Pointless Announcements

Time to get started on the day's work. Many thanks to @Baraka_Guru for the introduction to Scrivener. It suits how I write perfectly.

 

My mom and dad are out on a road trip and coming to visit later today. It's Mom's 65th birthday and we'll go out for dinner, etc. She is so happy to be able to get into Medicare since she was one of those that really got screwed by Obamacare, as the cost of her private medical insurance more than doubled.

 

I stopped at a local Asian market I usually don't go to because they're cash-only. I hadn't been there in years, so I spent some time browsing the different items to see what lined up with the things I usually buy for my pantry (I cook across multiple Asian cuisines: Thai, Japanese, Korean mostly), and to see what the emphasis was, as most Asian markets tend to favor one cuisine over another. They had a decent selection of Japanese sweets, so I picked out a couple of different flavors of Pocky to take to frisbee to amuse small children with, and also decided to buy a tub of Korean red pepper paste, gochujang, while I was there. At the register, the guy asked if I knew what the gochujang was.

Uh, duh. If I didn't, I wouldn't be buying it, was my thought. Instead, I smiled as patronizingly at him as he had at me and confirmed, yes, I knew I was buying gochujang.

I can't help but wonder what difference it might have made had I opted to buy Korean fermented bean paste, doenjang, at the same time. Maybe he would have assumed that I want to become a jjigae master.

Maybe it was the Pocky.

What was really disappointing was that I kept seeing boxes for Japanese sweets like dorayaki (pancakes stuffed with red bean) and daifuku, yet there was no evidence of dorayaki or daifuku anywhere.

Guess I should have stopped at H-Mart and Uwajimaya two weeks ago. Sigh. As it is, I'll be going back to the other Asian market. The guy there recognizes me and is super nice.

 

It's from Literature & Latte, right?

I love their idea splatting software, Scapple. I use it all the time.
Literature and Latte - Scapple for Mac OS X and Windows

It's even better than writing on restaurant napkins. Scapple makes it easy to just throw ideas out there and rework multiple times. Makes me feel like Jackson Pollack throwing paint from the top of a ladder.
A real bargain at about $15
Needs a lot of screen space, tho. Gave me an excuse, or at least a rationalization, to buy a 28" pivot monitor.

Is Scrivener helpful in writing dialog? I could use some help with that.

 

Scrapple looks cool too. Also of note is Aeon Timeline: Aeon Timeline: The timeline tool for creative thinking

It's compatible with Scrivener. I don't have it, but I will probably get it one day, as it looks amazing for plotting out timelines with intricate plots.

Not really—at least not dialog specifically. Writing good dialog is really hard. The only real way to get better is through practice and by reading the masters of fictional dialog (and watching a lot of good movies helps too).

 

Because I write in discrete bits and pieces, sometimes working from different perspectives, and back and forth along a timeline I have in my head for the narrative, Scrivener is helpful to me in that I can drag and drop what I've written, and still have the narrative compile as a cohesive whole. I have discovered that I really, really like reading my own epubs of finished projects (ultimately, I write for me, first and foremost).

Also, because I've started thinking about self-publishing a cookbook, Scrivener would work for that, too. AND I get a discount for being a teacher when I finally get around to buying it (24 days left on my trial).

As @Baraka_Guru said, writing dialog is hard. It's not something I struggle with. I struggle with internal monologues and trying to get character introspection down on paper. I'm pretty good at moving the narrative along and writing natural-sounding dialog...which then becomes problematic when a scene ends up being 90% dialog

 

I took a class - Microeconomics- (economics of the individual or firm) where the prof graded based on how many right answers you had.
He gave five scheduled tests. These were a mix of true/false and multiple choice questions. He asked fifty two questions, each worth two points. He claimed that every question's answer was in both his lectures and the textbook, but just in case he forgot to cover something in his lectures, he gave us the possibility to have two wrong answers and still get 100 points. Also, if more than half of the testees got a question wrong, he would give everyone alike two points for that question, reasoning that the question was unclearly worded or again, not covered.

So, it was possible to get better than 100% on his tests, even with a couple of wrong answers, and I regularly got over 100% He was an easy grader (it was an easy class) but a stickler on attendance, so he would also give a few 'surprise' quizzes that were for extra points, but you were SOL if you skipped that day.

He addressed his students as Ms. Lindy or Mr. Fuentes, etc., never using first names in class, but he always knew your first name if he met you socially. I just loved him. His lectures were good, with interesting and humorous examples. I got an A+

 

Making ciabatta. It's a fun bread to make.

 

I just got another random email saying they sent me another $104 for this video.

 

Udon cooked. Cabbage shredded. Ciabatta bulk rising.

Everything is coming together nicely.