.

Finally, a contest for me. Over on this writer’s website, Nothing But Bonfires, she is having a contest. If you have a middle name, you can enter to win a Nintendo DS Lite. Not totally sure what exactly it is, but my nephew has one, so that means it must be cool, new and probably costs more than I would be comfortable shelling out for a game system. Oh yeah, and if you don’t have a middle name, you can enter–just say what you wish it was. Wahoo!

This contest brings a few things to mind for me. First, if you wish you had a middle name, why the hell don’t you give yourself one? For a few bucks, you can even make it legal. I know this because I did it when I was 19. I didn’t actually give myself a middle name as so much as gave myself a first name, but that is a rather long and somewhat convoluted story. (Not really, but there is some back story involved.) Second, if you are a writer, the comments section is GOLD! Hilarious, wondrous gold! I mean at this point there are almost 500 entries. Yep, my odds of winning decline by the minute. Anyway, there is all sorts of interesting rants, ideas, voices, names and complaints. It is great! There is even some woman who needed 30 years to embrace ‘Jean’ as her middle name. Give me a break and suck it up honey!

Tags: Internet, just goofing by Jean
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Sometimes life is so unfair.

Guide to Literary Agents dot com is having a contest and I can’t enter because I live in Canada. Waaaaaa! That’s as bad as those silly contests sponsored by yummy ice cream treat companies that make you go online and enter a PIN plus all your personal information at your chance to win $100,000. Bastards.

Anyway, write the worst logline and he will give you a prize. He will critique your query and then PHONE you to discuss it. Holy smokes! PLUS you win a book. A BOOK! I love books! I just got six books in the mail from Chapters today. It was like Christmas. Christmas, I say!

Sigh.

So how about something lame like this for a logline:

“During a blue moon, the pink flamingo ornaments on Evelyn’s yard come to life, but she soon finds that not only are her rapidly overgrown prize-winning pansies in danger of getting her disqualified and ridiculed at the national flower show, but her pure bred Schnowzer seems to be pregnant–and she was spayed years ago.”

Okay, that was really lame. But can you out-lame me? The challenge is on. You can bet I will be watching the comments section over at Guide to Literary Agents. And if you are an American, you have until the end of the month to try your hand at lameness on their site. Even the agents are getting in on it. Good luck to you all

Tags: just goofing by Jean
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This just in…

Main characters who do not realise that they are to thaw a turkey before cooking are considered to be TSTL. (Too stupid to live)

In unrelated news, you can have jeans fitted. The word on the street is that you can ask the store to fit you. Asking a member of the same sex to join you in a change room bearing a measuring tape will not imply that you are gay and coming on to sales clerk. Attempts at past fittings without measuring tape and/or sales personnel have resulted in the sage advice, “Try another size” and “Sorry, that’s all we’ve got. Try Wal-Mart.”

In other breaking news, you can ask liquor store clerks for advice on what wine goes with what foods. Reports have stated that you will not hear the previously assumed reply of, “Coors Light?” but actual, helpful advice.

While the findings of this informative and oh-so-helpful news article have not been geographically tested, the results are guaranteed in upper-end larger city locations where citizens have great wealth and time on their hands.  In all other locations (i.e. the rest of the universe), the advice is still considered worth heeding or at least pondering before discarding with great mirth.

This post has been brought to you by waffles.

Tags: just goofing by Jean
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Well folks, it is Friday again. Since I am having a ‘people who use other people suck’ kind of a day…let’s have some fun on the Internet. The Internet is fun and will never use you to make themselves a better mom.

There is a great quiz here which figures out which Disney Character you are. Guess who I am? I’m Goofy! No, really, the character Goofy. Isn’t that great! Here’s why: “Your alter ego is Goofy! You are fun [true] and great to be around [very accurate], and you are always willing to help others [also true]. You aren’t worried about embarrassing yourself [SO true], so you are one who is more willing to try new things[Bingo. You’ve got me pegged].” A close second for me is Peter Pan. I suppose I am a goofy person who doesn’t want to grow up, dammit. Then again, with questions like, “You like to walk around with no pants on” are always excellent indicators of a reliable and true quiz.

I tried the ‘Which Patronus [like in Harry Potter] Are You’ Quiz but all the spelling mistakes started to get to me and being asked if I was brave (for the 6th) time wore me down and by question #118, I gave up and wandered off. Apparently impatient folks like me don’t have patronuses.

Uh, okay. Apparently I am a rap song. The options were pop song, country song or rap song. And I’m a rap song. Maybe I should have said I liked mud and my grill or MTV.

Huh. If I were an infectious disease, I would be Syphilis. Attractive. I guess the fact that my ‘passions run high’ and ‘I never forget anything’ signed me up for this one. And this quote, is just funny, so I guess I will revel in my ‘disease’: “Your recent comeback tour is going well, especially since you stopped listening to your critics.” Ha. Ha.

I took the Super Powers quiz with disappointing results. My super power is ‘can stretch really far’. Big freaky deal.

Well, so long and I think I’ll just sit here and grab myself a new drink from the other room…

Tags: Internet, just goofing by Jean
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I love cool Internet toys!

And okay, the online test I took a few weeks ago did declare me a uber-geek, but still. This Gender Genie online toy is freaking cool!

What you do is paste 500 or more words into the box and it looks at the words and decides if the author is male or female. So, I took a 644 word section out of the middle of my last blog entry and pasted it in. The result: male. Female score was 1004 and the male score was 1054. I’m a boy?

Then I tried a section out of my chick lit story and guess what? I’m a girl! Okay, Allie is a girl. Out of 1082 words, the female score was 1287 and the male score was 1105. This was a section with both male and female dialogue but from a female point of view.

On a more female note, I tried putting in 613 words of dialogue between the two girl friends chatting about guys and ta-da. They are still girls with a female score of 839 and a male score of 680.

Even more interesting, I pulled a quick 96 words of dialogue belonging to a stiff-as-a-board-I-have-no-famale-sensitivity male character out of that same story and put it into the Gender Genie form. And guess what? He’s a boy! (Yes!) Male score was 175 and the female score was 4. It is hard to say if the score would be that slanted if I used 500 words, but either way, it is good to hear that I am making my males sound like males–although maybe a bit too much?

If you are curious about how they come up with male or female, here is some background from BookBlog’s site (which also contains a useful tip for writers):
“In the most basic terms, the computational linguists behind the algorithm, Koppel and Argamon, took a bunch of fiction and looked for trends based on gender. Using complicated formulas, they determined that male writers tended to write more about specific things like an apple, a book, or the car. In contrast, female writers wrote about connections to things like my apple, your book, or our car. The nouns themselves (apple, book, car) didn’t matter much but the preceding qualifier, whether an article (a, an, the) or possessive (my, your, our), did.”

 Try it out, it’s Fun with a capital ‘f’.

Tags: Internet, blogs, character development, just goofing, writing by Jean
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Cool news!

“Blogger Christian Lander’s STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE, a ’study’ of
upper-middle-class white people, satirically exposing a culture that
prides itself on individuality and diversity, yet manages to express
these beliefs in exactly the same way (white people: Whole Foods, Wes
Anderson, Starbucks, graduate school, kitchen gadgets, Barack Obama,
Apple products, the movie Juno, expensive sandwiches, etc.), promising
two-thirds new material, to Jane von Mehren at Random House Trade
Paperbacks, with Jill Schwartzman editing, by Erin Malone at the William
Morris Agency (NA).” From Publishers Lunch (Publishers Marketplace)
March 24, 2008.

I thought this was a witty site and guess others have as well. Some of the comments on the site indicate that some people just may take themselves a tad too seriously.

Then again, the idea of someone’s website content being published in book form isn’t that new. For example, The Darwin Awards.

I am also curious about this deal:

“Marie Claire editor Sarah Wexler’s LIVING LARGE, weaving together
first-person reporting and original research to examine America’s
obsession with supersizing — whether its our cars, TVs, meals,
churches, or homes — and the real-world impact of our hunger for all
things big, to Yaniv Soha at St. Martin’s, by Emmanuelle Alspaugh at
Wendy Sherman Associates (NA).” From Publishers Lunch (Publishers
Marketplace) March 24, 2008.

This is something I will want to check out. I wonder if she will talk about how six foot fences are a slow, persistent removal from our neighbours and those that we will need to lean on for help if the economy really does take a nice little (HUGE) nose dive. Right now, we have the wealth to go it alone, but when we no longer have that, our separation is going to hit us hard. Who will we turn to? We are disconnected and turning away from our humanness and filling the void with consumer products and that only makes the hole bigger–thus the need for bigger products to fill that bigger hole.

On a lighter note, here is something fun for the writer inside: shirts! Check it out by clicking here.

As well, for a few hoots and giggles, check out Nathan Bransford’s March 31st blog entry on Mad Lib queries. If you don’t laugh, go get checked out, there is something broken. 

Tags: blogs, books, just goofing by Jean
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Why it is dangerous to follow the links on Meg Cabot’s blog ( http://www.megcabot.com/diary/index.php) when you are trying to get some work done:

1. You end up laughing at some crazy kid using his cat as entertainment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGkQkVQt7ak&feature=related

2. You end up laughing at a librarians blog and then trying to post your own comment, which doesn’t go through, so you give up.

http://librarianavengers.org/worship-2/

3. You discover Patrick Swayze has cancer. And then you move on.

4. You end up following a link to Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Ward-Cleaver-Jenny-Gardiner/dp/0505527472/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204826739&sr=8-1

5. And then you end up going to Chapters to find out what the book is actually about.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Sleeping-with-Ward-Cleaver-Jenny-Gardiner/9780505527479-item.html?ref=Search+Books%3a+%2527sleeping+ward+claeaver%2527&sterm=sleeping+ward+claeaver+-+Books

6. And then you end up trying to figure out if Ward Cleaver is that TV character from that show you’ve never seen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cleaver 

7. You follow a link to an author’s site and realise that there is just too much to read on the Internet and you will never get back to work, so close everything down again, promising yourself you will go look at it all again later.

http://www.thedebutanteball.com/ 

8. You end up writing a blog entry so you can share the crazy links.

And then you notice that Sting’s song ‘Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot’ is song number 666 on winamp’s playlist. I’m just saying. That’s all. I’m not implying that Sting is evil or anything. Or that your soul is going to pilot you straight to hell or anything. Really, I’m not. I’m sure it is just a quirky little coincidence.

Oh my god! It’s a sign!!!!!!!!!!!

(Kidding.)

Tags: Internet, just goofing by Jean
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It’s time for some guidance in my life. Therefore my husband’s magic 8 ball is at my humble assistance. 

I asked if I’m going to get an agent. It said, “yes.”

Will I become a famous published author? “Without a doubt.”

Will I ever get my car radio fixed? (Evidently it will only work when my husband is in the car.) “Yes.”

And just in case it was coating things for me: Will I ever be able to sing like Ella Fitzgerald? “My sources say no.”

And as a second test: Is my name Jean? “It is decidedly so.”

So there you have it. If you want to know me before I become a famous writer, email me and become my friend. I am a very generous gal, you know. (In case you were not yet overcome by my blog charm.

Tags: just goofing by Jean
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