Quote of the day

"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.” --Edith Lovejoy

I wish all of you a happy New Year's and hope that 2011 is filled with love and joy and peace and success.

P.S. Don't forget to check out my contest on Buffy's World.

Awesome contest to check out

I wanted to let you know that I'm running a contest on my other blog, Buffy's World. Many of you will know the answer to my question immediately because it relates to my writing. Anyway, pop over, join in the fun and you'll have a chance to win a $25 Target gift card. Sweet:)

Writing advice

FROM WILLIAM ZINSSER
Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be tired. Be confused. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.

A look at e-book trends

Check out this post on e-book trends. I think the potential for user interactivity will be huge. What do you think?

A minute list

Use one word to describe the following. Mine is in ()'s. Copy and paste list into comments and add yours. Should only take a minute. Can't wait to read your lists.
Shrimp (spicy)
Hat (tattered)
Desk (scratched)
Dog (fluffy)
Computer (slow)
Sauce (white)
Glasses (broken)
Record player (vintage)
Snowman (Calvin -ish) Not sure that this is even a word, but love the snowman series. (Smiles)
Candle (taper)

Writing advice

FROM JAMES BALDWIN
The hardest thing about writing, in a sense, is not writing. I mean, the sentence is not intended to show you off, you know. It is not supposed to be “look at me!” “Look, no hands!” It’s supposed to be a pipeline between the reader and you. Once condition of the sentence is to write so well that no one notices that you’re writing.

Times Square ball app

Found this totally cool Times Square Ball App (for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Android) that features a live video feed (commercial free) of the festivities from Times Square. There's a customizable countdown clock to 2011 that you can adjust for whatever time zone you're in.
You can link to your other social networking accounts, send a "kiss" to a loved one and upload your photo for a chance to appear on the giant video screen atop One Times Square.
The app also includes an awesome database of events, interactive maps, weather updates and more.
I can't begin to describe all the coolness this app packs, so here's a video to watch. Happy New Year all my peeps.

Words and trends and fun

This is totally sweet. Learned about this from a co-worker and had to share. Google used data obtained from 15 million scanned books to build Google Books Ngram Viewer. As most of you know, Google Books is a project to digitize as many tomes as possible. The viewer allows you to search for words and prints a graph showing how many times those words appear in the books it has digitized.

What's cool about this is that you're able to see trends over time. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year. I searched for "zombie" between the years 1800 and 2000. I found the word mentioned in the early 1800s, increasingly found in books in the late 1920s and then spiking in usuage by 2000. Go ahead. Check it out and have fun.

Christmas story told digitally

Imagine the birth of Jesus using today's technology.

Writing advice

Writing advice from ELIZABETH BOWEN

1.Dialogue should be brief.
2. It should add to the reader’s present knowledge.
3. It should eliminate the routine exchanges of ordinary conversation.
4. It should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.
5. It should keep the story moving forward.
6. It should be revelatory of the speaker’s character, both directly and indirectly.
7. It should show the relationships among people.

Quote of the day

"Don’t say it was 'delightful'; make us say 'delightful' when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers 'Please will you do my job for me?'" --C.S. LEWIS

Holiday emoticons

Some holiday emoticons for you to use.

Christmas tree *<<<<+

Angel O:-)

Santa Claus *<[:-)

Really Happy :-))

Do you have any to share?