The lean, meme, writing machine...

I've been reading a book titled 'Epic Win for Anonymous' by Cole Stryker recently.
It's a, sort of, history of the Anonymous Hacker group and their rise to... notoriety, lets say... through the 4chan image-board network.
The book is a decent read if you like this type of thing, but that's not what this post is about. You see the first few chapters of this book explore memes in general and internet memes in particular.

  

Anyone heard of LolCatz? 

That's probably one of the most widespread Internet memes 'alive' today, and it was birthed from the rather fetid hive-mind that is 4chan.

Please don't be too tempted to go have a look though, as there are certain things you just can't un-see...


Anyway all this talk of memes got me thinking about how much our current memes are imbedded in today's writings, especially fiction writing. I think a lot of modern memes are present both in the finished stories and in the way we are now taught, or told, to write.

Anyone can be a writer!

...Or at least that's what a lot of the 'How To' books would have you believe. 
I read in the blurb of one such book that 'anyone who can write a letter can write a Novel.' But after looking at the ever-increasing pile of rejection notifications and  'one star' reviews I think most wannabe writers could be forgiven for being little sceptical of this advice.

Writing is a craft, and crafts can be learned and mastered. So in one real sense anyone could become a writer, that isn't a lie. But I don't think it necessarily means that anyone who can compose a decent letter can write a Novel. It's like saying anyone who can drive a car could become a top formula 1 racing driver. Maybe in theory they could, but unless they have the drive, not to mention nerves of steel, they won't get far in practice...

Is there anybody out there?

I've just noticed a rather drastic drop in my monthly page-view count this month.
For the last eight months it's mostly been a good few hundred posts over a thousand, and never fallen below.
last month it was only just over 200! Has something changed with blogger, or with any major site that links on to posts in blogger?

Surely my blogs can't have got that bad that quickley?
Anybody else noticed a drop in their page-views last month? Have I missed something?

Writing-aide applications, are they any good?

I was reading thorough some blogs and forums lately and noticed a few people talking about some of the programs they use to help with their writing. From what I made out there are two main types of programs, the ones that are intended to help with the technicalities of your writing and the ones that let you store and organise both your writing and your ideas.

Now, the only application I’ve ever used to help with my writing is MS word, and the benefits of that ‘helping’ are dubious at best. Ok, so the built-in thesaurus is sometimes worth its weight in gold, and I do use the spell-checker... but I’ve learned that I should definitely not rely on it. I’m not too sure about it’s concepts of grammar and punctuation ether. And that leads me into the programs purporting to help with your technical writing. Now, suffering from a touch of dyslexia, as I do I was quite interested in context sensitive spell checking software, although I was also a bit dubious. Would it detect ‘theme’ instead of ‘them,’ possibly. But how about ‘bed’ instead of ‘bead’ ... probably no so much. Anyway I decided to have a look and begun some on-line trawling for example/demo applications.

Bloging is writing to...

That may sound like an obvious and redundant statement, but after recently discussing this I was amazed by how many people don’t seem to make the connection.

I suppose it all depends on what type of blogs you primarily read. I mostly ether read about writing from writers, or about gaming – from gamers, and yes there is a general  difference in both presentation and style. That’s not to say the writing blogs are always better written. I’ve read some very professional sounding and eloquent gaming blogs. Remember that most gamers, and perhaps especially most of the ones that have a blog, are at least in their mid twenties, and statistically most gamers are above thirty. Not the spotty teenagers writing in text speak that the media would have you believe they are.

I’m sure we all know that Blog is a concatenation of ‘’Web Log” and unfortunately there are bloggers that do exactly that... log their daily endeavours, or lack there off, onto their blog. But that’s no different from the same type of accounts on Facebook or Twitter. And where this type if thing is getting increasingly prevalent on those types of site, the rambling shambling blog is becoming rarer all the time, as better outlets become available for this type of ‘personal log’ site...