult to time the roast correctly.

Luckily, these problems all contain the solution to one another. My aunt and I just got done throwing a stew in the crockpot which is heavily inspired by the aforementioned Greene Beef Stew: she didn’t have any brown sugar on hand and didn’t really want to add any, nor did she have seasoning salt, but on the other hand she had some other stuff she wanted to use up before she left. The final ingredients list looks about like so:

Greene Beefe Stewe – Wade Porke Variante*

• 1 lb boneless pork sirloin roast, cubed
• about a dozen baby carrots, sliced (I made sure the total carrot volume was about right)
• 3 celery stalks, chopped
• 4 yellow potatoes, diced
• about a third of a really big red onion, chopped
• 1 cup corn
• 1 large clove garlic, minced (This was probably equivalent to 2 normal cloves; we had another clove that would have brought the equivalent total up to 3, but it was moldy so we didn’t use it.)
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tbsp olive oil (used to brown meat)
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp marjoram
• 1/2 tsp rosemary
• 3 cups beef bullion & 1 cup pork bullion
• 1 small zuchinni squash, chopped
• 1 red and 1 green sweet pepper, chopped
• 1 small Red Delicious apple, cored and chopped

The stew is now sitting in the crockpot, making my aunt’s house smell really good and patiently waiting for us to end its life sometime around six or seven tonight. I have a great picture, but since the cable for my camera is at home, you’re just going to have to imagine it. Or wait, I guess. You could do that.

In the meantime, worry not, I intend to make actual Greene Beefe Stewe next week, since my aunt has been so kind as to offer me the use of her crockpot during her absence.

*I totally asked permission to do this to the stewe’s name, because it makes me giggle. It also makes me giggle that the words that actually have e’s and the names are the same. It’s entirely possible that I’m easily amused. Or short on sleep. Those look a lot alike.