Blogging advice from Mark Twain

A passage from Mark Twain's bestselling autobiography, via Mark Liberman at Language Log:

Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; talk only about the thing which intrests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting.

And so, I have found the right plan. It makes my labor amusement — mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless. It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon.

Liberman calls this "the right plan for successful blogging." Perhaps I should take a page from Mark Twain?

Finished!

Yesterday, a little before 4pm, I finished my novel! I started it in May, though the exact date escapes me (the Word document was created in January, so that wouldn't be of any help).

What an incredible feeling! Now I'll sit on it and work on something else, ready to look at it with fresh eyes in the future.

I broke Microsoft Word Again

Mere weeks after causing Word to stop spell-checking my novel, I've once again upset the internal workings of this program. On Monday I reached the magic number of 100,000 words. As soon as I passed 99,999 the "word count" indicator at the bottom of the window disappeared, as you can see in the screen shot below:


This is merely a glitch with the indicator on the window, because the number of words is still counted by the program:
I imagine this isn't a big problem because, let's be honest, who ever reaches 100,000 words in a document? Ah, what a magical number.

Mackinac redux

Forget what I said about most zoo visitors knowing how to pronounce "Mackinac." I've noticed over the past few days that 90% of the people are, in fact, pronouncing it "Mackinac" with a k sound instead of how it should be pronounced, as if it had a w at the end.

Either I was giving visitors too much credit in September, or a different kind of crowd is visiting. Perhaps fewer Wisconsinites or Michiganders (?) are visiting and more people from farther away are getting ice cream. But that doesn't make sense, since you'd think more out-of-staters would visit during the summer than during the fall/winter. Was I simply giving everyone too much credit?

As you can tell, I still have a job scooping ice cream. No indication as to how long my part of the zoo will stay open, since I'm scheduled to be back there next weekend. Ice cream cones in winter--mmmm!