The biggest flaw with this book so far (I’m about a third of the way through) is, like Jude: Level One, is that the back jacket copy compares the book to John Kennedy Toole’s excellent A Confederacy of Dunces. Whoops.
I desperately want to like this book (I have no idea why, though), but there’s no way it’s a patch on Confederacy… it’s fine, so far, if a bit heavy-handed and awkward in spots. So we’ll see how the rest of it goes.
Lobel’s self-effacing approach turned him into an almost cult-like figure in Boston, particularly with female viewers. His fellow staffers recall him getting love letters, even proposals. He was often more celebrated than the athletes he covered, landing in the gossip columns more than he would have liked.
This is from Jackie MacMullan’s article a few days ago in the Globe… and this is where they’re getting it wrong. Guys, you are not the story. Bob Lobel, we’re not paying to watch you skate or hit a baseball or catch a pass. Jackie, nor are you the reason. Normally I like Jackie’s columns, and this one is another well written one… but I think she’s overstating Bob’s importance just a tad. At the very least the editor writing the headline for that article is, by a long shot. Media folks, you’re media folks. We’re not particularly interested in you, yourselves. You just report the stories we’re (sometimes) interested in.
QIClock was written primarily for the developers, who found themselves dealing with coworkers on all sorts of different time zones, particularly those with the gall to reside on the other side of the international date line (should you, like the sun, only conceptually travel East to West).
It might also come in handy if you’re attempting to watch the opening series of the Major League Baseball season and for some reason or another they’re playing it not in the home team’s ballpark but somewhere five thousand miles or so to the left of it.
It’s not an earth-shattering type of application, but it works for what my needs. This version was actually written for L, who needed to organize conference calls across GMT, JST, EST, and PST.
One of the best ways to get your creative juices moving again is to write–about anything. It doesn’t even have to be good. Just sit down, pen in hand, and let the ideas flow. A great way to do this is by using “free association.” Psychologists sometimes use this exercise with their patients to determine the subconscious cause of a problem. It can be similarly used by writers to understand the basis of their writer’s block or just to generate ideas.
This one, in particular, is what Writer.app is all about. It’s the tool for getting you to think forward about your story, and not worry so much about what it is you’re writing. Just get something down, don’t interrupt your flow with the mental editor kicking in every couple seconds.
