Fetish & Sex Scientist. Bizarre Ultra Vixen. Crash Test Mummy. Also a professional writer with a full-time househusband.

Posts tagged “writing

Unnecessary Redundancy

Redundancy by mlcastle

One of my pet hates is redundant language; I reserve the right to “really truly” for emphasis if I want to, but all that “05-hundred AM in the morning” stuff is for cock jockeys.

Here’s a little visual celebration of redundancy in action:

I'd prefer to prepay afterwards, by Andrew Sardone

I'd prefer to prepay afterwards, by Andrew Sardone

Redundant Touch by JulianBleecker

Redundant Touch by JulianBleecker

Stating the Obvious by Hryck

Stating the Obvious by Hryck

Redundancy by mlcastle

Redundancy by mlcastle

Images via Flickr: Andrew SardoneJulianBleeckerHryckmlcastle


Don’t be that dude, dude: Selling the Cloud [Video]

Don’t do that thing where you think that anyone who needs what you have will already know what it is.

Don’t be that twat who thinks “Duuhhh, you Luddite (or philistine, or newbie, or mouth-breathing meatbag 1.0)!” before and/or after every sentence.

Don’t assume that the only thing all those in-the-end-real people require is a targeted landing page iteration and autoresponder sequence.

Do use concrete data alongside, yes, fucking similes & metaphors; I love them.

Do allow yourself a little bit of mythos.  It’s “the Cloud”, for fuck’s sake.  Gods might be in there somewhere, playing What the Neighbours Did and sneering at our metaphysical shagpile carpeting.

But don’t overdo it.  No unicorns.

Do watch the video, it’s fucking ace.


Taking Risks: Success is defined by the possibility of failure

This is a guest post by Caitlin Kelly of Broadside blog.

Malled - the book

If you told me to jump out of an airplane or try rock-climbing or bungee-jumping or riding a motorbike, I’d say no thanks. I hate heights. Most physical risks leave me cold.

But when I was 25, I left behind my apartment, dog, freelance writing clients and live-in boyfriend eager to marry me – and moved alone to France for eight months for a journalism fellowship. I was desperate for a break and a change, but I knew getting on that plane would – as it did – forever change my life and how I saw myself living it.

Sure enough, I came back to Toronto, ditched the boyfriend and got the best job ever, aglow with the sort of confidence I could never have attained sitting safely at home.

During my fellowship I had taken all sorts of risks that even my mother, a woman who had traveled the world alone for years, found a little… misguided. Like getting into a truck with a French truck-driver who spoke no English and driving from the south of France to Istanbul for a story. Sleeping in the truck on a bunk about two feet away from a man 10 years my senior I had never met. For eight days.

Best trip of my life!
It cemented, early, my conviction that selective professional, intellectual, emotional, creative and athletic risk-taking is a highly under-rated activity, especially for girls and women, as so many of us, still, are programmed to play it safe: pick the right school/grad school/man/job/apartment. Strap in and hang on!

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

I think it’s the worst advice anyone can give a woman, and millions of us grow up listening to a chorus of people trying to dissuade us from trying the very things that will likely help us grow (up) a lot faster and in more interesting ways than simply taking the easier and less risky conventional path.

I grew up in a family of talented creative folk, who wrote and directed and edited films, television shows and magazines for a living. No one ever had a paycheck or a pension. It was balls-to-the-wall. So I knew early that risks bring rewards, and rejection — we had steak years and hamburger years. I learned, as I still do, to splurge on lovely and durable items (cashmere, a car) when I have the cash because next year… who knows? I learned to save money, live low and ferret out great consignment and thrift shop deals in my leaner years.

One of the tricks to risk-taking is making sure you’ve got a safety net before you leap: good health, savings in the bank, little to no debt and the consistent self-discipline to ruthlessly separate wants (flat-screen TV, new car, iPad) from needs (groceries, a safe vehicle, health insurance.)

I took another risk after I lost my fancy newspaper job, as a reporter for the New York Daily News, in 2006. I couldn’t find anything else and, desperate for steady cash to supplement my freelance income, took a retail job at a local mall for $11 an hour. This was in September 2007, long before the recession, and friends and family were puzzled by my choice.

Why would I work for so little? Retail? I was 50 at the time, more than 20 to 30 years older than almost all my co-workers.

I took the risk of trying something new, something utterly out of my comfort zone. My ego took a beating, as everyone does in retail, with snotty customers.

But that risk paid off in ways I could never have quite imagined; my second book, “Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail” was published in April 2011, called “an excellent memoir” by Entertainment Weekly.

And my life during those two years – how weird is this? – has been optioned by CBS as a possible sitcom.

Risk is not a four-letter word.

Dull is!

*****

Caitlin KellyCaitlin Kelly is the author of Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail and Blown Away: American Women and Guns.

Caitlin blogs about women, writing and work at Broadside.  She also helps other writers to excel through her expert coaching and editing services.


“Mixed Reaction to Striking Teachers”

image

Gloriously ambiguous. Pupils presumably delighted in any interpretation.


Call for guest bloggers

Pop quiz, hotshot. How many of the following are you?

  • interestingGuest bloggers on Machiavelli Id's blog
  • creative
  • funny
  • excitable
  • imaginative
  • geeky
  • sexy
  • open-minded
  • opinionated
  • oddball
  • honest
  • eloquent
  • obsessive
  • insightful
  • snarky
  • freaky
  • or Z, all of the above?

If you said yep to more than half of those, we want you.  If you said yep to the last one, we really really want you.

I’m looking for new guest bloggers that will blow our heads off with their awesomeness.  Or just spout some mad gubbins that entertains us.  That’ll do.

Interested? Here’s how:

  1. Email mi@machiavelliid.com and tell me
    • Who or what you are
    • Where you blog (if you don’t blog anywhere, that’s fine)
    • What you’d write about on here
    • Where else we can find you (Twitter, Facebook, whatever)
  2. Write what you like, and people like you will read it.  Send it to me or upload it to our guest blogger account as a draft.
  3. Don’t send us the same old stuff you’ve already had published somewhere else, please.  If you want to get more exposure on a certain topic, write a new post about it.
  4. Include nice relevant, attributed public domain images where you can, cos everybody likes a good picture.
  5. Write yourself a byline/mini-bio/shamelessly self-promoting blurb that I can put at the end of your post.  You’ll get a one-line intro at the start of the post as well with your name & a link to your main blog/site.
  6. If you want your byline to include a photo or logo, email me that too.
  7. Please don’t put affiliate links (like clickbank, go, affiliatewindow, etc) in your guest posts or bylines.  I’ll remove them.
  8. If you’ve got a one-on-one deal with someone that they’re gonna give you a kickback for the customers that find them via a link in your post, that’s fine with me (and I may not even be able to tell, if they’re just using something like Google Analytics to count clicks & conversions).  But if it looks like an affiliate system to me, I’ll remove the hyperlink.
  9. Stuff in as many non-affiliate links as you want.  I’ll only remove them if they’re boring (drab p0rn, search pages, bad web services) or despicable (non-consensual p0rn, virus peddlers, predatory fearmongers).
  10. Be aware that I edit all posts on here, but I’ll check anything beyond spelling, punctuation & grammar changes with you first.

Still reading?  Nice one.  Email me now, then.


Catch me on the Front Side Bus

I’m massively happy to announce that I’m now the go-to girl for brains, robots, archaeology and freaks/feats of nature on Front Side Bus — if you haven’t checked it out yet, go there now.  You’re missing all sorts of tasty science, gadget & geek news.

Here’s links to my first 2 stories for them:

Making Brains out of Skin: A New Genetic Technique

Forgotten Something? Your Brain’s on the Wrong Frequency


10 Ways to Work Incredibly Hard with No Results Guaranteed

I was recently informed that this is an example of a terrible headline/subject line that would put people off reading further.  Got to say, I totally disagree.  For one thing, you just did it.  Q.E.D., etc.

Also, it has a huge subtext of honesty and the potential for all these great results (though they’re not guaranteed, they’ve been mentioned; now they’re on your mind and the non-guarantee irrationally makes them seem more, not less, likely provided one is not a total lazy idiot.  Which one is not, of course, else one would not be here reading such a classy blog.)

Soufflé (image via Wikipedia)

Soufflé (image via Wikipedia)

So, as promised:

  1. Raise children.
  2. Do the big holiday grocery shop.
  3. Fall in love.
  4. Help the lazy.
  5. Give up sleep and food to make time for everything else.
  6. Make (and serve) soufflé.
  7. Blog outdoors at sub-zero temperatures in a howling wind.
  8. Count calories.
  9. Write an epic trilogy in a fictional language.
  10. Do your best.

I’m currently doing 7 out of 10.  How about you?  Let me know in the comments section so we can compare…