If knitting books had a plot

... as a tech writer, one time someone in QA suggested to me that I write a manual with a plot, where the user has various problems putting the product together and getting to work (it was a hardware manual). I got out of doing the revision by saying that it would probably increase the word count.

I could have quoted Tina the Tech Writer, and said that "unfortunately it was not to be, because User A was not attracted to User B, because he was a bald engineer." Alas, I did not. The person who suggested this to me used to accost people on Friday afternoons and draw pictures on his whiteboard that involved the cliff-shaped kingdom of man, and the opposing cliff-shaped kingdom of God, and the cross-shaped thing that joined them. HR had warned him about doing that, but unfortunately he was a good QA guy. We all learned to stay out of the lab on Friday afternoons.

Today I got to the end of the mark-ups on Draft 2. Now I have a whole bunch of scenes to write, and I can print it out again. I had a panic while working on it, when I was trying to move Chapter 48.5 to after Chapter 48 and I couldn't find Chapter 48, which I had moved to after Chapter 6. Thank God for search-and-replace.

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

What I read: March 2024

LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence. "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read. LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes. I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...

Robynettely

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