Current mood:	On Top of the World
Current music:	P!nk -- "Walk of Shame"

It's November! And we all know what that means!
Yes, my lovely wankas, it's NaNoWriMo time. I don't believe I brought you the wank news last year, as I was dealing with in-person blowups in my region (remind me to tell you the one about the girl who believed that demons lived in Tarot cards... and announced as much at a bookstore that also hosted Tarot readings), but I am back with some of the usual odds and sods and some new wank.

Pretend entry tags: nanowrimo, mark leach, marienbadmylove, words mean things, paragraph breaks mean nothing, writing, not editing, plagiarism, the one plagiarist who makes cassie claire look good


Mark Leach, our headline artist, is on Twitter. If you think that the 140 character limit curbs his tendency to ramble, think again. Earlier this month he posted a beautiful trio of Tweets:

1. Since '08 I've been a #Nanowrimo overachiever, consistently producing in excess of 1 million words –& making a lot of enemies along the way.

2. Plagiarism, fraud, theft, falsification, uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation –quickly & easily produce 1 million words!

3. Boredom, valuelessness & nutritionlessness is my ethos. My #nanowrimo is built on aplastic, objective & entirely non-writing procedures.

Congratulations, Mark. You're really owning what you're doing there! Instead of, you know, owning what other people do, which is his usual M.O.

The Writer Formerly Known as Alan Holman has gone incognito, but word on the street is that the mod of his area knows who he is and has her eye on him. More news if it is forthcoming; with luck it won't be, because that mod sure could use a break!

And a new addition to the wankroll this year is carmeniris, whose rant... well, I'll need to cut it to save your friends lists, gentlewankas, because it's a big 'un.


One of the writers started a thread titled, Could you make the site a bit more rubbish please? Tongues were in cheeks and everyone was quite merry, until...

carmeniris: "Seriously" are you for real? I agree with the rubbish part. I had to sign up for tumblr and was forced to chose 3 blogs, only wanted Light, plus set up one of my own which I will never use. Then there is twitter and Facebook both of which I avoid like a plague. AND we have a 30 day deadline and lives to live. I don't mind the boring diatribes about grammar, it's the rest I don't like. This is NOT an improvement. I know some people are into all that stuff, especially children, but not everyone is. That "glad you're enjoying it" really was "called" for. Not a new participant.

*record screech*

For someone who doesn't mind the "boring diatribes about grammar", she is a little slapdash about applying it in her own posts. BenPanced points out that the OP was being sarcastic. Heather Dudley, forums moderator extraordinaire, aka the poor person who is being paid to deal with this shit, gets matter of fact on carmeniris's ass.

Heather: I think you may have misunderstood the point of the post. Why on earth are you signing up for tumblr? There is nothing here that requires tumblr signin, and all of our twitter and Facebook things are public, and don't require accounts to read.

Do you have some specific criticism that I'm not understanding?

Sweet, succinct, and easy to comprehend, right?

Apparently not. Because carmeniris comes right back with 454 words (surely she could have been writing her novel?) of pure ungrammatical diatribe.

carmeniris: If we are NOT required to sign up for tumblr, why did tumblr come up when I tried to signed up for the Office of Letters and Light blog from this same site and why did it tell me I had to set up an account, choose three blogs (when I tried for one) and then I had to chose a name, etc for MY blog. I bet the young woman that you responded to with your sarcastic "(Seriously though, glad you're enjoying it!)" when she mentioned nothing of the sort, had to go through the same thing I did. Then there is mention of updates through Facebook and tweeter in this same site we are now on. As you can see, obviously you fail to understand me and the young woman because you are a moderator and we are NOT so you had information we did not. As to your other message to me, which I "hopefully mistakenly took as revenge" for my post here which I admit was an attempt to be as sarcastic as yours to the new member, I have a few things to say. I went to law school and I practiced law for many years, so I know that for me to be calling someone a liar or a cheat, I have to be addressing someone, which I did not. I stated my opinion based on mathematics and logic. For a person to complete a 50,000 word NOVEL (I'm being fair by assuming 5 characters per word which in typing includes spaces since as you know doesn't happen automatically but is not counted as characters in Word or to make simple, 4 letter words which is unlikely in a novel) in 24 hours they would need 10,416 characters per hour non-stop (as in no breaks for bathroom, eating, stretching,etc or even more unlikely no time to think what is coming next in the novel you are typing) for 24 hours straight. Maybe you find that believable but I don't. I stated my opinion based on hard fact and my opinion is that you can type random thought which make no sense (a word I used) but not a novel. I was unaware, during all the years that I have been coming here, that stating your opinion on something you find illogical was not allowed. If that's the case I apologize but I still think it's illogical. As to your comment "see if we can't stick a few more boring diatribes about grammar here and there" let me just say that as a person with a major in college in English Literature (along with one in psychology) I do NOT find anything boring about grammar, I'm surprised you do.

Original paragraphs preserved; i.e. she didn't hit Enter once. For a person with a major in college in English Literature, she seems to have issues in actually applying anything that she learned. Unless she's from the James Joyce school of writing. Heather makes a nicely moderatory response to her. Writer Seera, on the other hand, says exactly what I imagine all the moderators were thinking.

Seera: The OP wanted the site to be more rubbish so that it would be less of a distraction. She was NOT saying the site was rubbish.

I didn't have to sign up for Twitter or Tumblr when I registered here. I already had a FB, but I didn't have to link it or anything to prove I had one. So not sure why you felt you were forced to get those. And I can view their twitter page without an account.

I didn't have to make a single blog, let alone three.

The goal of NaNo is 50,000 words in 30 days. Not 24 hours, so not sure why you did the math for that. And please go see the Beyond 50K forum to see all of the overachievers going for word counts way above 50K or doing 50K in a lot shorter time frame. If 50K was not possible, why would there be so many overachievers?

And for an English Literature major that you have, I'm surprised I found it so hard to read and understand your post. I'm sure you could have split it into paragraphs without breaking any grammar rules.

carmeniris has not yet responded to this post as of four days ago. Possibly because Seera is utterly flawless. This wanka would like to note that carmeniris's word count is sitting at just under 4,000 words. Perhaps if she put as much effort into her novel as into her forum comment rants, she would be a lot closer to her target.


That's the best of the wank so far for this year. I'll be sure to keep you updated if anything else blows up. <333