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First off: New icon.
Okay. Writing-wise, I have achieved *something* since September.
1 challenge fic = done.
chapters 7 & 8 of 524 = done.
next chapter of 4XiaolinPast = half done
hell-load of research on the 5th and 6th centuries AD, also known as 'Northern Wei Dynasty', also known as 'The Wandering Times' also known as 'That time when the Western Roman Empire was dead but the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire was still hanging on' = attempted
... Let's concentrate on the first two, eh? I just updated 524 like, 5 seconds ago. The chapter is the length of the last two put together. It's good. Yes.
Even though I'm not doing school work, something has been done!
EDIT: WTF is with http://europe.fanfiction.net (and by extension, asia.fanfiction.net)? It's supposed to be faster for us Euro-ficcers, but it takes like half an hour to load the homepage.
...
And of course, as soon as I check the XS front page for my fic-update-appearanceness, I point at the screen and go 'OMG!Scribberfangirllypuddle!' and open the two (two!) one-shots she's posted - except one of them sends me to YouTube, so I get even fangirllyer over the DWCG-era and watch the vid like three times...
So it's now an hour, no, two, after I started writting this. *needs sleep*
---
Oh, and I probably shouldn't say such things the day after New Year's, when y'all are thinking 'Right, Tamar, we know that there's a lot of leftover alcohol in your house now, but did you have to?', but it needs to be said:
Most of you got friended by me because you write well. Fic-wise or blog-wise or both-wise, the ability to put your ideas forward in a coherent manner (if not an entertaining or poetic manner), is the mark of intelligence when working on a text-based medium such as the web.
As such, you all know how to use a comma. That isn't the important thing. The thing is: you've got to know what a comma is for. It's common to find long run-on sentences that make you mentally hold your breath, even in good!fic. They can be used for comic effect in the right circumstance - a character is more focussed on her diatribe then her breathing, for example, or on her mental train more than her physical self - but in the majority of cases?
Not knowing why you aren't using a comma ('I've heard of them! The Cambridge comma. That's bad - you shouldn't have a comma after the last item of a list. Um. *remove*') is as bad as not knowing why you are.
There's more to punctuation than correct use. There's a reason for it. If you have a huge run-on sentence like this with no commas or semicolons or something to tell the reader to take a breath when they need to because the reader is probably a human being with oxygen needs such as the one being denied by this huge run-on sentence sorry for being drunk and doing this wrong by the way (comma breath), your readers will get disgruntled and backbutton.
Unless they don't care. In which case, they're reading what they want to see instead of what's actually there, anyway.
Okay. Writing-wise, I have achieved *something* since September.
1 challenge fic = done.
chapters 7 & 8 of 524 = done.
next chapter of 4XiaolinPast = half done
hell-load of research on the 5th and 6th centuries AD, also known as 'Northern Wei Dynasty', also known as 'The Wandering Times' also known as 'That time when the Western Roman Empire was dead but the Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empire was still hanging on' = attempted
... Let's concentrate on the first two, eh? I just updated 524 like, 5 seconds ago. The chapter is the length of the last two put together. It's good. Yes.
Even though I'm not doing school work, something has been done!
EDIT: WTF is with http://europe.fanfiction.net (and by extension, asia.fanfiction.net)? It's supposed to be faster for us Euro-ficcers, but it takes like half an hour to load the homepage.
...
And of course, as soon as I check the XS front page for my fic-update-appearanceness, I point at the screen and go 'OMG!Scribberfangirllypuddle!' and open the two (two!) one-shots she's posted - except one of them sends me to YouTube, so I get even fangirllyer over the DWCG-era and watch the vid like three times...
So it's now an hour, no, two, after I started writting this. *needs sleep*
---
Oh, and I probably shouldn't say such things the day after New Year's, when y'all are thinking 'Right, Tamar, we know that there's a lot of leftover alcohol in your house now, but did you have to?', but it needs to be said:
Most of you got friended by me because you write well. Fic-wise or blog-wise or both-wise, the ability to put your ideas forward in a coherent manner (if not an entertaining or poetic manner), is the mark of intelligence when working on a text-based medium such as the web.
As such, you all know how to use a comma. That isn't the important thing. The thing is: you've got to know what a comma is for. It's common to find long run-on sentences that make you mentally hold your breath, even in good!fic. They can be used for comic effect in the right circumstance - a character is more focussed on her diatribe then her breathing, for example, or on her mental train more than her physical self - but in the majority of cases?
Not knowing why you aren't using a comma ('I've heard of them! The Cambridge comma. That's bad - you shouldn't have a comma after the last item of a list. Um. *remove*') is as bad as not knowing why you are.
There's more to punctuation than correct use. There's a reason for it. If you have a huge run-on sentence like this with no commas or semicolons or something to tell the reader to take a breath when they need to because the reader is probably a human being with oxygen needs such as the one being denied by this huge run-on sentence sorry for being drunk and doing this wrong by the way (comma breath), your readers will get disgruntled and backbutton.
Unless they don't care. In which case, they're reading what they want to see instead of what's actually there, anyway.
