I’m a sad mashup of the Ice King from “Adventure Time,” Ted Moseby from “HIMYM,” both Andys from “The Office,” and “Parks and Rec,” and I’m writing a book about it
Last night I had a moment I didn’t expect. I sat down on couch I’ve sat on over a thousand times. Its arm rests are blocky and barely padded. While the cushions are soft, the frame has broken in at least one place, so the whole thing sags in the middle. It has a chase lounge with storage underneath, and even a rollout foot-rest. All in all, it’s an okay piece of furniture but it wasn’t what I…
Right now I’m employed in an agency where exercise is part of the job. For that reason, fitness is strongly encouraged and even weight lifting is part of the culture. I’ve got easy access to gyms and the convenience stores around my office sell protein shakes and energy drinks–the latter which are closer to pre-workout than they are Red Bulls. It’s pretty fascinating. (But then again, partying is…
Lately, I’ve been reading a genre of fantasy set in coffee shops and boutique bars–one that’s probably too new to have a common name, although I’ve seen it referred to as “slice-of-life.” I love it. The stakes are intentionally low and the mundane situations make the fantasy characters more relatable. An orc operating a café is a fun juxtaposition. Viv is such a soft take on the mythical bugaboo…
Gods be with thee, Fair Travelers! (As I say on my TikTok channel.) So my goal was weekly blogging, and I missed last week so my streak resets. Çest la vis, we move on!
What’s hot and interesting right now is I’m typing this on a new laptop. I got the Apple PowerBook M2 Max, which I’m stoked about! It’s definitely more powerful than what I’m used to, which is important since I’ll need said power…
Let me tell you a story about a man and a woman who accidentally broke each others’ hearts.
Part 1.
Long ago, they met as assigned friends in a local cult. He was faithful in his duties to check on her welfare, and she was grateful and showed such through letters of moral support when he accepted his calling to recruit afar off. When he returned, she asked to keep in touch and he suggested she join a discourse community that made long-range communication easy. She did, but they fell out of speaking for a few years. They crossed paths once at a facility for higher learning, but it was brief.
Then one autumn season, she pitched to her friends in the community that they should all go to a harvest festival. It was near his new home, so he asked if he could come. She agreed, and he and one of her friends all went together. He began to know her like he hadn’t before, and recognized how smart and witty she was. He began to fall for her like she had fallen for him more than a decade ago.
Years later their overlapping interest in philosophy re-crossed their paths. He was struck by her beauty and how much she stood out from other girls in their cult. They began to study together, and their hearts became entwined.
Unsolicited commentary from a professional copyeditor:
A: every single person makes grammar mistakes.
I have my writing read over by others because you know what you meant, so your brain automatically fills in the right thing. Also, copyediting is its own trained skill which is separate from writing. (Hence the profession!) While writers should definitely have some of those skills, given the horrors that I see from professional writers I do not expect amateur writers to be low on mistakes.
So that’s my first point - everyone makes mistakes in their own writing. Copyeditors make them, professional writers make them, amateur writers make them.
B: take Grammarly with an entire shaker of salt.
Your writing does have mistakes, I guarantee it, but I’d say for most people about half to two thirds of what Grammarly comments on is valid. Grammarly is like if a 3rd grade teacher with a grudge against children who just goes down the page slashing everything with red, had a baby with an old-school robot of the type that breaks down with a “does not compute” if you ask it to calculate the last digit of pi.
B1: In most situations, your writing should not be 100% grammatically “correct”. Stylistic writing requires stretching some grammar norms and breaking others, and almost all writing is stylistic. Some is really obviously stylistic - dril writes Like That on purpose - and some is more subtly so, but if you aren’t doing technical writing or in a 3rd grade English class, you’re stylizing. You should be stylizing. Otherwise Grammarly could write your thing for you.
B2: Grammarly is sometimes just flat-out wrong. Languages are complex, sentences are complex, and computers being able to parse human language at all is a VERY recent concept. Grammarly can’t always figure out what that pronoun was meant to refer to, or where that clause actually ended.
TL;DR: Your writing definitely has mistakes and that’s not because you’re a bad writer. Do look at everything Grammarly says!!! But also half of what Grammarly says you may disagree with after looking, and you may not be wrong to do so.
Unsolicited commentary from a professional writer:
Learn to edit your own work.
Buy these:
The Elements of Editing is for writers, too.
Ask yourself: If I didn’t have a computer, could I write confidently? Would I know whether my grammar is correct?
You need to know the rules. You need to know how to recognize if something’s wrong and how to fix it on your own.
When I hear writers say Grammarly makes their writing better I have to say: For the entire history of humankind until we had PCs, every single writer learned how to edit her or his own work. Every. Single. One.
Homer, Sun Tzu, Virgil, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Agatha Christie.
ALL of them self-edited their work. And then editors, who also learned to edit without computers, helped them polish their work.
It’s not difficult. Of course it takes time to learn. Becoming very good at something always does.
Like all computer programs Grammarly is flawed. If you don’t know the rules of grammar by heart then you won’t know when Grammarly is wrong. And you could submit or post work that makes people shake their heads and say, “Damn, this writer’s sloppy.”
I know editors who say they can tell when a writer has used a computer program like Grammarly and when the writer self-edits. And the self-edited work is always better.
Of course you’ll make mistakes. But you’ll make fewer, and when you see them you can fix them. Correctly.
For god’s sake, become a real writer. Learn how to write, not to obey a fucking algorithm.
Tiny addition from me, I learned to edit from other bloggers online. I learned to edit from infographics on Pinterest, some of which were totally wrong or biased, but I learned that eventually too. Some people have a better eye for errors than others, but who’s to say they didn’t train that eye first?
You can pick up books on editing at the library for free, or you can start reading what’s already here at your fingertips.
As someone that has grown up surrounded by beaches and done surf life saving, I know how the sea works. Lots of people dont. Every summer multiple tourists die here because they don’t respect the sea, if you’re going to the coast, here’s a thing I saw on Facebook.
Although it’s difficult to see what you’re looking at, this is a #physics experiment I just did with some string tied to my chair and the bookshelf to see how my character (symbolized by the hole punch), holding on to the middle of the rope, would swing if the line were cut. #writing #research #author #deletemybrowserhistory https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf_0DZLuh05/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Yo, I can’t believe how vibrant @mythologiecandles #cottagecore line smells! They’re strong but not overpowering, & you can distinguish each note they list on the label. #stonecottage #secretgarden #afternoontea (at Killeen, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CclztIbuH4z/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
Having an Irish stout to help me be more patient before we go into @thinkeryatx (at WhichCraft Tap Room & Bottle Shop) https://www.instagram.com/p/CbIZUJxONO8/?utm_medium=tumblr
The United Nations Security Council isn’t generally the place to hear works of great oratory. Speeches delivered there are more likely to inspire a nap than global action. But on Monday night, Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the U.N., gave a barnburner about Russian threats against Ukraine that has rightly gone viral.
At the last meeting held on Ukraine in late January, Kenya and the other African nations on the council were more muted about Russia’s role in the crisis than the U.S. and European members would have liked. But during the council’s rare late-night emergency session Monday, Kimani was in no mood to downplay Russia’s aggression.
Kimani called out Russia for acting toward Ukraine in a way that’s all too familiar to countries born out of colonialism. Any security concerns in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk “cannot justify” Russia recognizing them as independent states, he said. He went on to compare the birth of his country to Ukraine’s founding and the “ending of empire” that their new nations represented.
Kimani’s sentiment was echoed by the ambassadors from Gabon and Ghana, the two other African countries currently serving on the Security Council. Given the usual comity between Moscow and the African Group at the U.N., this direct opposition from Kenya, Gabon and Ghana counts as a huge break against Russia.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union presented itself as a friend to anti-colonial movements across Africa. Moscow’s warm embrace of these former colonies represented the antithesis of the West and the capitalism it represented stripping the newly founded countries of their resources. Russian President Vladimir Putin has worked to build on that goodwill by offering monetary and military assistance to African nations with none of the human rights and anti-corruption conditions the United States and its allies demand.
But that jockeying for influence clashes with Putin’s rhetoric regarding Ukraine. He’s repeatedly called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the 20th century. That belief has undergirded his treatment of his country’s neighbors throughout his two decades in power. His revised version of history deems the Ukrainian people and state as a mistake created out of whole cloth — a mistake he intends to correct.
Kimani in his speech Monday night empathized with that position, before outright rejecting it as a good reason to start a war:
We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them?
However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression. We rejected irredentism and expansionism on any basis, including racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural factors. We reject it again today.
It can be all too easy at times to frame empire and colonialism as a uniquely Western pursuit. That mindset has driven a large swath of the opposition on the American left to Washington’s attempts to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine. In truth, all five permanent members of the Security Council have subjugated others in pursuit of national glory and power. Kimani didn’t ignore that fact in his speech, calling out that “multilateralism lies on its deathbed,” having “been assaulted, as it has by other powerful states in the recent past.”
But Kimani didn’t use the West’s past imperialism as an excuse to condone violating Ukraine’s sovereignty. Instead, he was rightly willing to place the blame for any war in Ukraine squarely where it belongs, on Moscow’s neocolonialism and Putin’s need to go down in the history books as the man who tried restore Russia to its imperial greatness.
“It can be all too easy at times to frame empires and colonialism as an uniquely Western pursuit” and therefore not only to justify, but to support Russian imperialism believing it is resisting some nebulous CIA-funded plot. It’s nothing but self-righteousness that will cost lives now.
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