Friday January 1st, 2010

The exercise:

Typing 2010 instead of 2009 is going to take some getting used to.

Regardless! Welcome to the new year!

Let us start the year off with this Friday Four Line Prose prompt: faking it.

Small site note: I've finally started going through my old posts and adding labels for the writing prompts. 125 down, 450'ish to go! Sigh.

Anyway! While I'm chipping away at that I've added a Label Cloud just above the archive list on the bottom right. Currently I have it set to display any prompt that was used more than once. I'd love to make it a random selection but I haven't worked out how to do that yet. If it's even possible.

I'll update my progress on A Fighting Chance later (once I've actually worked on it).

Update: 1,028 words today, and the posts have been labeled up to the start of January.

That would be way more awesome if it wasn't January 2009 I was talking about.

Mine:

Over on Protagonize we've been dealing with fake accounts for a while now, but it's been getting worse recently (which lead to the blog post from Nick linked above). Basically, a few users have created additional accounts for the sole purpose of rating their own work highly so that they move up in the overall author rankings.

What a load of silly nonsense.

It's pointless and ridiculously insecure and a waste of my damn time - I'd much rather be reading and writing stories than tracking down and dealing with this crap.

4 comments:

Greg said...

It's only 2010 for a year, you can cope! I've been following the blog (and the beta-group) on the fake accounts with interest, though I've not had anything worthwhile to contribute so far. I do sympathise though, as having to chase that kind of thing down does sound rather like a waste of your time.

I like the labels you're putting up by the way :)

Faking it

"I'm not sure I understand this," I said, "you are the artist, so how can you create a forgery of your own work?"
Red looked up at me from where he was crouching on the floor, leaning over a three-foot square canvas with a can of spray paint in both hands.
"Because I'll disown the work, and I've made a couple of changes to my usual style that I can point to as evidence of forgery," he said. "Trust me, this will help us find our art thief, Emma."

Marc said...

Glad you like the labels... because it's taking forever, haha. I totally should have done this sooner.

And I've bugged Archi! Perhaps you'll get to work on Tagged again soon!

Not that I really mind these cameos. They just get me excited about working on it again :)

Anonymous said...

So, I'm starting a day late but I wanted to begin with the first prompt of the new decade. One of these days I'll make an account so I can get myself a username. I want to see if I can make it for a whole year.


Reading other people’s writing gives me a sense that I am doing some kind of creative work because the ideas or the style might be fresh and I can feel like I’ve discovered something new. But when I get honest and cut through all the games, I see that there is no personal creativity in it. It’s just a way to make myself think I’m moving forward without actually doing any work. Appreciating other people’s work has its benefits but if I’m not actually doing the writing, I’m not a writer and I’m faking it.

Marc said...

Anon - starting a day late is far, far better than not starting at all :)

I wish you the best of luck and if you get stuck in a rut I'm sure everyone here will be there with encouraging words to help you along.

And judging by what you produced for this prompt, I think I can look forward to a year of quality writing from you!