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Astinus said:
Guys, today, I wrote my first drabble. It was 111 words, but I edited it down and changed a few sentences to make it 100 words exactly.

Then I read the fic over, and realized that it just didn't work.

So, power to those who can write drabbles and make them work. I just fail in doing that.

There was no point to this post, btw.
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I don't think I could ever do drabbles. I'm too verbose. XD
 
Same here. The fandom that I was writing in makes me more verbose, and come up with some really weird, long, but good sentences. I would try to write a drabble for another fandom, but no other fandom catches my main muse's interest like that one...

And you got a cloud egg. >_< I want one, but I miss the drops.

I had a response to An-chan's question, but I found I couldn't answer it without swearing, and teaching you all (with the possible exception of those who are as vicious as I am) how colorful the English language can be.

[PokeCommunity.com] Fanfiction Lounge
 
I had a response to An-chan's question, but I found I couldn't answer it without swearing, and teaching you all (with the possible exception of those who are as vicious as I am) how colorful the English language can be.
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You should play an online shooter on a 4chan server. Those people are inventive.

And yeah, I managed to get into the first drop I've seen in a few months. XD The sun was an abandoned one, though, so you might have some luck there.
 
Astinus said:
Guys, today, I wrote my first drabble. It was 111 words, but I edited it down and changed a few sentences to make it 100 words exactly.

Then I read the fic over, and realized that it just didn't work.

So, power to those who can write drabbles and make them work. I just fail in doing that.

There was no point to this post, btw.
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The key to good drabbles is compacting your ideas. Drabbles should focus around one small point in time, small emotion or small incident, and don't go into much detail with them - simplicity is the key. After that, they get pretty easy, and 111 is very good for your first go, Astinus.

The only reason I know this is because I suck at writing long fics because I get bored and because I'm lazy, so drabbles are perfect for the lazy person in me.
 
That's what's funny. See, the fic is just a small moment in time. (It's one character thinking that divorce is a possible outcome in his life.) So it's just the character thinking "This could happen, this is why." And I just can't get it shorter.

Then again, it is canon fact that when this character thinks about his problems, he doesn't shut up about them. x3 (That was the longest chapter introduction I have ever read.)

Like I said, I'll keep trying, and maybe with another character. The one I write about the most though? He doesn't shut up. (But he's my woobie little baby, and I luv him.)

Then again, I'm just in a "write longer pieces" mood. My chapters for my first fic struggled to reach seven pages. My chapters now are fifteen pages on average. (Nothing will ever beat the unfinished chapter I had, which was up to thirty-one pages, and still going!)

I'm going to go stalk the AP now.
 
celuthea said:
The key to good drabbles is compacting your ideas. Drabbles should focus around one small point in time, small emotion or small incident, and don't go into much detail with them - simplicity is the key. .
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I am pretty good at drabbles since my writing seems to want to be shorter by nature :). My trouble is finding a word program that actually counts 100 words exactly. So many of them count over or under so I have to hand count just to be sure :P.
 
I use OpenOffice for all of my writing, as my computer didn't come with Word. As far as I know the word counter works fine on it, and now that it's been upgraded to 3.0 it runs a lot faster. I used to use WordPad, but OpenOffice works much better (especially because of the spellchecker).
 
I really only use WordPad because it's light, it's easy to use (no useless functions that come unasked), it has all the functions I need and files in the .rtf format can be opened with virtually any program, save for NotePad. I has everything I need, so I see no reason to use Open Office. I do have it installed to my computer, though, and I sometimes write my school assingments with it.

I've never noticed anything wrong with WordPad's word count. How exactly does a program miscount the amount of words?

As a side note, the girl I told you about before *****ed to me today. I decided I don't like her after all.

I had a response to An-chan's question, but I found I couldn't answer it without swearing, and teaching you all (with the possible exception of those who are as vicious as I am) how colorful the English language can be.
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I'm very interested in seeing exactly how colourful this language can be... Plz to be showing me? They don't teach us to swear in school, so it might be useful :laugh: </excuse>
 
I've never noticed anything wrong with WordPad's word count. How exactly does a program miscount the amount of words?
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Different programs count words in different ways. For example, the typing program that I used in middle school called a "word" five characters (in order to calculate WPM). As for actual word processing programs, there tend to be differences in the way that they calculate things that are hyphenated (some would count one word, some two) or divided by a virgule; for all I know, there might be some that discount words under three letters or something like that. It just depends on the algorithm the program counts with.
 
Negrek said:
Different programs count words in different ways. For example, the typing program that I used in middle school called a "word" five characters (in order to calculate WPM). As for actual word processing programs, there tend to be differences in the way that they calculate things that are hyphenated (some would count one word, some two) or divided by a virgule; for all I know, there might be some that discount words under three letters or something like that. It just depends on the algorithm the program counts with.
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Huh, I didn't realize English has words with apostrophes that are in fact two separate words. Or, well, I didn't think of it, because in Finnish you can easily define one word to be something that has spaces on the both sides of it. We have no apostrophes and almost no hyphens (and when we do, it counts as a single word anyway) or anything. Now that you mentioned it, I realized it actually isn't that easy to count words with a program in English... So, thanks.

Why wouldn't words under three letters count as words? Isn't "or" a word, too..? Then again, "a" and "the" might not really classify as actual words. Ah, why is your language so difficult? *sulk*
 
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An-chan said:
Huh, I didn't realize English has words with apostrophes that are in fact two separate words. Or, well, I didn't think of it, because in Finnish you can easily define one word to be something that has spaces on the both sides of it. We have no apostrophes and almost no hyphens (and when we do, it counts as a single word anyway) or anything. Now that you mentioned it, I realized it actually isn't that easy to count words with a program in English... So, thanks.

Why wouldn't words under three letters count as words? Isn't "or" a word, too..? Then again, "a" and "the" might not really classify as actual words. Ah, why is your language so difficult? *sulk*
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I think words like "what's" are considered to be one word. Things like racecar are also considered one word, but they're really two words smashed together. When it comes to things with a hyphen, like "yellow-green," I would consider them two words.

The shorter things like "the" and "a" I still consider words.
 
Huh, I didn't realize English has words with apostrophes that are in fact two separate words. Or, well, I didn't think of it, because in Finnish you can easily define one word to be something that has spaces on the both sides of it. We have no apostrophes and almost no hyphens (and when we do, it counts as a single word anyway) or anything. Now that you mentioned it, I realized it actually isn't that easy to count words with a program in English... So, thanks.

Why wouldn't words under three letters count as words? Isn't "or" a word, too..? Then again, "a" and "the" might not really classify as actual words. Ah, why is your language so difficult? *sulk*
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Well, almost all words with apostrophes are actually two or more words (contractions), but I don't think they're ever counted as two.

As for short words not counting, that would be for counts by number of letters, rather than groups of characters delineated by spaces (for example, every five letters = 1 word, so "I had a" is one word instead of three). I doubt there are any major software programs that actually work like that, outside of typing ones, but I could see where there would be a problem just going by spaces... after all, then you could end up with stuff like E. B. White. Would that register as three words, or just one proper name? Is the algorithm set to exclude single letters followed by a period, or to discount any single letter that isn't "a" or "i"? Obviously, undercounting because of short words would be far more common, so it's likely that this sort of error would be considered "acceptable," unless there were some way to get around it without writing hideous amounts of code.

Similarly, there are genuine problems with hyphenated words. For example, you could have a sentence reading, "He was ten years old" versus "He was a ten-year-old." Obviously the hyphen is only joining three individual words in this case. But what about "cul-de-sac" or "pince-nez?" Those don't stand on their own if you take the hyphen away.

So yeah. I think it's pretty interesting how programmers are able to deal with the human language; I complain as much as anyone when Word does something inane, but considering that they have to try to assess things about a language as messy with English using precise computer language, I can understand what a task it must be to come up with a word-counter or grammar-checker that provides the least error.
 
This lounge better get more active or I'm going to start talking to myself here.

Anyway, I've actually decided to be on-topic for once. I wrote this line in the Eon Chronicles a while back:

Darkness. It permeated everything, concealing all, revealing nothing. It was all that existed to Latios in his egg, all that he knew; and yet, it was somewhat comforting.
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Someone was reading that recently, and thought that I should replace the word "permeated" with "permeates." I immediately told them "no" on account of the story being in past-tense, but then they said that darkness still does those things and therefore I should refer to it in present-tense.

Now I'm not so sure what to do. Thoughts?
 
txteclipse said:
Someone was reading that recently, and thought that I should replace the word "permeated" with "permeates." I immediately told them "no" on account of the story being in past-tense, but then they said that darkness still does those things and therefore I should refer to it in present-tense.
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The quality of darkness you're talking about -- and, in fact, that particular moment of darkness -- doesn't exist anymore. (Logically, Latios would not be able to experience the kind of darkness he saw only while he was in the egg. Unless he's got some seriously messed up fetishes.) Therefore, past tense.

As a side note, have you tried taking "and" out of that excerpt? Having two conjunctions there seems a little redundant to me, but maybe it's just me here.
 
Valentine said:
The quality of darkness you're talking about -- and, in fact, that particular moment of darkness -- doesn't exist anymore. (Logically, Latios would not be able to experience the kind of darkness he saw only while he was in the egg. Unless he's got some seriously messed up fetishes.) Therefore, past tense.

As a side note, have you tried taking "and" out of that excerpt? Having two conjunctions there seems a little redundant to me, but maybe it's just me here.
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That's kinda what I was thinking, but I didn't understand exactly why. I write on instinct for the most part: I actually don't have a ton of knowledge about the English language (origins of words, syntax norms, etc.) but I can tell when something "sounds right," so to speak.

As for the second bit, you mean taking out "and" and leaving "yet?" It hasn't even crossed my mind. I always thought "and yet" was a substitute for "however" or "regardless."
 
txteclipse said:
That's kinda what I was thinking, but I didn't understand exactly why. I write on instinct for the most part: I actually don't have a ton of knowledge about the English language (origins of words, syntax norms, etc.) but I can tell when something "sounds right," so to speak.
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Fair 'nough. A lot of people do, really, hence why beta-readers have a job. So, it's completely okay to write by instinct so long as it sounds good to you (and you have a beta-reader to verify that it does [/advertising]).

As for the second bit, you mean taking out "and" and leaving "yet?"
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Yep.

It hasn't even crossed my mind. I always thought "and yet" was a substitute for "however" or "regardless."
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As far as I know, "yet" by itself is the substitute, so you're saying "and regardless." Only not so much that because "yet" pretty much means "nonetheless." (So... you're more saying "and nonetheless" there.)
 
Sorry about the lack of activity in this thread. I've been blehish and ugh and unable to come up with a way to turn this back into a spampit. Or, at least a way to do so without mentioning a certain red-head who reminds me of another red-head. Oh Walter. Or what he calls himself, but I don't want to say because then it would be more obvious who I'm talking about.

And I don't want that to happen.

Sorry, txteclipse about the lack o' activity. =(

so you're saying "and regardless."
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IRREGARDLESS!

Teeheeheeheeheeeeeeee...
 
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