Day: October 17, 2023

Truthful Tuesday — Nanu Nanu

Fandango7 Comments

Frank, aka PCGuyIV, has returned as host of Truthful Tuesday. The idea behind this prompt is for us to respond to the question (or questions) Frank asks and to be 100% truthful in our responses. No glib answers, no funny business, no fibs. Just raw honesty.

This week, Frank wants to know…

Will you be participating in NaNoWriMo this year? If so, have you already started prepping for it, or are you waiting until November 1st to dive in?

Have you ever participated with either NaNoWriMo or NaPoWriMo in the past? If so, did you enjoy the process or was it not your cup of preferred hot beverage?

The short answers to both questions are “No.”

As to NaNoWriMo, I have never participated in the past, and I just don’t have the bandwidth to attempt averaging about 1,800 words a day working on a novel, keeping up with my own blog, reading posts from bloggers I follow, and living my real world life. So rather than getting frustrated by the whole process midway, I’m going to pass.

NaPoWriMo is, for me, a non-starter. My poetry writing is, at best, awful. So absolutely not!

Blogging Platform — Proofreading

Fandango9 Comments

While Dr. Tanya, who hosts Blogging Insights, is on a hiatus, Sadje thought that she could host discussions about our experiences and expectations regarding blogging on Blogging Platform.

Today’s topic is about editing your posts. Sadje says…

Editing is a very important part of blogging, if not the most important part of blogging.

I agree with Sadje that proofreading a post before publishing it is almost as critical as creating it in the first place. And I try to — believe me, I try — to proofread every post before I publish it. But I’m horrified when I go back and read some of my published posts and see typos, misspelling, misuse, bad punctuation, missing words, or duplicate words.

I’ve boiled the problem down to one thing: a design flaw in human evolution. Do you want to know what it is? Okay, I’ll tell you.

Your eyes see what your brain expects them to see.

I can be proofreading something and to anyone else reading my draft, my error is obvious. But to me, if my brain expected to see the word “they’re” in the context of the sentence, that’s what my eyes see, despite the fact that the word written on my screen is actually “there.”

I’ve asked my wife if she would be my proofreader. But she always laughs and laughs and then goes back to her crossword puzzle.

I do have the Grammarly keyboard app on my iPhone, but I prefer to use the native keyboard that comes with my iPhone. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and use the Grammarly keyboard and hope it does a better job than my eyes do in catching errors.

By the way, I encourage readers who come across a typo, misspelling, punctuation, or other grammatical faux pas to let me know so that I may make the correction.

Of course, sometimes that can backfire. I remember in a post using the phrase, “I couldn’t care less.” A woman wrote in a comment, “It’s ‘I could care less’ not ‘couldn’t.’ Common error.”

I responded by writing, “I hate to be argumentative, but you’re very wrong about could and couldn’t care less. Logically, if you COULD care less, it means you do care some and could care more. But saying that you COULDN’T care less means that you don’t care at all. So my usage was not an error. It was absolutely accurate.”

She and I got into a multi-comment battle on “couldn’t” versus “could” care less that went on for a dozen or more rounds with her insisting that she was correct and I was wrong. Of course, given that the name of her blog was “Better Off with Trump,” I wasn’t surprised.

MFFFC — Bicycle Lady

Fandango6 Comments

Mai looked up the street to her right and then down the street to her left. Where is everyone? she wondered. She had been selling her produce at this address for years, and while this wasn’t the busiest spot in the city, she rarely had trouble selling most of her stock.

It was early 1968 and the Americans had been in Vietnam for almost three years, and Mai, personally, had never felt their presence. But then the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong initiated the Tet Offensive directed at U.S. and South Vietnamese positions across South Vietnam, with Saigon as the main focal point of the offensive.

Word of mouth rumors circulated within the city about the upcoming offensive with warnings that civilians should stay off the streets. But on this day, the 67 year old woman was at her usual spot, unsure if she’d be able to sell anything, since there as absolutely no foot traffic.

No one knows for sure if Mai was simply unaware of what was going to be happening in Saigon or if she deliberately chose to ignore the warnings. But Mai went missing and her bicycle was never found since that last day she showed up at her usual spot that she’d been selling her produce for years and wondered why the streets were so empty.

Written for Melissa’s Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge. Image credit: Pete Walls on Unsplash.

Fandango’s Story Starter #119

Fandango10 Comments

It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

Sandra made a promise to herself that she would never do it, yet here she was, about to do precisely what she said she never would.

If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and to tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

FOWC with Fandango — Disgrace

Fandango8 Comments
FOWC

Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “disgrace.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.