Here, read this poem. When you’ve finished, read the stuff I’ve written below and answer the question. This is going to be goooood!

Earlier today, when writing that previous blog post and searching for ‘fonts for writing memories’, I came across a font called Sans Forgetica. It was absolutely in no way related to what I was looking for, but interesting nevertheless. And so, in the interests of not doing what I was supposed to be doing, I read more.

Sans Forgetica is a font ‘designed using the principles of cognitive psychology to help you to better remember your study notes’. It was designed (by scientists, no less!) to be harder to read than most fonts because that extra difficulty forces your brain to work harder to extract the meaning in the words, and that extra effort means you better remember what you read.

RMIT university have released Sans Forgetica for free and are saying it’ll help students remember more of what they study before an exam period. They have done research to back this up (though it may not be published yet–I can see any published papers on it).

More importantly, though: I am in the middle of my own experiment. Inspired by this unforgettable font, I downloaded it and wrote the poem above in Sans Forgetica. If it really works, then tell me:

What is the third word on the fourth line of the poem?

Below are some rules I have adopted as my own standard for punctuating/formatting speech and thought. I had never had problems with this while writing shorter stories, but with this book (now around 100K words), I have too much variety of narrative style to handle organically.

1. Direct speech = ” ”
   (Speech occurring at the time of the narrative)
   This is actually opposite to the standard British style of using ‘ ‘, and more in line with North American style, but I don’t like the use of ‘ being the same as apostrophes, especially as it result in nasty sentences like:
   >  ‘Those sweets are the kids’.’
   >  ‘It’s Al’s.’.
2. Quotations = ‘ ‘
   (When a character says or remembers what another character said)
   Worth noting that if you use ‘ ‘ rather than ” ” for direct speech, then this rule is reversed.
3. General thoughts = standard font
   (Thoughts/opinions ascribed to a character, but not presented as ‘direct thoughts’)
   By ‘general thoughts’, I am meaning things like:
   >  Tom thought she looked tired.
   >  She looked tired, Tom thought.
   But not:
   >  She looks tired, Tom thought.
4. Direct thoughts = italic font
   (Basically, direct speech, but in a character’s head)
   This is where it gets tricky. By ‘direct thoughts’, I mean things like:
   >  She looks tired, Tom thought.
   In this case, the narrative aim is to have the thought appear directly as if thought by the character, rather than the narrator reporting it. I have toyed with: i) getting rid of these entirely in favour of always using ‘general thoughts’–but there are times when direct thought feels right; ii) using standard font instead, but then you really can’t use present tense–it just looks like a mistake.
   Here’s a little article about it.
5. Memory sections/flashbacks = italic font
   (Whole sections of the story that appear as memories ascribed to one character)
   Here’s the reason I had to think about this whole thing more formulaically. I have one chapter where various things the character does evoke memories. The structure is like: A, B, A, B…, where A=a section at the time of the story and B=a memory section. However, each of these sections includes multiple paragraphs, so I couldn’t just say ‘He thought: ‘ or ‘He remembered a time when…”.
   I have found places that say that italics are not the way to present flashbacks, and I can’t say that I disagree. But for what I’m writing now, it seems the most appropriate. That said, I agree with this piece, which says use of flashbacks is something to be avoided when possible! So, the next thing I do: no flashbacks!

I love robot stories (as you might gather from some of the things I’ve had published). The other week I was in the local bookshop after a robot book and found a collection of classic A.I. short stories. Unfortunately for the publishers, it struck me it would be cheaper to take a picture of the contents page then look them up myself, so here we go (along with some others I’ve dug up in the process):

• R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek
  This, apparently, is the work that introduced the word ‘robot’
• Moxon’s Master, by Ambrose Bierce
• The discontented machine, by Adeline Knapp
• Ely’s automatic handmaid, by Elizabeth Bellamy
• Automata, by S. Fowler Wright
• The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster
• Two-handed engine, by C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner
• But who can replace a man, by Brian Aldiss
• A logic named Joe, by Will Jenkins
• Imposter, by Philip K Dick
• Also, any of Asimov’s short stories could make this list, but it’s easy to find these by Googling: “Asimov i robot pdf”, for example.

Here’s a small update on a story I got accepted last year: it’s just been officially published, and is available on Amazon here.

I’m kind of unsure what this means, as the story has been available on their website since it was accepted last year, but navigating their website is rather a confusing affair, but I’ve received an email with a link to the latest issue, and this is easy to follow (the email contained 9 different ways to navigate to the story, but gave the impression of trying to fish a fragment of eggshell out of the egg white).

In a related note, the version I sent had fun little paragraph numbers in square brackets to make it look more Biblical, but they don’t show on the published version. I guess they thought I left them there as a mistake. Please imagine you see them.

I read Stephen King’s On Writing a couple of Christmases ago, which included the recommendation to write daily (good advice), with a good starting quantity being 1000 words per day.

Last year I spent primarily doing short stories and flash, with that 1000 wpd idea constantly in mind. I found two things: i) I’m a slow writer; ii) setting goals you can’t achieve leads to minor failings, which lead to long periods of inactivity.

Towards the end of last year, I shifted to writing a long story (originally intended to be 1000 words–one day!–now at 70,000), and so keeping track of words per day became easier, as there’s less switching between ideas, writing and editing. After that, I managed two weeks of aiming for 1000 wpd, achieving it around 50 per cent of the time. Following that, my daily word count slipped and I subconsciously resigned myself to goallessness (oddly satisfying word to write).

Roll on this year, a resolution to get the book finished, and a revised daily word count goal to help see me through. Now it is at 500 words. A little calculation told me that this isn’t too bad: 80,000 words divided by 500 wpd means a full novel could be written in a little under half a year (160 days).

I have 1-1.5 hours in the mornings for writing, and an indeterminate and fluctuating amount in the evenings, and that is about enough for me to always achieve the wpd goal, and frequently go above and beyond. Here’s my recent wpd graph (because I obsess over this):

Green’s what I did, red’s predicted total words assuming 500 wpd. The long, flat period covers the time when I gave up on 1000 words per day, and also when I excused myself to mess around with some short stories instead.

So, in short, unachievable goals lead to demoralisation and sub-par performance; achievable goals lead to eagerness and above-par performance. Who woulda thunk it?

Perhaps no matter when we start, or what we do, we trail behind the times. There’s something beyond our grasp which is the place… the place where things are happening. If we could knock in the right way, tap tap tap, we’d be in, and it would be easy.

In my search for places to submit, I came across Medium. I think I’m not so young any more, because just trying to work out how to use it is a challenge. It’s made by one of the same people who made Twitter (which, though I fitter with, I have never quite got the spirit of).

So, this post is to say that I’ve just published something on Medium… and it was kind of by accident, and it isn’t a story I really have any faith in. But Medium states that it only takes 4 minutes to read, so here is Dr Lotty Lovelock.

Towards the end of last year, as I was making my way through some blogs that had been made to help writers make their writing better, I made a discovery. Apparently, the verb ‘make’ makes more appearances than it should. This made me think. I made some attempts to remove my makes, and I must say,  it made a difference. Phrases with make do make the phrase less impactful.  Consider:

• it made a difference –> it changed things
• I made it –> I succeeded
• it made me think –> it forced me to think
• she made her way to town –> she went to town

Right now, I’m making some changes to (editing) the first part of a story I (made) wrote, and find myself searching for exciting equivalents to my makes. I thought I’d share a few.

1. ‘soulful eyes that made him a popular lover and leader’ –> ‘soulful eyes that endeared him as lover and leader’ (struggling with this was what made me think to write a blog… not sure I’ve hit on the best option, or made the right choice)
2. ‘and he’d done his best to live up to the promises his eyes made’ –> ‘…his eyes delivered’ (in the same damned sentence!!!)

Now, I can definitively state that I’d changed a few makes before I decided to write this (and I can’t be bothered to go back and find them), but I’ve just reached the end of the piece without finding another, so I guess my conscious tweaking over the last couple of months has reached my subconscious. Great for me, not so great for this blog post though!

To punctuate that failure with another, I thought I’d share a few links where others discuss removing ‘make’, but have completely failed to find any. It seems removing makes isn’t as hot a style topic as I’d thought. However, removing ‘be’ verbs has many hits, so for the sake of sharing, and to give me something to click on and read tomorrow, here’s one of those links.

As it’s the end of my first year submitting stories, I decided to compile everything I managed to finish into a single collection. This has got me thinking about stats, so I thought I’d tap down a quick update.

My 2018 collection contains 29 stories, 120 pages (Times New Roman, single-spaced!) and 53,143 words–enough for a short novel. It is broken down into three sections: Good stuff (15 stories), Not so good  (9 stories), and Stuff I wrote before 2018 but scrubbed up this year (5 stories). It was an useful process deciding which of my works were not so good, and has led to me retiring 8 pieces. I should really be even more remorseless with this, as resubmitting rejected stories is rather time consuming.

On top of that there’s the approximately 40,000 words of the first novel, which I think is around 60 per cent finished. I think it’ll take till summer next year to get the first draft done.

Moving on to submission stats, and grabbing these from Submission Grinder:

– Stories: 30
– Submissions: 118
– Rejections: 84
– Acceptances: 6
– Pending Submissions: 19
– Lifetime Earnings: $53.89

Happy or not? Dunno. But it gives me something to compare to in December 2019.

Following the theme of my previous post… a few months ago I read an article  in Nature about the morality of driverless cars and decided I’d like to write a story about it.

Since then, I’ve had a couple of attempts, but not yet come upon a good plot.

Today, I stumbled across this marvellously clever story on just that topic. It’s also a fine example of interactive fiction, with the real meat of the story being provided via footnotes and editor comments.