Justine Larbalestier Shares a NaNoWriMo Tip From Me
Posted on November 12, 2009 Posted by John Scalzi 36 Comments
It’s here. As she notes, when I gave her the tip, it included quite a bit of cursing. She snipped those parts out whilst adapting it for her site. Because Australians never curse.
Of course we don’t. We’re far too fucking polite for that shit.
Lilith in Canberra
“when I gave it to her the tip”
Uhm, huh?
Of course they curse, we just can’t understand them and think its cute slang.
You mean the interwebs can be turned off? Amazing!
Australians are remarkable for their restraint that way.
Nik: on my computer I can do it with a single command:
ifconfig eth0 down
+++
NO CARRIER
After doing this a few times, I have learned to pace myself, so I frequently take breaks to surf the net. Keeps the brain sharp.
Any chance we can get a copy of the original posted somewhere? It’s just not colorful Scalzi, all cleaned up that way…
“Australians never curse.”
Quick, hide Jim Jeffries from the world!
@ Jeff
That seems like a lot of typing. I use ‘ifupdown eth1’, and that covers bringing it back up to. Its a Debian package, FWIW.
While it may be true that Australians never curse, their swearing can blister tarmac and curdle beer.
Lilith @1: thank you for the rejoinder. Weak aerosolized coffee is great for removing smudgy fingerprints from the lappy’s display.
… [Australian] swearing can .. curdle beer.
Well, that explains Fosters.
Heh. I was just about to sit down and write, got online, started checking Google Reader… and thought, “I should really turn my wireless off. Well, I’ll just check Whatever first.” Nice.
Actually, I’d be in trouble with this year’s NaNo if I didn’t have the Intranetz. It’s hard to research Chinese deities and names without access to some sort of giant database. Preferably one that – unlike the library – doesn’t require you to search for five-hundred pages of text for the preferred mount of Xi Wang Mu. Or help you determine the name of an outre and not quite sane deity.
Fuckin’ aye
Sorry, I’m confused: why is an Australian participating in, or at least offer ing tips for, National Novel Writing Month? Or is it now GloNoWriMo?
Warren Terra:
Australia is not a nation?
Beyond this, I genuinely hope that you’re not actually serious in the implication that an award-winning author with several novels under her belt should not dispense wisdom to new writers during NaNoWriMo simply because you’re under the impression that she doesn’t qualify for some arbitrary reason you’ve just thought up.
NaNoWriMo is happening here in the UK too. I know several participants.
I can’t turn off the interwebs. I’m using Google Docs to do my writing.
Greg:
Google Gears can fix that problem.
What a quaint notion. Some Yank still thinks they own the interwebs. Not only has Justine pwnd your nanowrimo she has taken one of your menfolk too.
Oh, and turn the interwebs off? You’ve got to be kidding. How else would I have found out how Chaucer used the word quaint. Then again my word count for nanowrimo is very low at the moment.
15. Warren Terra:
It started out in the U.S. but has been international for quite some time now. Anyone anywhere can participate. :) They didn’t change it to “Innowrimo” because it just doesn’t roll off the tongue the same. See their FAQ for details.
JohnScalzi @#60, I dunno. Maybe Warren just likes the name GloNoWriMo. I think if I had to come up with a name for a character quickly, I would call him Glono. He would have to save his older brother Nano from the mean streets of some fantastic city where he’d gotten hooked on Pixie Stix (dealt by Pixies on shady street corners). Nano would keep a picture of his little boy Pico in his wallet.
Of course, specifying which country’s National Novel Writng Month you’re participating in would be fun, especially if it popularized the word “NanoAmerican,” or even better, “NanoBrit,” which sounds like a very confused unit of measurement.
Oops, my comment was addressed to JohnScalzi@#16, not some future JohnScalzi comment.
Sihaya@23: See, now we’ll have to keep this going so at post #60 John can ask you a question about Warren.
Actually, that would highly amuse me if we made it that far without post-padding.
Warren reminds me of a kid I knew at summer camp who insisted that an organizational name like “United Press International” didn’t make any sense because he thought the word “united” meant that an organization was limited to the United States.
This was about 40 years ago; I hope that kid has learned better since.
Of course, Australia is entirely peopled with criminals.
@DG Lewis
Hey!
*Looks around*… hmmm… okay, carry on.
My advice for NaNoWriMo, learned in 2002: don’t plan to participate the month your first child is due.
He was born the 20th. My unfinished novel is 35,000 words. I may participate again in 2020.
To Sarcastro @11.
Why do you think we export it to you lot? We keep the good stuff for ourselves (Coopers Pale or Sparkling, for mine) , and you, raised on Budweiser, actually drink Fosters, even when no one has dared you to.
And today is a day for it; it’s been over 30 all week in Melbourne, and it isn’t even summer yet.
Vaguely on topic: I wish there was an OzNoWriMo that didn’t happen in the middle of final-marking season.
Where it” in the second para is Coopers, not Fosters.
John, thanks for this post. I showed it to my wife who is NaNoWriMo-ing for her first time, and she went through the back-posts of both Justine’s & Scott’s blogs and found some of the tips fairly helpful.
She did 4000 words today and she’s pretty proud of it. Of course, she’s still behind a bit, but not as much!
Australians never curse? The Sydney I just visited must be on some other continent or a different part of the space-time continuum.
Hm. I was just joking, but seem to have been taken rather seriously. No offense intended, to Australians or to anyone else. An international endeavour seems more idealistic in any case.
I actually suggested once that they call it “World-Wide Novel Writing Month”, or WoWiNoWriMo. (Hey, say that 3 times fast!) Nothing came of it, as with so many of my wonderful ideas…
Richard @24, dangit, now I’m constantly checking this thread to see how it progresses.
Does this mean we have to stop cursing to meet your expectations? If we do, there’s only one appropriate response and that is to refer you to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Y3AsZ19Hc