For the past four months, I’ve been traveling about and haven’t had much of the necessary time nor the inclination to write. In lieu of that, I had been aggressively updating my Facebook photo albums. Being back at school for the summer will reinstate blogging as among my primary procrastination measures, so expect more content in the coming weeks, including a much-needed update to WP-Cats.

In the past I’ve always enjoyed the changes from school to work and vice-versa. The variety offered by Waterloo’s co-op program is a wonderful blessing: Working is money and free time and independence. School is community and friendships.

This time does feel different, though, and I’m not the only one feeling it.

I’m trying to be excited to go back to school, but I’m really just not. New York is a beautiful city; I’d come to love it there. Meanwhile, my connection to Waterloo this term was little more than a tuition bill and an increasingly broken and mismanaged professional development program. Here, I was in a job where I could leverage my existing skills, learn far more than I have in any academic term, and yet still make a meaningful, appreciated contribution.

I do know that I will one day be back in New York—I love too many things about it to not return. This leaving is temporary; whether back in months or years, for a few days, or for a decade, I cannot say. But I do mean to return. Leaving now is not a permanent farewell, only a temporary parting.

Since Wordie showed up, I’ve been using it to collect together words I like. I find that vocabulary is not something I can recall on demand—I think of the words in situations that demand them, and then afterwards hit up Wordie to log them for later perusal.

Punctuation use, for me, is similar. It’s more instinctive than thoughtful, which is a bit odd, considering my nature generally. But unfortunately, it seems that for many, the use of commas, apostrophes, and even basic spelling is neither instinctive nor thoughtful. Recently, I lashed out at someone on IM for using the letters u and r in place of the words they sound like. “The only situation,” I typed furiously, “in which it is acceptable to abuse letters of the Latin alphabet in this manner through written correspondence with me, is if you are cute, female, and single.”

The thing about poorly-punctuated emails and IM chats, though, is that the vast majority of people are at least aware that it’s informal. It’s like people doing the grind—it’s fine at night clubs, not so much at a formal occasion. ¹

So yeah. Despite this general awareness of incompetency, dashes are an area of punctuation that a lot of folks remain permanently in the dark about. I thought it might be helpful to put up a quick summary of the four main kinds you need to know about. Read on…

I surprised myself in senior year when I signed up to take Writer’s Craft. I’d never liked the writing process; my so-called poetry was a disaster of fictitious emotion, my stories seemed to launch grandiose plots that went nowhere, I regarded essay composition as the sort of suspicious art mastered by those whom I felt sure would vault themselves directly from business school to corporate management.

But I did take Writer’s Craft, and I enjoyed it; when inspired, and not under duress, I could enjoy writing. I’ve always been good at explaining things to people: teaching and tutoring are incredibly rewarding activities.

So in some ways it’s perfectly understandable that I’d have spent the two intervening years writing on a website and writing a book. And in others, it’s very strange. Read on…

A review of my book has just made Slashdot. Michael J. Ross gives us an 8/10 and an overwhelmingly positive run-down, concluding thus:

Overall, Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax is an excellent introduction to extending the power of Google Maps on the Web, and provides enough detail to both help and entice readers to build their own Google Maps mashups.

Within the next day or two, I’ll have a very sweet example ready to show off on the blog; stay tuned. (ht)

It’s often easy to draw a word’s meaning from context, but in the age of Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, and Google Define, there’s little excuse for not knowing a word’s precise definition. Here are a handful that I’ve clarified recently, courtesy of my browser history.

Insouciant — Marked by a blithe lack of concern.

Dandy — A dandy is a man who rejects bourgeois values, devotes particular attention to his physical appearance, refines his language, and cultivates his hobbies. Wing may be a spoiled dandy, but he’s an expert swordsman.

Cephalopod — A member of the group of molluscs that includes octopuses, squid, nautiluses and cuttlefishes. There was a strong cephalopod theme [in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest]

Gamine — A girl or woman of impish appeal. Audrey Hepburn

Pastiche — A work of art that imitates the style of some previous work.

Wanly — Suggestive or indicative of weariness, illness, or unhappiness. My wan expression suggested hours of studying.

Oblique — An indirect or evasive angle. The salesperson’s oblique answers served only to dodge my true questions.

Poncey — The actions of a pompous tosser who thinks their value is higher than it is actually worth.

Cadaver — A dead body intended for dissection. One minute to midnight we hit the street, cold as a cadaver, hard as concrete.

We’ve just posted up the fourth chapter of Beginning Google Maps Applications, which is about the art of geocoding.

Cam was the primary author on this chapter, and did splendid job of researching and presenting the multiple options available—Google, Yahoo, Geocoder.us/ca—and then also demonstrating a finished project, located here. (You can see all of Chapter 4’s source code here.)

There are some books from my childhood that never seem to leave the radar. If my little brother’s got them out of the library while I’m home, I’ll check out from the conversation and curl up with an old friend.

One such book is Henry Reed, Inc., by Keith Robertson. (and indeed, all five in the Henry Reed series.)

Henry Reed

Henry Reed’s parents are in the diplomatic service. So although he’s travelled worldwide with them, he has yet to experience any kind of normal adolescent lifestyle. He’s sophisticated and eloquent, and extremely dry.

The books are the journal he keeps over the summer, staying with his aunt and uncle in the 5-house town of Grover’s Corner, NJ.

Journal Style

One of the masterful things that Robertson accomplishes with these books is an utmost adherence to the creative writing guideline of “show, don’t tell.”

When writing first person, there’s a tremendous temptation to save on words and fill out sentences with bare moods. After all, it’s a first-person perspective, they can just go ahead and say how they’re feeling, can’t they?

One of the charms of Henry Reed is that no matter how absurd the situation is that he finds himself in, he never admits to it. He simply carries on presenting facts for the digestion of the reader.

Others

I encounted a similar narrative style at home on the weekend, re-discovering Sid Fleischman’s book Humbug Mountain.

One final example that deserves mention is The Chicken Doesn’t Skate, simply because the characters that Korman presents in this instance are all ridiculous caricatures, and yet their own self-righteous opinions of each other are conveyed beautifully through the situations and actions, rather than by talking to the reader.

Mike

A eighteen-year-old in Kentucky has been jailed for writing a story about a high-school over-run by zombies. Says he,

It’s a fake story. I made it up. I’ve been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran [sic] by zombies … It didn’t mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn’t mention [George Rogers Clark High School], didn’t mention no principal or cops, nothing. Half the people at high school know me. They know I’m not that stupid, that crazy.

Obviously, I’m not informed enough to make a proper judgement, since I’m missing a key piece of evidence here — the story itself. Nevertheless, taking this all at face value, there’s a couple important things to consider.

It Was An Act Of Creativity

It would have perfectly valid, under this jurisdiction, for him to consume zombie-themed entertainment in the form of movies. or video games, neither of which are as intellectually stimulating as writing a short story.

With the political power that the gaming and movie industries represent, these things will never disappear. And neither should they; that’s a basic free-speech/free-expression issue. But to attack some kid over it seems rather low.

He Seems Pretty Normal

Perhaps the story was hideous. Maybe it was shocking to the point of being grotesque, with a complete absence of redeeming moral qualities. After all, his grandparents turned it in to the authorities. But were these shocking things that ended up in the story really part of a psychopathic nature that was leading to the next Columbine? What if he just gleaned them from the aforementioned movies and games?

Teenages Do And Say Dumb Things

And I’ll be the first to step up and admit it. It sounds like he didn’t even intend these writings to have ever left his journal. Having a private journal is helpful, because later on it can be a humbling influence. (”Wow, I felt so justified then, just like now. But it turned out then that I was just being a petulant child.”)

But even if he did intend to publish the story, and assuming it was somehow improper to the point that it needed additional correction, I’m not sure jailing him is the correct way to deal with it. Yeah, maybe they could get a shrink or whatever to check him over, if they’re really worried, but the thought of being jailed for mere words on paper is a scary thought. Especially when you’re just eighteen.

I Can Only Partly Empathise…

… Because I don’t really get the whole zombie thing, nor really the larger genre of horror. It’s just not something that I enjoy as entertainment. But if Mr. Poole is using it as material to flex the creative muscle, that’s something to be praised, not arrested over.

Mike