Swearwords and Shockwords

I like all types of authors, but especially those that really know how to use the language. What I call "fine writers".


Ursula K. Le Guin is one of those.  I haven't read many of her books, and that was mostly 20 years ago, only because I haven't purchased a new book in such along time and because I live in a back water where the books I like to read are not available in bookstores.


So, today when I discovered this blog post by Le Guin from back in March, I was thrilled


I have to say I have been a prolific user of those shock/swear words, but I also agree with Ursula.  They don't really have the meaning or impact they once had.  I loved her bit about them being used as the glue between other words, because surely that's what the usage has descended to.


What I find delightful these days, when I want to make my words emphatic or shocking is to use a word that starts off sounding like a swear word. I love seeing people blush half way and then realize that what they're hearing isn't what they thought they were hearing. Like "Holy Sugar", or "Shut the Front Door".  It just proves that the shock has more to do with the context of the word usage than the actual word.  You'll understand this if you ever hear a parent reprimand their child for calling a sibling stupid.


However, the use of shock words has become a reflex I'm trying to break. I must also be getting old, because I find myself squirming in my seat, for instance, when a comedian's only punchline is the word fuck. A disturbing lack of imagination, and that is what irks me most about my own reflex.


My grandfather (among others) used to rant about using swear words displayed a shocking lack of vocabulary. After looking up the word vocabulary, I found myself in total agreement and yet totally unable to stop swearing.  If anything, I swore more.  It became another way to separate myself from the adults in my life, as I got older.


To this day, I have a fine appreciation for a well placed cuss.  I think there is still room for swearing at just the right time to drive home your point but, as Le Guin points out, overuse drastically erodes the impact you might have had otherwise.


As the "Elements of Style" gods Strunk and White moaned, "...omit needless words...". I might modify that to include the admonishment "...omit over-used words...".


How do you feel about using swear words or shock words?  This isn't about whether you do or not (I will call you a liar right here in advance, so that we can get it over with...lol) but more about how you use them and whether or not you agree with Ursula and me about use and over use. Do they still have a place in your heart?

The big things around us

There are all kinds of big things in our solar system and sometimes it just freaks the daylights out of me.

Oh sure, here on the surface of our planet there are big things. There are pyramids and long rivers, deep gouges in the face of the planet and the Great Wall. Our planets is a big thing and yet it's puny compared to others planets in our Solar System.

Hell, Our planet is puny compared to the storms on other planets, like this doozey on Saturn:

That photo was taken by Cassini. If you follow me on Twitter, you've heard me bleat on about how much I love Cassini because it takes pictures of Saturn.

Anyway, this picture is what they call a false colour image which means the colours were added so that our eyes can see the details.  It's pretty fuzzy compared to other pictures taken by Cassini, and I encourage you to visit the Cassini spacecraft's homepage for some pictures that will blow your mind, possibly even freak the daylights out of you.

Recently, a fairly big thing went zipping right by our little blue marble - closer even than the moon* ever gets.

I neglected to record who took this picture. If it's yours, let me know how to attribute it please.

The International Space Station is not the only spacecraft to have visited our solar system, although I think it was some sort of time travel that brought the Borg cube this far.

Oh, I'm sorry, was I supposed to write something serious?

* - the moon is actually slowly moving away from us. It makes me a little sad to think that someday Earth will be without its constant companion.

The pendulum swing of life

I learned earlier this week that one of my favourite authors, Anne McCaffrey has passed away, at the age of 85.

Like many others, my first McCaffrey read was the Harper Hall books that eventually developed into the Dragonriders of Pern series. They started with three volumes I later learned were written as books for adolescents. The series was continued in another trilogy in the exact same setting, but with a more adult approach. The entire Dragonriders of Pern series is said to cover 22 novels.

My recollection of the books and their reading is kind of gauzy and golden it has been so long, but I do remember clearly my wonder at how McCaffrey presented me with a fantasy story in a science fiction wrapper.  Fantasy readers love their dragons, but here was a fantasy world where science required their existence. The books helped me reconcile the two ends of the pendulum swing of my reading.

Just as Anne M. passes 'between', another pendulum swing continues. Earlier this month every grade one student in the province got a free book as part of a yearly program to foster a love of reading.

I can't help but marvel at the symmetry of the universe - out the door goes one person and her life long devotion to books, while across our land a shiny new generation of book lovers is awakened.

HalCon weekend

I drove to Halifax yesterday, in the driving rain - pardon the pun.  Except for one spot just past Truro, where the rain was so thick as it swept across the highway that it looked like blowing snow, it was mostly just a rainy day.

I've had my first day at HalCon and so far, things are good.  I wish I had more photos to show for the day. I took quite a few but I think I fudged up a setting on the camera. That and shooting in low light conditions conspired to make it one of the worst photo session I've done on the past five years. It was massively disappointing but these are the bumps in the road we all have to deal with.

In many ways, this years HalCon is a winner. The venue at the World Trade and Convention Centre is a superior setting.  Here are the big rooms with lots of artists, vendors, game demos.

Tables and tables of Warhammer 40K players and their wicked looking models

Here is the variety of special function rooms where a sizable audience can pack it in with their genre heroes for demonstrations, Q&A sessions, and photos.

John Paladin painting up an audience member as a Klingon

Here are the wide corridors that can accommodate milling crowds with or without costumes. Yet, my joy has been small and fleeting.

I'm hoping Sunday will be a better experience, but it feels like something is missing and I can't put my finger on it and if I can't figure it out, I'm afraid it will bug me so much I'll be distracted from the business of having fun.

The highlight of the day for me was hearing Steve Jackson promote his latest game creations. Here is the man from Texas, whose namesake - Steve Jackson Games - is a 30 year old veteran of the indie game industry.

It's a Duck of Doom dice bag, inside a Cthulhu tentacle dice bag.  What else?

Apologies if the Duck or the Tentacle confuse you. Go check out the website.

My favourite Steve Jackson Game is OGRE (but I think I told you that once before).  I'd show you photos of the cool new Ogre 6th edition stuff coming this time next year, but I have this horrible photo shoot thing going on.

SJ Games' big property these days is a game called Munchkin.  The game is designed to make fun of all those rules lawyers you've ever been forced to play with.  Wonderfully, today Steve revealed for the first time, the latest add-on for the game called Munchkin: Apocalypse.

The apocalyptic future of Munchkin

I was really pleased that he choose this setting to announce his newest game.

All in all a good first day, although there are some things that could be improved.  First, I walked the Con for several hours but never found a handy source of food.  The convention centre is attached to a mall, and there is mall food available, but nothing directly related to, or within the physical bounds of the convention.

The vendor area is still too closely packed.  This may have been a space constraint, but I think a more creative arrangement of tables would help.  The artists area seemed to have people just crammed together too.

I was disappointed with the game vendors.  The selection seemed smaller than last year, and the prices looked like they were up. The variety of games represented was much narrower and past mainstays of the industry like Dungeons & Dragons seemed to have all but disappeared.

As they say, tomorrow is another day.  My convention buddy Andrew and I are raiding his game closet tonight, looking for something to bring with us to play on Sunday, something quick and easy to play, with some action to attract on-lookers, and maybe something that interested players might want to join for a couple of turns.

Blogging about blogging?

A little tweeter

While I've spent some time on Twitter, I have largely eschewed the world of Social Media, until recently.

Several friends in the past have suggested I try writing a blog. While I agree I have a lot to say, usually I am describing the number of words that I use and not so much the value of them. What could I possibly say that anyone would want to hear?  As sad as it sounds, my utterances are largely limited to bitching about how crummy my life is. Hardly uplifting stuff.

I am amazed, perhaps more so than any reader, that here I am writing blog entries. I am getting positive feedback from friends, so I will take that as moderate encouragement to continue.

I'm certain my strategy is nothing new, but recently I had a chat with someone else trying to get into blogging and promised I would blog, well, about blogging.

What do you write about?

It's the first thing people ask me when I tell them I blog.  Most of the blogs I read are topic focused, but I'm not that focused and I don't think you have to be. So I just say I haven't found my voice yet and I'm just learning.

I write about anything that interests me and if I don't write I can usually find some inspirational quotation to post.  Sometimes I get a good snapshot and share that. A lot of the time I regurgitate something I've found out there on the intertubes that matches the interests of someone I know who is reading. Because I'm a computer geek, I talk about using computers.

I'm experimenting with a lot of different little things. Depending on how those work for me, this blog will evolve and may become more focused. I'm in no hurry. I started blogging to scratch a writing itch and I have a lot of scratch left in me yet. ;)

I suspect due to my background in journalism, I like to have a lot of information around me and I use Twitter and Google+ to manage it. They both have the ability to be topically focused which helps to sift a lot of information into a manageable amount.

Twitter is a fast response tool where ideas and media are shared in a rapidly changing surf-like ebb and flow.  It's can be very impromptu and very fast for organizing.

Twitter is like a conversation on the dance floor - fast and jumping around a lot. Google+ is that same conversation taken to the living room - there's plenty of room to spread out and it's comfortable for lots of people to get involved in the conversation.

In fact, that's a lot of what Social Media has been about for me - listening, compiling, accumulating and when there are enough items to talk about, then write about it. I have been surprised several times when themes emerge without any effort on my part. It happens more often than you'd think. I suppose that has something to do with my news background again.

Most of all, here at the starting line, I'm not listening for "big issues". I'm just doing day to day things, and telling people about it.  To be honest, I'd be really happy if a theme emerged from all the noise in my head, if only so that I could stop writing this blog about writing this blog.

How do you write?

I've been chatting back and forth (in the real world) with a Mad Mind this week, about writing in general.  We've both started blogging just recently, so it's come up in conversation quite naturally..

I was a journalist for a while, people consider me to be a good writer, and I often get asked about it. I've always thought I was a better editor than writer - it's much easy to sit back and re-arrange the work of other people, than to create original work yourself ;)

Here, at his request, is what I told the MadMind about his first blog post:

"I will give you the advice I give anyone who writes, or feels like they are struggling with writing, and that is to read it out loud before you commit to it.

It doesn't matter if you are a good out loud reader or whether you *like* reading out loud.  Your post was pretty well structured, but there were a few sentences that felt kind of awkward.  If you read them out loud, you will *definitely* find those right away.

This also has the benefit of teaching you to write the same way that you speak.  In broadcasting it's called writing "the spoken word" and it's the style every broadcaster wants to achieve.  It's less formal, more friendly and more approachable.  It's also easier to read for the readers. It allows you to "Omit needless words" as Strunk and White recommend and it keeps you from getting all florid in your prose - no one these days feels comfortable talking like a bloody Victorian!

My final lesson I learned from working for ten days at the CBC.  Their style guide specifies writing with one thought per sentence. Sometimes, it results in a lot of small sentences which sounds choppy, and so I don't follow it to the letter.  But it *will* improve your writing and prevent you from committing style suicide with long run on sentences, over use of commas, and weird clause structures that can ruin a reading experience."

Yesterday, someone on Twitter asked about the environment people write in.  Specifically, do they like or require noise or do they need absolute quiet to achieve their writing goals?


As I noted above, my challenge in writing is to create original material.  I can get good ideas, but rarely can translate them into a finished, written product. So, a nice quiet environment is what I seek when it comes to writing from scratch.  However, if I'm compiling material from several sources or if I'm revising a draft (you *do* use drafts don't you?), I like some music on in the background and generally noise is not a bother.


Then I ran across a guest blog post over at Blogging Authors by Ralph Ewig. He talks about the "specific instruments" used for writing.  He mentions starting out with a 5 line LCD equipped word processor. Yes Ralph, those were heady days weren't they?


I too use particular instruments when writing, which also seem to be specific to *what* I'm writing. If I'm writing poetry it has to start on a blank pad of paper with pen in hand. It seems that kind of emotionally charged writing requires a different approach. Revisions are done on my computer. If I'm writing technical material such as is required by my job, it's done start to finish on the computer usually in WordPerfect.


Writing this blog has been a different adventure.  In trying to embrace the mobile nature of social media, I subconsciously committed to writing blog posts on the Mac laptop provided me by my employer. I like the computer but I find the Mac keyboard a wretched horrible thing. The so-called "chiclet" keyboard makes hardly any sound, the keys are almost flush to the case and I am distracted trying to feel the keys to keep my finger location on the keyboard.


I find more of my blogging is back on the desktop computer.  I have a nice black plastic keyboard I can literally pound on and the keys are noisy and have distinct edges to them, so I encounter fewer typos and get nice physical feedback from every key press.


It's tricky stuff this writing.  How are you finding it?

HalCon 2011

Choose your weapon wisely

So here's an odd thing.  HalCon is only two days this year, Saturday and Sunday, because it's taking place the same weekend as Remembrance Day which is on that Friday. A cruel trick of the calendar, or booking agents depending upon where you score on the paranoia scale.

Hal-Con is in it's second year after a decade long hiatus. They have a varied and extensive guest list.

I go to these things when I can so that I can catch up on gaming news. Not video games so much - I have different channels for that.

I will crush your head

I'm talking about board games, historical simulations, and other pen and paper games. If the games have anything to do with sience fiction, I'm your sucker.

I'm quite excited. I'll get to visit with some cool friends
I haven't seen all year and we'll attend a "con". We alway hope to play a game or two and this year hopefully chat with a game industry pioneer.



Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games will be at HalCon. His company makes a very cool cybernetic tank game called OGRE. I have several products from this line and I'm hoping for an autograph.

I suppose I sound like a fanboy and I can't deny how much fun it is to attend these events.  Just keep in mind, I will not be dressing up nor will I be wearing Spock ears.

They called him Baby Fett one too many times

Lots of others dress up though - these pictures were all taken last year - and I plan to take more this year. Speaking of pictures, a friend of mine - Sandy Carruthers - will be doing some drawing over the weekend.

So, if you're in Halifax in a couple of weeks, visit HalCon. I'll be the 50something babbling about cybernetic tanks.

Axis and Allies

"Oh Bother!" as Pooh would say; AND, So let's get on with it then.

Heh...the best way to get past writer's block, is to write.  Like life; clever yet unintuitive.

Gorgeous day to be stuck at your desk all day.  I did get out around lunch time when the sun was out and the temperature at 10-12.

Here's a shot from outside my building.  I watched them all through October and marveled at how nature keeps on busting out all over despite the odds.  Mind you it was a pretty temperate October.

Not dead yet

The new plantings out front includes some spectacular holly.  I have always loved this plant.  The shape of it's leaves, the sharp regular scallop along the edges, triggers my childhood memory of Christmas decorations and Christmas cards.

Bountiful Holly

Altogether a nice bright day...

The big and the small of it

I know, I know. It's creepy, how cheerful I can be, isn't it?