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Today’s Hate Mail, Graded
Graded hate mail for October 13.
Jay writes:
So it’s going on 5 months since the last installment. What’s the deal? I get the feeling that you’re becoming as bored with this story as I have been over the last several chapters. Why not just tell us who the wife is and put this thing out of it’s misery.
The magic has evaporated buddy.
My grade:
Congratulations on using capital letters and complete sentences. Congratulations on excellent spelling and diction. You even demonstrate a grasp of contractions, including the ever-challenging “you’re.” That’s the good news. Now for the bad…
1) “It’s” is a contraction meaning “it is,” but you confused it with “its,” a possessive adjective. You should have written “…out of its misery.”
2) Use a comma to set off direct address, as in “The magic has evaporated, buddy.”
I give you a B+. A solid effort, but I’m sure you can do better.
- Nick
Graded POD Hate Mail
More graded hate mail. See my reply over at the Picture of the Day.
Graded Hate Mail
Today’s graded hate mail:
Message from: <name removed to protect the guilty> :
the more i read the less i like your story.in the
begining , i wanted to know who died,but at this
point i dont care.the arguments are so stupid at
times,and paul seems pathetic going from mature to
immature and back to mature and back to
immature.the longer the story goes the worse it
gets and thats mainly because of the B.S. way your
trying to drag this out,i have an idea for your
next chapter ( THE END)———————————————-
Emailed through StoriesOnline’s Mailing System
My reply:
Thanks for writing, now let me grade your hate mail.
1) Use capital letters to begin sentences.
2) Hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself… Use sentences! Sentences contain a subject and a verb, and end with some form of punctuation, usually a period (a question mark or exclamation point will do nicely as well).
3) Use apostrophes for contractions like “don’t” and “that’s.” A contraction is where you contract two words into one, and the apostrophe is used in place of the missing letters (I won’t burden you with the concept of elision right now… too advanced).
4) The word is “beginning” (two N’s).
5) Capitalize “I” when used as a subject pronoun. Capitalize proper nouns, such as people’s names.
6) “Your” is an adjective used to show possession. The word you want is “you’re” (one of those nasty contractions again), which means “you are.”
All in all, not such a great example of hate mail. I give you a D. You can do better!
Nick
Mocking haters is fun. 
Life in POD-land
Yes, I’m still alive. No, I haven’t succumbed to a recurrence of tonsillitis. No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth. And no, I haven’t joined the TSA. (I don’t meet their standards, since I have a basic amount of common sense. I don’t drag my knuckles or wear jackboots either, but I digress…)
I’ve been working on the Picture of the Day pretty much non-stop since February. I installed WordPress as a content management system and then taught myself PHP and WordPress theme development. It was more tedious than difficult, since I’ve been programming off and on for 25+ years.
My goal was to design a custom theme that looked like the old POD, but with lots of new stuff (comments, ratings, tags, etc.). Then I started importing the old archives. That turned out a to be a huge job, so I recruited a team of volunteers to help. Once we imported a sufficient number of pictures from 2007, 2008, and 2009, I decided to go live with the new interface on March 23. That was the Trillion-dollar post.
I’m not dead yet!
Actually, I’m feeling a lot better. Finally!
My tonsils hurt for nearly a week after the shot of antibiotics. I pretty much lived on milkshakes and grilled cheese, and not much of either. The silver lining is that I lost almost 10 lbs. I wouldn’t recommend it as a diet plan, though. I still didn’t talk much over the next week (it hurt), and eating was painful if I didn’t chew my food thoroughly.
Gulp… wince
A really quick update…
I thought I had the flu, but it turns out I don’t. I have tonsillitis instead. Jesu, joy of man’s desiring!
At least it explains why my throat hurts like hell. Fortunately, the doc gave me a shot in the office (well, that’s not really where he stuck me, but you get the picture), and a prescription for oral antibiotics.
Don’t Tread on Me
I’ve actually had more time to write lately. I’ve also had the motivation, which is even better. Now, I don’t think I’ll ever get back to the 2,000 words a day of Book 1, but I’m pretty happy with my pace lately (~800 words a day).
Anyway, I started a long blog post a couple of days ago, but it was more rant than post. It was about politics, but it wasn’t what you’d think.
Social Distortion
My business partner is an only child. On top of that, he’s an only child of older parents. His parents both worked when he was growing up, so he spent a lot of time alone. And when they did spend time with him, they tried to make up for it by lavishing attention on him.
So it was famine or feast. Not surprisingly, he learned to hate the famine and crave the feast. These days, he doesn’t do anything alone. Not if he can help it, at least.
Now, if you’re like me, you grew up with siblings, so you know the value of alone-time. It’s nice to have some peace and quiet to yourself sometimes. But my business partner never learned the value of alone-time, and he does everything he can to avoid it.
So, why am I telling you this?
Dealing with critics.
Someone recently commented on my last blog post, and I started to write a reply. But then I thought about it. I didn’t want my reply to get buried as comment #63, so I decided to kick it to the top of the blog with a main post.
If you’d like, you can read the original comment. The whole thing is polite and well-written, but I disagree, obviously (or I wouldn’t be taking the time to reply… at length). Anyway, that’s probably enough preamble. Here’s my reply.