Critiquing at the Writing Excuses Retreat

On Tuesday the Writing Excuses Retreat was in Labadee, Haiti, a private port owned by Royal Carribean. I’m not a beach or snorkeling fan, so I stayed on the ship to prepare for my critique session on Thursday.

First Sessions at the Writing Excuses Retreat

The Writing Excuses retreat features several sessions where established writers talk about some specific aspect of writing. Sometimes they also have exercises for us to do, which is a significant step up in terms of learning from just listening.

We're on a boat!

This is the continuation of my previous post about my writing retreat/cruise – what happened the rest of Sunday Sep 20.

Flying to Florida

As I mentioned on Google+, I'm on a writing retreat organized by the folks at Writing Excuses, my favourite podcast about writing speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and horror). It's taking place on a Carribean cruise ship, the Independence of the Seas. This is a brief summary of how the trip has gone so far.

Warning: boring minutiae ahead, likely of interest only to friends and family. Executive summary: I had been hearing horror stories about how bad air travel had become in the 15+ years since my last flight, but nothing even remotely close happened to me. The trip had its minor issues, but nothing particularly unpleasant.

National Air and Space Museum Annex

Yesterday (Aug 14) my sister-in-law and her husband took my wife and me to the National Air and Space Museum Annex near Dulles Airport outside Washington DC, which I'd never seen. It has some ordinary displays of stuff that is “lower priority” than the things at the main museum on the Mall, but also some very large exhibits that literally wouldn't fit. The annex was huge, and we only saw about 3/4 of it in the 5 or so hours we were there. The three big deals for me, in roughly this order, were the Discovery space shuttle, the SR-71 Blackbird, and the Enola Gay.

Reviewing Sites you Hate

I don't (yet, at least) review other websites, but I could conceivably want to comment on something I was criticizing. I'd probably want to link to it so readers could read it, if they wanted to check out whether my comments were accurate or off-base. In fact that's probably basic responsible reviewing -- a special case of responsible journalism, and something that is routine in academic writing.

The trouble is, that would increase the site's view count, which for some sites generates revenue. It would also increase their ranking in search engines. I wouldn't want to do that if I disliked the site enough.

I just discovered one solution for the problem: donotlink.com. You paste a URL into a box and it gives you another URL to use in place of the original -- one that avoids generating another page view. At first I suspected it used cacheing, but they are cleverer than that. So, if you ever want to link to something questionable (presumably because you're dissing it), check it out.

Walkthroughs versus Let's Play versus What I Really Want

A long time ago I purchased a copy of Settlers 6 by Ubisoft to run under my old XP system. It's a real-time strategy game, with city-building and only a little combat (in most scenarios), so it easily fits into the category of game I usually enjoy (which I wrote about back in April last year). I ran through the first nine scenarios OK, but ran into a lot of trouble on the tenth, Juahar.  I stopped playing the game out of frustration and shifted back to others like Pharaoh/Cleopatra that I liked better.

When I recently updated to a new machine with Windows 8, I installed it again but decided I'd consult a walkthrough to avoid the kinds of frustrations I ran into the first time around. This led me to think about what kind of advice I really wanted. Basically, the walkthrough, though excellent, often gave me too much information for optimal enjoyment. Don't get me wrong -- the walkthrough was well written, and I'm delighted to have had it to look at. It turned the scenario from something frustrating to something enjoyable. But I'd have enjoyed the game more if I knew a little less.