This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 7:38 am and is filed under All Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
12 Responses to “The Stupid 365 Project, Day 8: Week 2 Begins” -
Laren Bright Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 8:38 am
I vote a definite: it’s your blog — I don’t care what you post on it. I only read it to see what the reCAPTCHA words will be each day.
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Beth Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 10:13 am
Tim, I just want you to keep writing so I can keep reading your always terrific stuff.
How you do it is entirely up to you. You made the rules so you get to break them, twist them, bend them, or throw them out and start all over.
The only thing I would like to hold you to is a piece everyday. Re-cycled is fine. As I re-read Simeon I enjoy him more the second time.
Beth
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Phil Hanson Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 10:38 am
He who writes the rules gets to . . . rewrite the rules. Revise! Revise! Revise! Go for it, Tim.
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EverettK Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Do as you wish, or Great and Powerful Oz! 
As for this silly exercise helping your “day job” writing, I’ve read many authors who’ve said that a writer should sit down and write, write, write EVERY day. Don’t wait for inspiration to hit, don’t wait for your Muse to speak into your ear. If you’re not sitting there at the keyboard (or pen and paper…) when the Muse speaks, the Muse will take longer to come back and speak again, and then longer and then longer. But every time you’re there working away when your Muse whispers in your ear, that encourages that silly being to return more swiftly the next time, and then more swiftly and… well,
you probably have caught the drift by this point, and were probably already aware of this anyway. But hey, this is what the comment section is here for, isn’t it? (Or is this the peanut gallery?)
Regarding Junior Bender, are these books that you wrote some time ago, or are they recent compositions? Just curious about the history of them, since you have 2 1/2 of them just sitting around…
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
Laren — Captcha has gotten a lot weirder over the past six months or so. It used to be things like “elementary penguins” (no, not that, I guess — that’s proprietary) — but at least words that often made a sort of surreal sense. Now, God knows — they seem to be snippets from some parallel universe. Hey!! There we are — a distant civilization, trying to speak to us through . . . . naaaahhhhh.
You’re right, Beth. They’re my rules and I can tie them into knots if I want to. And I probably will. Things are going to get desperate eventually, and probably sooner rather than later. I’ll do everything I can to turn out a piece a day — and thanks for saying that about the Simeons.
Phil — I’m going for it and not yet regretting it. Writing is writing is writing.
Everett, OF COURSE, I believe everything you wrote above; as Picasso says, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” And I do work every day, seven days a week. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. I’m currently writing a book I haven’t got any idea how to write, and I’m in the Dread Middle, the part where things always go off the track, so I have lots of anxiety about sitting down to move things along. But I do. And, no, the muse doesn’t arrive more swiftly if I write daily, and sometime she doesn’t arrive at all, but she NEVER shows up if I’m not meeting her halfway.
I wrote the first Junior about 18 months ago, in between Poke books, and finished the second about four months ago. Still writing the third, although it’s sort of parked at the curb right now while I try to get through the stone wall on the other book. We just didn’t get good enough offers ($$$, in other words) to make it worth giving up the ebook rights. So they’re going straight into ebooks.
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EverettK Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
reCaptcha is used to do two things at once: provide “proof of human-ness” for things like these comments, and also (at the same time) to digitize documents. By now, they should have finished digitizing (and proofreading, essentially) the entire run of the New York Times from way back in the 1800-somethings through the present. They’ve probably switched over to digitizing something in a non-English language, hence some of the bizarre ‘words’. It’s a cool, VERY inventive idea.
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fairyhedgehog Says:
October 8th, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Whatever you choose to write, I’ll read it.
I’m on chapter 18 of Fourth Watcher and loving it. I don’t want to get to the end and have to stop hanging around with Poke, Rose and Miaow!
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Pat Browning Says:
October 9th, 2010 at 10:22 am
Yes, yes, yes! Looking forward to that ghost story, and the preview chapters of the Junior Bender series!
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 9th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Everett, it does a terrible job at demonstrating anything even faintly resembling human-ness. I had no idea about the digitizing aspect — why and for whom? And that explains the occasional floating punctuation mark.
FHH — You’re so nice. We’ll see whether you still feel that way around Week Four. Glad you’re enjoying WATCHER — I like that one, myself.
Pat — the ghost story is at about 1200 words right now, and I’m laughing myself stupid over it. Unfortunately for the rating, the central character/villain is in the music industry and his vocabulary is rich in ancient Anglo-Saxon four-letter words. Oh, well. I was in that world for years, and that’s how they talk.
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EverettK Says:
October 9th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
RE: reCaptcha.
The ‘human-ness’ verification is based on the fact that it’s incredibly difficult for computers to figure out exactly what the spelling of the words is, because of the distortion of the graphic. Therefore, if you enter the word correctly, it’s highly likely you’re a human and not a computer spamming the blog.
The digitization project works like this: they always give you two words. One word has already been digitized and verified before, so they KNOW what it’s supposed to be. The other one is unknown or not yet verified. If you enter the KNOWN word correctly, then it’s highly likely that you entered the UNKNOWN one correctly, too. But it’s not yet verified at that point, until someone ELSE also enters the exact same spelling for that unknown word. Once two people agree on the spelling of the unknown word, then it’s accepted as the correct spelling.
The first big project was to scan in all of the New York Times newspapers from beginning to present, break them up into individual words, and then use them in the reCaptchas. There are tens of MILLIONS of these done EVERY day, so in a very short time LARGE amounts of material can be very reliably digitized and proofread. You can read more about it (should anyone be interested) on this page:
http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
and/or on this wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
Some of the words are non-English, but some are just the back end of a hyphenated word, which happens VERY often in newspaper columns.
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Larissa Says:
October 11th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Everett: That’s really cool about the reCaptcha stuff… I had no idea.
And yes, Tim, you can change the rules if you-however, I do think that the chapters should be like attachments or additions to something spontaneous that you’re writing the day…basically I want to work for it a bit 
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Timothy Hallinan Says:
October 11th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Riss — I’ll write some kind of framing stuff, but there’s no way I know of to attach the chapters, so they’ll just be the body of the blog for the 2-3 days they appear. Anyway, at most I’ll do this twice in this year to which I seem to have sentenced myself.
Slave driver.
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