Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Tom by the way, has speculated that a badger scaled up to human size could in fact probably beat up Wolverine something rotten. This may be true, but he could never love Brian Cox the same way, so we'll call it evens.

Meanwhile - I've just received a copy of NewNovelist, primarily to satisfy my interest in how exactly one takes the mess and fuss out of writing the novel. I'm hoping that it will be full of handy little flashing notes like "your characters should shag here, yes?". Possibly with a quill instead of the Microsoft Office paperclip. This sounds about the right level to be aiming at.

Two interesting things about it before even beginning. First, the tagline of this product is "releasing the creative genius in us all".

This is quite patently bollocks. If there were a creative genius in us all, then we would all be sketching birds and dying of starvation. A more honest title might be "some of you will still be unable to write for shit. Sorry. But you've got a spreadsheet program now".

Second up, their site is hilarious. A more perfect collection of regrettable locutions is hardly likely to be found outside Red Dwarf fanfiction. Particularly loving this quote from Jason Pierce, who became a published writer using NewNovelist and as such has been able to give up his soul-crushing day job as the lead singer of Spiritualised.

I want to thank you very much for sending the disk, and I will tell everyone, about newnovelist! It is due to the ease of the program that I, a new writer, was able to publish my first novel. Without it, I think I may have never attempted it. But due to newnovelist, I am published ! ! !

Clearly, there isn't a "dude, commas" button. Or a "calm the fuck down" function. This is all good to know.

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