7 Easy Steps to a More Pretentious Poem

Need help annoying the hell out of your writer’s group? The best way is to learn how to write a pretentious poem. This lesson works best with an example, so let’s start with one of the simplest and most well known poems of all time.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you.

This a simple poem. It is short, sweet and lacks pretension. Let’s fix it.

Step One: Add old time words nobody uses in real life

Roses doth be red,
Err violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet,
Thus so art thou.

Step Two: Add complex terms for simple words

Grandifloras doth be damask,
Err viola are azurite,
Sugar is ambrosial,
Thus so art thou.

Step Three: Add some foreign words and italicize them

Grandifloras doth be damask,
Err Viola are azurite,
Tener azucar ambrosial,
Thus so art thou.

Step Four: Add something technological so people realize you’re living in a new age

Grandifloras doth be damask,
Err Viola ping azurite,
Tener azucar ambrosial,
Thus thou art interfaced.

Step Five: Add some other modern stuff such as abbreviations and slang

OMG Grandifloras doth B damask,
Err Viola ping azurite,
Tener azucar ambrosial,
Thus thou RT interfaced sandwich girl.

Step Six: Mix up the line endings

OMG Grandifloras
Doth B
Damask, err
Viola ping
Azurite, tener azucar
Ambrosial,
Thus
Thou
RT interfaced
Sandwich girl.

Step Seven: Take out the punctuation

OMG Grandifloras
Doth B
Damask err
Viola ping
Azurite tener azucar
Ambrosial
Thus
Thou
RT interfaced
Sandwich girl

There you go. One gloriously pretentious poem in seven easy steps.

6 Ways to Tell You Were Hungry When You Wrote Your Last Short Story

Just a goofy trifle to polish off the night:

6 Ways to Tell You Were Hungry When You Wrote Your Last Short Story

1. Your three characters are named Peter, Skippy and Jif.
2. You devote one paragraph to your main character’s appearance, and two pages to his Hoagie.
3. You spend most of the morning picking mozzarella and crust out of your keyboard.
4. The killer’s weapon was a garlic press
5. You used your first draft as a napkin
6. The last paragraph is just the word Brunch typed over and over

Thank you and goodnight!!!

10 Reasons Freelancing is for Suckers

There are plenty of sites out there that are willing to tell you how great freelancing is. I think it is time to give you the other side. Freelancing is for suckers.

1. Success as a freelancer requires constant attention to sales and marketing. Unless you love sales and marketing, you’re going to make yourself miserable. Marketing takes time away from what you want to do — write.
2. Freelancing is a feast or famine industry. One month you’ll feel like a millionaire, the next month you’ll be borrowing money from your parents to cover the bills. Freelancing requires excellent money management. Most people are terrible with money. If you’re having trouble figuring out if you’re good with money, try this simple test. Have you ever made the minimum monthly payment on a credit card? If so, you are not good with money.
3. The market is terrible. Thanks to the Internet, any jerk with a computer can be a freelance writer. These dreamers get on the Internet and bid next to nothing for jobs just because they want the experience. You’ll find yourself bidding $100 to write some college punk’s 20-page term paper complete with 25 citations. The worst part is, you’ll get underbid.
4. The clients never like what you wrote. Even sadder, the changes they want are always lousy. They have no taste, and it is your job to please them.
5. Clients will do anything they can to avoid paying you. They’ll tell you they’re broke. They’ll write bad checks. They’ll even change their phone number, just to avoid paying you for the hard work you did. Did you want a career as a collections agent? If so, freelancing is the next best thing.
6. Your friends and family will call you all day long wanting you to run errands for them. They won’t consider you to be really working. They’ll think you’re just wasting time and screwing around.
7. You’ll just waste time and screw around. Freelancing requires a solid work ethic and excellent time management skills. Most people who want to freelance have neither of these qualities, that’s why they think freelancing would be better than a real job.
8. People make more money telling you how to freelance than they actually do freelancing. Did you ever wonder how much of Bob Bly’s freelancing income comes from selling books about freelancing? With a title like, Secrets of a Freelance Writer: How to Make $100,000 a Year or More, how can anyone resist? Go ahead. Click on it. You know you want to.
9. Which do you prefer, paying through the nose for health insurance or not having any health insurance? If you are a freelancer in America, those are your choices. The best case scenario is to marry someone with a real job.
10. Freelancing can never beat blogging. Now there’s a legitimate profession with no real downside!

Smallville

This post is mainly for fun, but file it under fiction and plot.

Imaginary conversation between Sam Jones III and the producers of Smallville about his single episode return after three years.

Prod: Hey Sam, welcome home buddy.

Sam: It’s great to be here.

Prod: Ok, we’re going to bring you back as the roadie for a rock band.

Sam: Really? That’s awesome!

Prod: No, you’re unhappy about it. You had hoped your life would have turned out better.

Sam: I’m like twenty years old on the show, right?

Prod: I don’t know. I guess. We don’t really keep track of these things.

Sam: Ok, well for a twenty year old guy, being the roadie for a rock band is a pretty awesome job.

Prod: No. No. You think you’re life has gone off track and you’re jealous of Clark.

Sam: Why would I be jealous? Clark doesn’t even have a job. He’s still working on the farm he always wanted to leave.

Prod: You just are.

Sam: Ummm, Ok.

Prod: Now, we’re gonna give you a power. You’ll have the ability to stretch.

Sam: Wasn’t that Jimmy Olson’s ability? He’s on the show now, you know.

Prod: That doesn’t matter. We veer from the source material all the time. Nobody notices.

Sam: I guess. I must have gotten my powers from all the times I was exposed to the meteor rocks, kind of like Cloe.

Prod: No. No. You get it from this gum that you found in a creepy old factory. Some Kryptonite leaked on it.

Sam: How did the Kryptonite get in the factory?

Prod: We’re not gonna address that. It’s just there.

Sam: Well, I don’t think you need to have that. I could just have the powers from the original meteor exposure.

Prod: That won’t work. You see, the gum is there so we can have a product placement for Stride gum.

Sam: Why would Stride would want to portrayed as a radioactive gum in a filthy factory? Wouldn’t that hurt their brand?

Prod: Beats me kid, beats me.

Sam: So, we’re just gonna phone this one in, aren’t we?

Prod: You got it kid. Welcome back to the show.

12 Ways to Write Terrible Documentation

When I began my technical writing career, I was under the impression that companies valued good documentation. After twelve years in the industry, I can assure you that is not the case. Judging by the documentation I have seen and the documentation I’ve been asked to produce, companies would prefer to put out unmanageable manuals and meager guides. Realizing this, I have decided that they should have their own set of instructions — a sort of quick reference guide for bad documentation. In keeping with their style, I have chosen to write this quickly, and avoid numbering the steps.

• Never outline what you are planning to develop. Outlines give you structure and help you to organize your thoughts. That is just the sort of thing you want to avoid. Always write on the fly.
• Learn as you write. Clients are learning as they read; you should approach your documentation the same way. As long as you’ve figured it out by the time you finished, you’ll be fine. Even if you don’t, if you throw enough words at the problem, the reader will get bored or frustrated long before they figure out that you don’t know what you are talking about.
• Avoid graphics, especially explanatory ones. A picture is worth a thousand words, so throw a thousand words at it instead.
• Embrace inconsistency. Every time you write about the same process, approach it a completely different way. Stay away from style guides, standardization and repetition at all costs.
• Edit sparsely. Editing is like smoking. If you’re editing now, stop. If you haven’t yet begun to edit, don’t start. This goes for peer reviews too. Avoid them if you possibly can. They’ll only make you change stuff.
• Avoid white space. Good visual design is far too helpful. Readability is your enemy. Crowd as much text onto the page as you possibly can. Long paragraphs are the way to go.
• Create as unreasonable a schedule as you can. If you have a product that you need documented, don’t even think about giving the writer more than a few days. Sure, it took you sixteen months to develop the product, but it should only take six hours to document it.
• Start the documentation as late in the process as possible and end it as early in the process as possible. If you have a ten-month development cycle, contact the documentation people after about eight months, but make sure they have to get it out before the product is finished. The more features you change after the manuals are out, the more frustrating the documentation will be. The customers will hate your product (they probably would have anyway), but you can blame the whole thing on the documentation.
• Use Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has the ability to crash while creating a table of contents. For longer documents, it often loses pages. Even better, the automatic numbering feature appears to have been created by dyslexic boll weevils. A random lost page and a bad table of contents will go a long way toward reaching your customer dissatisfaction goals, but inconsistent numbering will really put you over the top.
• Avoid establishing any processes or procedures. Procedures create repeatable results and avoid confusion. Processes can only hurt the documentation if they are unnecessarily complex or completely inappropriate for what you are doing. That is a lot of work to go to just to screw up your projects. It is easier to keep things nice and random. That will screw the documentation up with a minimum of effort.
• Never pay for usability testing. Usability testing is the nemesis of bad documentation. Actually letting the people who use your product have a say in the documentation (or god forbid the actual product) will result in unwanted improvements and increased customer satisfaction. Luckily, most companies avoid usability testing the way democrats avoid cohesion and unity, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
• Once your manual is produced, forget about it. Revisions are for suckers. Products come and go, but bad documentation blows and blows.

10 Ways to Annoy the Hell out of your Writers’ Group

A writers’ group is a collection of writers who get together to discuss each other’s work. Each writer submits a piece to the group and as a group, suggestions are given, issues are discussed and an effort is made to provide guidance to make each piece better. This is the model of most creative writing programs, as well as many independent groups. If everyone works together, it can be a wonderful experience for all involved. Unfortunately, there is usually some jerk in the group that ruins everything. This is a guide to how to be that jerk.

10 Ways to Annoy the Hell out of your Writers’ Group

• Attend sporadically. Most writers’ groups have rules about attendance, but once you are there, what are they going to do? Do they seriously have the stones to kick you out? I think not. Writers are usually nice people — exploit that.
• Bring the whole novel. Most writers’ groups try to keep the length of the things they are discussing to a reasonable level. After all, most members have jobs or kids or classes. Some members even want to spend time on their own writing. They can’t be expected to read and critique hundred of pages a week… or can they? After all, the main reason the group exists is to serve your needs.
• Don’t worry about the genre. The science fiction writer’s group is the perfect place to present your nihilistic seventies romance. If anyone makes a fuss, tell them that they’re stifling you.
• Don’t waste a lot of time reading the other member’s work. Try to limit any review to the five minutes before the group meets. Make a show of marking up the paper with red lines or a highlighter. Just pick random passages to mark. There’s always something wrong with everything if you look hard enough.
• Keep an eye out for typos or spelling errors. Some writers think that a writers’ group should focus on character, plot, themes and other esoteric things. Stick to the basics. If you find a spelling error or a grammar error, focus solely on that. Make sure the discussion lasts twenty minutes at least. By discussion I mean you prattling on, interrupting other people whenever they try to take part.
• Keep other criticisms as vague as possible. Look for statements that sound intelligent but mean nothing. String them together for as long as you can. Sample Rant: You need this story to feel more real. It doesn’t speak to me yet. When I read it, it feels like a story. It’s as if someone wrote it down and expected me to read it and come away with some sort of impression. I shouldn’t have to know so much about the characters in order to get them. They should be a part of the page. The whole thing should function holistically and organically.
• Don’t say anything positive. People only attend a writers’ group to hear criticism, especially your criticism. That’s how you bring value to the group. Take as much time as you need to make sure they know just how badly written their work is. If you’re lucky, you just might get to see the moment when a writer’s spirit is crushed. You can usually catch it in their eyes, so be alert.
• Bring your political agenda with you. Everyone should share your views, so share your views with everyone. If you’re reading a story about an African hunting expedition, for example, never miss the opportunity to advocate vegetarianism and declare that hunting is murder. Never move on. Never let it rest. Their story should be your story.
• Don’t ever accept criticism of your own work. When other people point out problems with your story, they’re really just being petty. They can see how much better your writing is than theirs, and the only way they can deal with it is by pointing out minor, imaginary flaws. Anyone who brings these things up clearly has an ax to grind. Argue every point. Make it personal.
• Leave in a huff. Tell the group they’re idiots and you’re never coming back. That will make your appearance the next time mean so much more to them.

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