New Poll!

Hunt it down and kill it! In the last two days the beard demise lobby pulled off an upset victory after trailing for the entire poll. Therefore, I will be going to Las Vegas clean-shaven. Just when I was starting to like it, too. Maybe I’ll grow it again in Prague.

The new poll reflects the loss of momentum I’ve had on The Monster Within. I know there are several people looking forward to reading it, and hopefully feedback from you guys will give me the boost I need to finish the thing. On the other hand, it will be a much more enjoyable read (i hope) after I fix some obvious problems. (There are whole chapters that have to go. They have their good points but overall don’t add to the story, and in one case there is a major continuity problem.)

So anyway, for those of you out there interested in giving an unfinished work a read, which would you prefer?

13 thoughts on “New Poll!

  1. I’d love to give your novel a read … I try to be the kind of test-reader I’d like to have, which means honest but constructive criticism.

    I never give anything I write to Pat to read any more, because his definition of “constructive criticism” seems to be about the same as my definition of “rip it to shreds.” My definition of “constructive criticism” is that I will point out where improvement could be made, and I won’t sugar-coat those observations, but I will also point out where things are going well.

    Hey, it works with my Developmental English students — I love at the end of the semester when the instructors get together to check each other’s students’ work to make sure we’re all grading on the same level. My students always do very well.

  2. BTW, you mentioned at some point on our sailing voyage that you were going to add longitude and latitude coordinates to your blog …

  3. Those are for the mao links I haven’t bothered to add yet. I’m on dialup right now, which makes setting those things up really tedious, but this afternoon or tomorrow morning I’ll be in the PB library again, and I’ll set those up.

  4. Uh, that’s “map links”, of course. My Mac has spell checking in any text window in any application you want, and I’ve gotten too accustomed to it. Now I’m on my PC.

    (I don’t do spell checking at all when I’m trying to be creative, but of course I end up reading those things several times rather than ust hitting the OK button.)

  5. The fungi thin abut spiel crackers is know-a-daze eye see sew mini correctly spelt worms, accept they are the ring worms in the ring con text. Noose papers are getting wurst and wurst, wit the knew generation off cub reporters.

  6. Interesting study I saw not too long ago — since the advent of spelling checkers, students’ spelling ability has declined greatly. I can confirm that based on observations of my own students. Some of the most frequent errors are when a student uses “defiantly” instead of “definitely” and “collage” instead of “college.” Especially in the former case, it’s because of the spelling checker — the student has typed “definately,” and the spelling checker makes the wrong guess about the word the student really meant.

    As a corollary, I have also seen a decline in penmanship, except among female students who have no interest in computers. Among male students, and among all students who are interested in computers, handwriting is nearly indecipherable. I wonder what that does to SAT scores now that the SAT includes a written essay portion?

  7. Oops, how did that last comment come out under Gerald’s name instead of mine? I notice some defaults have been reset …

  8. I, too, am back from a hiatus on onlineness. Unlike pants, me and Coolio were fighting Pterodactyls along the Turkish-Armenian border. Rest assured, the pteros are subdued, and the sequel is far in the future. I only have one thing to say, I wish I could have been there to stuff the box. A beard like that wasted. I hope you at least kept it.

  9. Welcome back, pL. Think you might find a Skoda we could borrow next spring? Gerald wants one with falling-down windows, a radio that works only sporadically, doors that won’t stay shut, and a muffler with holes in it, so it doesn’t matter whether the radio works. He saw one in that condition on PBS’ Globe Trekker, and now he wants to experience one just like it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *