Snowflakes, Sudoku and other strange stuff
Well the serpent has finally slinked out of Camp Nano and avoided being a feast for hordes of feral zombies. But there’s no time for the crash at the end of the finishing line. There’s a tax mid term exam due in tomorrow. The nice goblins let us do this one as an open book exam at home. Did the worst of it last Monday and Tuesday and spent the last two evenings just writing it out all nice and legible and making pdf files for the teacher to pick up and snatch in class.
I so so hate windoze. Took ages working out where the hell the main documents folder is kept. Guess that having the Big Mac has gotten this serpent all spoiled and lazy.
And being such a glutton for punishment, got a Coursera maths exam due in by Sunday evening. Will either have to find some way of uploading hand written files, do a crash course in math text mark up software or use one of those hunt and peck online keyboards. It too is one of the user friendly exams where you do not have to complete it all in one sitting. It came out yesterday so we have just under one week
Could of course always chicken out but have decided that it is better to try and fail miserably than not to bother at all and die wondering. Apparently many of the folks who did do the exam last time said that doing peer assessments of the final exams was where the penny finally dropped and they had their light bulb moments
It is actually quite amusing just how much you can get done by slowly plodding along. There’s something about a deadline that seems to unleash magical powers if you dare to take it seriously.
It just so happens that the recent week’s lectures in the wickedly wonderful “Beginner’s guide to Irrational Thinking” course deal with this very same topic. The infamous marshmallow tests and sneaky ways to get stuff done when the inner beast just wants to snooze, slink in Cyberia or lounge about doing generally nothing. It’s worth watching the videos just to see the evil creature called Clocky who does awful things when you try to press his snooze button.
External deadlines, telling all your friends about the project in order to increase the cost of failing and the old favourite of donating a certain some of money to the Westboro Baptist Church, the Klu Klux Klan, National Riflle Association or some other such worthy cause. (Of course the likes of Ayn Rand or Donald Rumsfeld would have a rather different lot on their donation list if it is to serve as a useful incentive to do well)
Did manage to keep up with the required daily word count but never quite made the 2,000 per day originally planned. For it turned out that churning out most of the words was a struggle and only in the very last week was actually able to get into the zone where writing is a pleasure not a chore and you want to keep going even after reaching the daily quota
Funny, of the five folks in the serpent’s cabin, two never even got out of the starting stalls. One of these had one of those happy clappy names like writingismylife. They must be a zombie because their word count never exceeded zero. All of us except one stuck to the tried and tested 50,000 word count. This time they let people choose their own goal posts so it was a veritable rebel frenzy. One camper picked a goal of 100,000 words and gave up near the end of the first week. With such a lofty goal, miss one day and it becomes almost impossible to catch up.
So it was reassuring to know that the one thing I can still do is plod along slowly and steadily. No last minute cramming for Izzie
Finally found the spark with only a couple of days to go and that was thanks to a certain Cat who proposed a most irresistible scenario for a dystopia. A zombie apocalypse was all that was needed to plug the major plot hole and then the Izzie was in business
As the whole point of Camp Nano is to go fishing for ideas for the big one in November, it provided a very promising foundation for a new story structure
Of course with the goblin exam, the looming maths exam and a writing assignment for Irrational Thinking along with the assorted weekly quizzes and daily 1,666 words, all sorts of distractions started appearing out of the wood work. Strangest of these was a sudden craving to do Sudoku puzzles. Decided a long time ago to keep away from these quirky little critters as they are so damned dangerous. They really are a sort of two dimensional rubik’s cube. No need for external information like those pesky crosswords just cold calculating logic
Then got to thinking that many story structures have three acts with three major signposts each, just like one grid of a Sudoku puzzle. So stealing the fractal snowflake idea for structuring a story, could divide each of these 9 sections into another grid of 9.
That would make 81 scenes or so and an interesting change from the usual formula of 22 chapters with 4 scenes each
Figured that the first of the month would be an auspicious day to delve into the box of zombies and start the construction of the house of cards. You know that when you get to First Major Plot point and The Tower turns up that something fun is going on
So The Hook was the delightful 3 of Swords. It looks like there will be a disastrous dinner at a restaurant
(Done at least four lots of zombie snacks already this month so that would will be dead easy to tweek)
The second card is for the main character. That was the high priestess who is going to have a lot of fun under a regime hell bent on stamping out any public display of religion. But it might be more interesting to swap her with the Knight of swords as the main character on his heroic mission to stamp out mumbo jumbo. After all nothing needs to be set in stone.
The third card was for the first major plot point and that is where the Tower turns up.
Will not bother listing the other six but this was just a random draw for fun and as an experiment and has already generated a whole bunch of possible leads and ideas
So the ever so elusive muses who made themselves absent for almost all of April finally decided to an enormous mind dump on this first day of the new month
Also had the inspired idea of stealing certain Coursera lecturers or rather their more interesting character traits. One of them would make a perfect zombie robot, another keeps poisoning his dinner guests and there’s more than a few mad scientist sorts to choose from
Using tarot cards as the foundation for a dystopia where logic and reason reign supreme and superstition and religions are outlawed is just the sort of thing to appeal to this sick and twisted strange loopy serpent
Now it is just such a pity that I cannot pick three cards and get them to prove that they are the only set of triple primes
I so so hate windoze. Took ages working out where the hell the main documents folder is kept. Guess that having the Big Mac has gotten this serpent all spoiled and lazy.
And being such a glutton for punishment, got a Coursera maths exam due in by Sunday evening. Will either have to find some way of uploading hand written files, do a crash course in math text mark up software or use one of those hunt and peck online keyboards. It too is one of the user friendly exams where you do not have to complete it all in one sitting. It came out yesterday so we have just under one week
Could of course always chicken out but have decided that it is better to try and fail miserably than not to bother at all and die wondering. Apparently many of the folks who did do the exam last time said that doing peer assessments of the final exams was where the penny finally dropped and they had their light bulb moments
It is actually quite amusing just how much you can get done by slowly plodding along. There’s something about a deadline that seems to unleash magical powers if you dare to take it seriously.
It just so happens that the recent week’s lectures in the wickedly wonderful “Beginner’s guide to Irrational Thinking” course deal with this very same topic. The infamous marshmallow tests and sneaky ways to get stuff done when the inner beast just wants to snooze, slink in Cyberia or lounge about doing generally nothing. It’s worth watching the videos just to see the evil creature called Clocky who does awful things when you try to press his snooze button.
External deadlines, telling all your friends about the project in order to increase the cost of failing and the old favourite of donating a certain some of money to the Westboro Baptist Church, the Klu Klux Klan, National Riflle Association or some other such worthy cause. (Of course the likes of Ayn Rand or Donald Rumsfeld would have a rather different lot on their donation list if it is to serve as a useful incentive to do well)
Did manage to keep up with the required daily word count but never quite made the 2,000 per day originally planned. For it turned out that churning out most of the words was a struggle and only in the very last week was actually able to get into the zone where writing is a pleasure not a chore and you want to keep going even after reaching the daily quota
Funny, of the five folks in the serpent’s cabin, two never even got out of the starting stalls. One of these had one of those happy clappy names like writingismylife. They must be a zombie because their word count never exceeded zero. All of us except one stuck to the tried and tested 50,000 word count. This time they let people choose their own goal posts so it was a veritable rebel frenzy. One camper picked a goal of 100,000 words and gave up near the end of the first week. With such a lofty goal, miss one day and it becomes almost impossible to catch up.
So it was reassuring to know that the one thing I can still do is plod along slowly and steadily. No last minute cramming for Izzie
Finally found the spark with only a couple of days to go and that was thanks to a certain Cat who proposed a most irresistible scenario for a dystopia. A zombie apocalypse was all that was needed to plug the major plot hole and then the Izzie was in business
As the whole point of Camp Nano is to go fishing for ideas for the big one in November, it provided a very promising foundation for a new story structure
Of course with the goblin exam, the looming maths exam and a writing assignment for Irrational Thinking along with the assorted weekly quizzes and daily 1,666 words, all sorts of distractions started appearing out of the wood work. Strangest of these was a sudden craving to do Sudoku puzzles. Decided a long time ago to keep away from these quirky little critters as they are so damned dangerous. They really are a sort of two dimensional rubik’s cube. No need for external information like those pesky crosswords just cold calculating logic
Then got to thinking that many story structures have three acts with three major signposts each, just like one grid of a Sudoku puzzle. So stealing the fractal snowflake idea for structuring a story, could divide each of these 9 sections into another grid of 9.
That would make 81 scenes or so and an interesting change from the usual formula of 22 chapters with 4 scenes each
Figured that the first of the month would be an auspicious day to delve into the box of zombies and start the construction of the house of cards. You know that when you get to First Major Plot point and The Tower turns up that something fun is going on
So The Hook was the delightful 3 of Swords. It looks like there will be a disastrous dinner at a restaurant
(Done at least four lots of zombie snacks already this month so that would will be dead easy to tweek)
The second card is for the main character. That was the high priestess who is going to have a lot of fun under a regime hell bent on stamping out any public display of religion. But it might be more interesting to swap her with the Knight of swords as the main character on his heroic mission to stamp out mumbo jumbo. After all nothing needs to be set in stone.
The third card was for the first major plot point and that is where the Tower turns up.
Will not bother listing the other six but this was just a random draw for fun and as an experiment and has already generated a whole bunch of possible leads and ideas
So the ever so elusive muses who made themselves absent for almost all of April finally decided to an enormous mind dump on this first day of the new month
Also had the inspired idea of stealing certain Coursera lecturers or rather their more interesting character traits. One of them would make a perfect zombie robot, another keeps poisoning his dinner guests and there’s more than a few mad scientist sorts to choose from
Using tarot cards as the foundation for a dystopia where logic and reason reign supreme and superstition and religions are outlawed is just the sort of thing to appeal to this sick and twisted strange loopy serpent
Now it is just such a pity that I cannot pick three cards and get them to prove that they are the only set of triple primes