Happy Belated Birthday, Douglas Adams!

March 11 would have been Douglas Adams's 61st birthday, had he not died of a heart attack in 2001. His work with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is his most popular work, but everything that he has written involves a heavy hand of humor and whimsy that turned him into a hipster cult phenomenon. Who knows what he would have done had he been alive now?

Don't Have a Not Sad Day (cad é?)

January 25th is National Opposite Day! So for today I would like you to write a paragraph from your book again, but with genders and roles switched. So if you have a female hero against a male villain, it's now a male villain against a female hero. However, keep any physical characteristics that would stay in the case of a gender switch, such as hair and eye color, build, and height proportions. (So if you were transferring a male to a female, they wouldn't be 6'4", but probably around 5'11".)

In addition, due to a ridiculously busy schedule I probably won't be able to post Mondays anymore, with few exceptions. Sorry.

P.S. The language in the title is Irish. It translates to "what?", as I'm sure you might have imagined. I was originally going to do "qué?", the Spanish, but I prefer Irish.

Please Tell Me...

I have many questions.

22 January is National Answer Your Cat's Question Day! So, what is your cat's question, anyway? And how would you answer it? If you don't have a cat, feel free to use a cat that you know. Dogs and children do not count.

Penguin Fun

Today, January 19, is National Penguin Awareness day! So today you will proceed to be peppered with weird penguin facts that you may not have known.

• Penguins eat snow to get a source of fresh water.
• The name comes from two Welsh terms: the first is "pen", which means head; and the second is "gwyn", which means white. So basically its name means "white head".
• The United States Libertarian Party's unofficial mascot is a penguin.
• The first thing a penguin does when it's born is call out loudly so that its parents learn to associate the voice with their chick.
• A group of penguins is called a colony or a rookery.
• Penguins can jump up to six feet out of the water.
• Penguins first appeared about forty million years ago.
• A prehistoric penguin is believed to have been up to five feet tall.
• Penguin hunt in water, which is where they end up spending about three quarters of their lives.
• The little blue penguin will, oft-times, make its home in someone's garage. While they are a very loud species, New Zealanders are so happy just to have a penguin living in their home that they'll put up with it.
• Penguins get deeper sleep in the afternoon than they do in mornings.

Close Enough

This is wonderful.

January 18 is National Polygraph Day. I decided to give you, as a writer, another kind of test. The Mary-Sue Litmus Test. This is a test designed to figure out whether your character is guilty of being a Mary-Sue, or "perfect" character. There are three main types: average, who is perfect in every way, shape, and form; clone, which is the author inserting themselves into a main character; and trauma, who has had an undeserved amount of abuse, has infinite mental disorders, and uses that as an excuse to either do horrible things or cry in a corner the whole time.

The most in-depth and my favorite is http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm, but a close second is http://www.katfeete.net/writing/marysue.html. Please note that those two strictly apply to humanoid creatures. For a wolf one, I found http://quizilla.teennick.com/quizzes/8164465/the-mary-sue-test-wolf-versionrequired-for-entrance-to-ethereal. While it is supposed to be for entrance to a roleplay, you can still get a pretty accurate score.

If you're looking to find out if a whole race in your fantasy story is too perfect, you may be looking for http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysuerace.htm.

Cars on Ropes--What Could Go Wrong?

January 17 is National Cable Car Day, so here are some fun facts about that transportation should it be vital to your characters.

• A trolley is six tons.
• The speed of a trolley is 9 1/2 mph.
• In San Francisco, there are 40 cars in service: 28 "single-enders" and 12 "double-enders".
• San Francisco trolleys have up to 26 passengers at a time on weekdays, but have the potential for carrying up to 60.
• More women are likely to work as a grip operator for a cable car.
• The first cable car line was created in 1873.
• A woman in 1964 sued the city of San Francisco for a mechanical failure that she claims gave her a black eye, bruises, and a brain injury that turned her into a nymphomaniac.

I had to leave you on an interesting note like that.

Two Holidays

I know not what I have done to
receive this fate.

January 14 has two fun holidays, so instead of picking I've decided to do both: it's a two-for-one day!

First, it's Clean Off Your Desk Day. This means that you need to get organized so that you can start writing without having to look for things all over the place. If you work on the computer, this can mean getting rid of old files that you haven't worked on for a while or that have gotten totally blanked out. Even blank files take up about 18 MB of space.

Second, it's Dress Up Your Pet Day. This is a more fun holiday than the previous one. If you have any characters that have domestic animals, I want you to write a paragraph that involves them finding simply *the* best outfit for their pet and attempting to put it one. Then write the same paragraph in the point of view of the poor victim.

The Blame Game

I know, it's all my fault.

January 13 is Blame Somebody Else Day, and this is the perfect day for a fun kind of procrastination. Instead of writing today, make a list of all the people that are impeding on your ability to get any work done. Feel free to include me on this list because you spend all your time reading this instead of actually writing, and because I gave you the idea in the first place. Don't feel bad about it; I'm blaming you as well, because you're the reason that I feel the need to write a new post every day.

Oh, The Strange

10 January is Peculiar People Day! I can think of nothing better than to show peculiar people to you. However, I cannot find any good free-use images of peculiar people. So that's where you come in. Look up "peculiar people" on Google Images, pick one, and go crazy!

Tesla Time

Nikola Tesla: he's
probably thinking of how
to zap you.

January 10 is National Static Electricity Day, and while I don't have anything fun directly related to the topic, I do have something about a guy who worked with static electricity, as well as other forms of electricity, quite a bit: Nikola Tesla. Tesla first got interested in static electricity when his cat shocked him (something that happens to me quite a bit). He also invented a death ray, but he never used it.

So, what if he did use the death ray and started zapping things like crazy to get back at people? He would probably zap Thomas Edison first, as Tesla created the AC when working for Edison and demanded his $50,000 reward for completing it. Edison said that he was only joking about the money, so Tesla released AC to the public. Edison claimed it was unsafe and electrocuted animals to prove it, including cats such as the one that inspired Tesla in the first place.

Using that as a launching pad (recap: Tesla builds death ray, uses it on Edison, says "That's for the cats!"), what happens next?

Fiction Trivia

But how can that be? That's
impossible!

January 4 is Trivia Day! Therefore, instead of giving you something to think on today, I'm going to give you some fun fictional trivia for you to quiz your friends with.

• In the novel Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King, King first mentions the werewolf having yellow eyes. In every account afterwards and in every illustration the werewolf has green eyes.
• In various Stephen King novels, the setting is Castle Rock, Maine. This was named for the William Golding novel Lord of the Flies, where the meeting place is called the Castle Rock.
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett was rejected sixty times, and one of the rejections told Stockett that there was no place in today's literature for her works.
• (This isn't fiction trivia, but it's still crazy) According to Sir Isaac Newton, the world is going to end in 2060.
• There's a 233-page French novel called Le Train de Nulle Part (The Nowhere Train) that has no verbs in it whatsoever.
• Mark Twain said that he wanted to dig up Jane Austen and beat her in the skull with her own skeleton.
• There are three instances in Shakespearean plays where a character mentions something not yet invented in the time period of the setting: when the Anglo-Saxon Lear mentions not wanting spectacles, cannons in 1054 and 1200, and clock in the time of Caesar.