How to clean up messy writing

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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I am a very messy writer, and getting worse with age as arthritis kicks in and cripples my fingers. (One of these days I am going to have to change to speech-to-writing technology.)

Because I am  not a good copy editor, I see what I think I wrote, not what I actually wrote. And the only way I can get away from that habit is to read my MS aloud. It slows me down a enables me to see all the mistakes — and I am always horrified by how many there are.

Missing words…
Muddled homonyms because I am hearing the words in my head as I type rather than thinking….
Typing “that” instead of “than”, and a whole stack of other similar one-letter-wrong words which are not really conventional typos but rather fingers going into authomatic mode when it’s NOT wanted…
Extraneous words that I thought I had deleted still there…
Not closing the speech quotes…

And so it goes on. And on and on and on.

But there are others, even worse:
Referring to a character by the wrong name…
Using the same word or phrase repeatedly over and over again…
Using the same phrase over and over again. They exchanged a glance.
Sigh.

And every now and end there are truly horrendous errors, where someone does something that is impossible within the context of the story. (My beta readers are fabulous at catching these.)

And the only way I find these kind of errors is reading aloud. Try it sometime.

US readers, don’t forget…!

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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 STORMLORD RISING
is available in less than two weeks!!!
If you live in North America.
Click on the Borders link, 
or the Amazon thingy to order now
– and guess what, 
it’ll be at your house on the release day. 
No more waiting!!
Go on, you know you can’t wait…
 
After such a cataclysmic finale to the first book the reader, like the characters, must struggle to pull together the shattered pieces of the world and make sense of it. The best thing about this book is the way that the heroes do this, growing into protagonists through some of the best character development I’ve read in years.
….
The point at which Shale and Terelle shift from passive to active ramps up the energy in what is already a dynamic series to the point where I caught myself cheering more than once. Clever and captivating, this is a book for any fantasy reader who wants to be completely swept away.
 
Australian Publisher + Bookseller  
March 2010, Vol 89, No. 6
 
 

More for wasp lovers…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Ok, the very last wasp photos, I promise.

Now surely you can see how beautiful she is? How extraordinarily fragile? And how dedicated to her young? In these pix she is building the top wing of the children’s nursery. In the top photo, an enlargement of the one to the right, she is moulding the entrance hole…

This is one of the Solitary Wasps – not to be confused with the Social Wasps, which are the scary ones, and which I have been stung by – 30+ stings in a single attack – and one species of which I have developed an allergic reaction to (fortunately not the aforementioned that swarmed in fury when their nest was accidentally disturbed by someone else. An attack that resulted in my losing a shoe in mangrove mud and having to bathe in an irrigation/drainage ditch…but that’s another story.)

I suspect this is a  Eumenidae, some of which are called potter wasps because of their gorgeous pot-shaped nets. We have those around the house too. This one here though is possibly Eustenogaster calyptodoma. Any wasp folk out there can confirm?

One for the geeks…my wasted day

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Something always goes wrong when I buy computer hardware. Yesterday we bought a wireless router. Should have known it was doomed… I think I’m death to technology.

I followed instructions step by step and there I was last night, wifi all over the house, even out to the back fence. Yay! We are truly connected … not. None of those beautifully connected computers could get onto the internet. Not sure what use wifi is if it doesn’t connect you to anything.

While struggling with this and trying a variety of things, friend Donny skyped me while waiting for the World Cup to start. He was good enough to spend time and energy trying to fix things. (Thanks, Donny!) Gave some advice, which today I tried to put into practice. All morning. Nothing worked.

So this afternoon, went to the local computer store with its wonderful staff who are somewhere around one third my age and 3000 times more knowledgeable on things geeky. They tried pretty much all the things that Donny suggested and several hours worth of other stuff. Nada. Router won’t talk to Modem, even though they are both Chinese.

After total frustration, the geek came up with a solution. Let’s have wifi that you use with a cable.

Right.

So now the wifi router is routed to both modem and the computer by cables. It acts as the translator. The wifi now connects to the internet, but too bad if I ever want to disconnect the computer from the router! Actually, it’s not as bad as it sounds, as that computer is pretty well permanently on my desk because it is hooked up to a large screen and an ergonomic keyboard anyway.

Why is nothing as easy as it sounds? Now I’ve done no work today and it’s almost 8pm.

And the future of science is in the hands of women….

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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.
Husband attended a Science Faculty meeting at the National University of Malaysia the other day, and there was some discussion on the new intake to the faculty. (The beginning of the university  year is July here.)

There were around about 8oo new science students  starting their first year of university, and 77.2% of them are women. That’s right. This is a Muslim, Asian country … and women lead the way to the future of science.

Of course the powers that be are scratching their heads over this one. They wanted women to have parity; no one expected that once you remove the societal barriers, they would prove to be better.

The solution might lie with taking a good look at the way in which students are expected to learn at school and the way in which they are assessed, which is now obviously favouring girls. Or the answer might lie more with the age at which university is proffered as the next step to most students. Men might benefit more from entering at an older age, or even with a more narrowly-focused subject requirement. Nations should perhaps fine-tune an alternate entry level to tertiary education to better meet the needs of men.

I see it as a problem, which does need to be addressed and rectified. We want equality, not imbalance. But for all that, somewhere inside, the woman in me feels … let’s admit it, a tad smug. In science, in our local university at least, we’ve more than made it.

More waspish industry…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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She now has two upstairs rooms built on the three downstairs. The third downstairs room addition has an outlook on to the floral landscape. I love the tail of greenery for the backroom.

And I finally managed a quick and fuzzy snapshot of the designer-builder. She is over 3cms long, black with yellow abdomen stripes and a very big butt…

The Staggering Price of Going Home…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
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Those of you who follow this blog regularly will know that the Malaysian Government has made it impossible for me to live here in my old age because they have refused to grant me permanent residency, and refuse to enter into any further discussion on the matter…
 …in spite of the fact that I am married to one of Malaysia’s more pre-eminent, highly decorated, internationally-renowned academics and citizens who has devoted much of his life to the  future Malaysian scientists and scientific endeavour (I’m sure he will blush when he reads that, but to my eyes, it’s a true statement)
…and in spite of the fact that I have lived here for 32 of the past 40 years
…and in spite of the fact that most of those 8 years abroad (ultimately the reason I lost my permanent residency status in the first place) were while he was on government secondment.

So we have been looking at ways in which we can settle down where I was born, Western Australia.

And believe me, I am wondering how it is ever going to be possible.

Look at this, figures taken from the business section of The Star Wed. 7th July 2010.

Australia’s median home price 2009 was 6x the gross yearly income
Britain’s  median home price 2009 was 5.1x the gross yearly income
USA’s median home price 2009 was 2.9x the gross yearly income

The median home in Australia cost $A 468,000 in May 2010
In US for 2009, the median home was US$216,700 or $A 248,085

In the past year, Australian house prices rose by an incredible 20%. Australian home prices are 82% higher than in the US.

I won’t even begin to say how much more they are than prices in Malaysia. Our major investment is in our home here – but if we sell it, it will only be about half the price of an Australian home one third of the size in a lousy area.

Maybe we’ll settle for a caravan somewhere…?