Who?

I'm posting from another server. Damn office firewall.

The top books for boys. I only have seven in my collection. A hundred and sixty to go for the two big guys in the house.

I remember back in the late eighties there used to be a software (whose name included the letters L, I, S and A that I now largely have forgotten) that can chat with a human. A question posed by the human called for a standard answer. A typical conversation would be as follows:

Human (H): What is your name?
Software (S): Why do you ask?
.
.
.
(I tell you I have forgotten everything except for the question part.)
H: What is the meaning of life?
S: Why do you ask?
H: Why am I talking to you?
S: Why do you ask?
H: Go to hell.
S: Ok.

Of course, I made up some of the parts. (EDIT: It was ELIZA.)

Now what if (standard question for spec fic writers) two chatbots actually talk to each other?

[Why do you ask?]
[...@%^*]

Looking at the transcripts of Alice (short for Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) and Jabberwacky, the conversations ranged from surreal to hilarious:

Alice (A): Do you dream?
Jabberwacky (J): Yes, I dream.
A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.

They're as good as office chats, imho.

via kottke.

Writer Beware is a good resource for authors excited to get published but don't want to be victimized by scammers.

So far I haven't heard of any local scam involving writers. But since I am also bent on reaching international shores, information from this site comes in handy.

I can imagine a stray punch on the Delete key drifted my gratitude to Bibliobibuli into cyberspace.

Hopefully she can understand this clueless ingrate, but I know that much gratitude is due to her for editing the rough draft of The Chain Letter Siege.

Rough, btw, is an understatement, so anybody can substitute lumpy, scraggy or nubbly.

What I learned to avoid: clumsy clauses that should have stood on their own, tenses that scatter all over the place, and catchy opening statements that frustratedly lead to spaced-out follow-ups.

TCLS would've ended a purple prose if not for her patience. Salamat, Sharon!

...because I chickened out at the last minute. I'll see you again next year, Don Carlos.

From an e-mail thread about Lasang Pinoy's months of absence, similarly I think I have a lot of explaining to do. At least out of courtesy.

We had trouble getting a sufficient number of entries to reach critical mass, we were busy, we were travelling a lot (work, not pleasure) and the project was shelved indefinitely. The question whether to continue WB was left hanging until now. Taking the time to address this question, likewise.

Words of wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut, or some dude patient enough to go through all of his works and come up with these:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

via chronicpaint via sfandf_writers.