SoCNoC - just caught up!

I finally caught up on SoCNoC after lagging behind for the last few weeks. After losing a day early on, I've struggled a bit to focus and at least keep my lag down to one day only.

It's funny, I keep imagining that I'll wake up early and spend a few hours catching up, but in the end, it's always after the TV shows are done and it's 10 o'clock and I write until 12:30.

Still, caught up is caught up and by day 21, here I am at 33414 total and over 3200 words written today.

I can't say that my story is working out that well, but I have managed to pull all the 5 different threads together into one. I consider that alone an accomplishment. It's the first time that I've had so many separate threads before. I kept it very simple and just cycled through them, bringing them closer and closer together, merging first two, then three and four and finally five. Very satisfying.

SoCNoC - halfway mark

I hit the halfway point with SoCNoC (Southern Cross Novel Challenge) last night. That means I've written 25k words so far in June and am just one day behind the expected pace.

Here's how I got there:

day date total today
1 01/06/10 1694 1694
2 02/06/10 3615 1921
3 03/06/10 5352 1737
4 04/06/10 6197 845
5 05/06/10 6829 632
6 06/06/10 8861 2032
7 07/06/10 9741 880
8 08/06/10 11597 1856
9 09/06/10 13342 1745
10 10/06/10 15736 2394
11 11/06/10 16755 1019
12 12/06/10 19205 2450
13 13/06/10 20068 863
14 14/06/10 21301 1233
15 15/06/10 23511 2210
16 16/06/10 25096 1585


Not exactly stellar, but despite being a little lazy, I've managed to stay only one day behind every day. I keep telling myself that I'll catch up on a weekend day. Maybe this weekend. :(

Good luck to all the other SocNoCers and HalfNoCers out there - I hope you're having a great June.

English weirdness - plurals

I quite often get into discussions about the weirdness of English. Things like "fluff" rhyming with "enough" and "threw" rhyming with "through", "taut" and "thought" etc...

Other oddities are words that can't possibly be pronounced without context. Examples:
1. minute
2. tear
3. bass
4. sewer

I got into a similar discussion on the weekend. This time, it was English plurals. Because English is a mish-mash of different languages, happy to borrow from almost any other language ("English is to language what Microsoft is to computing" from "Xenophobe's guide to the English"), it has lots of ways of pluralizing words. I claimed that there are at least a dozen ways of pluralizing in English. The smart (smart-ass?) people I was with said, "Oh? That sounds like a lot. Come on then, give them to us." Another request was for me to have all the examples on my blog - so, this is it. NOTE: There are possibly even more than a dozen here, but I quite often group them together.

straight s:
1. car->cars

es:
2. dish->dishes

ies:
3. cherry->cherries

irregulars - I will count them as 1
4. dwarf->dwarves , hoof->hooves, similarly rooves, leaves, elves

5. deer, moose, fish etc.. (some odder ones are species and series which don't change either)
6. ox, brother, child-> oxen, brethren, children
7. foot->feet, goose->geese, similarly teeth, mice, lice, men, women etc...
8. formula->formulae, indices, matrices, vertices
9. axis->axes, crisis->crises
10. criterion->criteria, phenomenon->phenomena
11. datum->data (similarly media, medium, millennia, memoranda)

Some other odd ones out:
12. alumni, cacti, fungi

even more odd
13. beau->beaux, or bureaux, chateaux

So there you go Ed. ;-)

4th annual SoCNoC continues...

I've had this story in my head since November's Nanowrimo. I've mulled it over and talked about it with some friends and read a book that had some similar ideas between then and now.

Strangely enough, for such a fully formed story idea, it's been slow going. I'm at 11,597 words so far, which is a full day behind yesterday's required pace (13,333), let alone today's (15,000). Probably the slowest I've had in the first 9 days of any novel writing month, since I always tend to hover around the slightly ahead mark (last year was a little wonky, since I had a house move, but that's exceptional and only later in the month).

Oh? You want to hear about the story?

I have five, count 'em, five threads all with the same main character happening at the same time. The settings are a soldier in a war, the member of an Antarctic expedition, a monk in training, a software developer in Montreal and finally, a businessman working with a scientist. Eventually, they begin to meet each other. The question is, why are there duplicates? Who made them? What is their purpose?