Showing posts with label wikipedia is teh awesome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wikipedia is teh awesome. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

My Daughter Wants to be Scrooge McDuck

That's not just a clever title. It's the honest truth. And to be fair this bothers me not at all. XD

Anyway I thought, just as a change of pace from the 30-day-meme I've been doing about my writing, I'd start the TWC2 Chapter Notes. I haven't done any chapter notes in a LONG time. First I guess I should check and make sure I haven't already started these...

Okay, checks out. Let's go!

References:
-Title: it's a line from the Beatles song "Yellow Submarine": "Sky of blue/and sea of green/in our yellow/submarine". I was on a HUGE Beatles kick during most of high school and this was written in the height of it.
-Obligatory callback to "Night of the Living Spud" with the Lyceum Nycanthropus.

  • I began this first scene about a year before I actually started writing the full fic. I think I started the fanfic in the second half of 2010, but I had the opening sequence done, I think, in late 2009. If not then, then in like early 2010 or so. I was trying to get back into writing after a really long hiatus during my second pregnancy and my son's first few months.

  • Laelia is in fact an orchid; I went looking for plant names for things like orchids that could be rare but work as actual names.

  • The conversation between Beth and LP initially got away from me and they started talking about how he knew Gizmoduck personally and all this stuff and it was like "STOP FLIRTING AND STAY ON SUBJECT!" They *always* do that. I had to send it to Amanda and have her tell me exactly where to snip it. ;)

  • I'm not really sure of the pacing of this scene or - well, the circumstances; and I'm not sure how much sense it makes for Beth to be so into Drake. I just kind of have to go with it. I have to be honest; I don't remember what it's like to have a crush on someone. ^^;

  • The inventory - when I wrote this the first time, I had the same thing in here, despite not ever having had a retail job. It was just vague and mainly involved me having Beth stay late to "do the inventory" which meant counting hte stock, since that's the textbook definition. However it's now slightly augmented by real-life experiences with retail - the late night and the counting turned out to be true, I ignored the fact that no retail store would have only *one* person do the retail, but I added stuff with paperwork. The paperwork is killer.

    That's about it for chapter 1...
  • Friday, December 17, 2010

    Wikipedia, you've done it again!

    Need a very small amount of information, just enough to fudge your way through something without actually researching it? That's why God invented Wikipedia!

    Thank you, Wikipedia, for giving me the names of plant hormones that can induce growth. You even tossed in a known antagonist to one of them, which neatly answers a question I was going to have to address in the *next* chapter. Bless you!

    ...Now, if I actually needed to research something and know what I was talking about, Wikipedia would be more like a source to suggest real research sources. But for half-assed fudging my way through it, you betcha this is the way to go! :D

    Thursday, August 19, 2010

    And again a triumphant return..?

    Well, I do intend to start writing in here again.

    For now, I have a confession to make: I am a Wikipedia ho.

    By which I mean that I use it constantly when writing; I use it as a reference tool. Only on really simple things, you know, if I have an idea for a joke or a minor point that isn't really relevant to the plot but could still help flesh out a scene, only I have no idea what I'm talking about, I just go to Wikipedia and look stuff up. Does anyone else do this? It only seems to make sense, really.

    Things I've looked up in recent fics:

    - Kinds of screws (like hardware)
    - Scientific names of flowers
    - Scientific names of frogs
    - The release dates of Monty Python comedy albums
    - Advertising slogans (yes, this is not THAT recent since I finished "High, Dry, and Flooded" like three years ago now, but still, I used it.)

    I wish *I* were on Wikipedia.