Merry Christmas

These images were created by streaking bacteria/mould onto agar plates!

It is probably a bit late for Xmas now, but if you want to buy these on a range of products - tree ornaments, mousemats, t-shirts, hoodies, baby clothes - you can get them from my shop: Superbug Agar Art. There are loads of other agar designs which aren't xmas themed too. All money made from the agar products goes to charity to help folk with MS.

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He said, she said...

"What do you mean?" she exclaimed in surprise.
"Well, the word 'said' is overused in novels," he countered definitively.
"But 'said' is a non-word that readers don't notice," she breathed, breathlessly.
"Surely you cannot wish to replace it?" he asserted with shock.

Yeah, it's pretty annoying. I personally have a massive problem with my characters hissing their dialogue when annoyed. Or laughing. I mean, have you ever tried to hiss an entire sentence without spitting on someone? Or laugh a reply without coming across like a crazy person?

So I am currently trying my very best to stick with 'said'. I heard that, if you write really well, readers should only notice the story and not the words. Although I have a massive urge to stick 'he ejaculated' somewhere in my book. Yes, I am 10 years old.

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Overused Words in Novel Writing

Wordle - paste in a bunch of text and it makes you a pretty word cloud. I removed the character names from my book first as they came out gargantuan. Makes for hours of non-writing, non-housework, non-xmas pressie wrapping fun!

Also useful in weeding out all those overused crutch words. Recently, my book editing has reached what I call the 'Search and Destroy' stage. I go through and hunt down all those pesky words that don't need to be there and delete, delete, delete. I never used to realise just how much I use the word 'just', it just seemed to creep into just about every sentence. Now I just delete them all...

So far, 6000 words of pure flab have been trimmed off with no removal of anything even slightly resembling plot.

Here's my little list of words that get used way too much:

Very (seriously overused and nearly always pointless. Either find a better word or chop it. e.g. 'Very big' should either be simply 'big' or 'massive/huge')
Really (same as above)
Just (it's just completely unnecessary)
There (at the start of a sentence)
As (when linking things together - 'She closed her eyes as she fell')
That (at least half can go)
But (at the start of every sentence? Really?)
Something (what?)
Started (she started to think etc. is overused, as is 'began')
Like (metaphor overload?)

To be verbs (Am/Is/Are/Was/Were) can make writing drag when overused.
For example: The bear was running straight for her.
Change this to: The bear ran straight for her.
This is where the Find and Replace function in Word comes in handy - under the 'More' option, you can select 'Find all word forms'. Search for 'Was' and it will pull up other versions of the verb.

And have you ever really looked at how often your characters smile, turn away, roll their eyes etc.? Most of the time, this is sloppy writing because the dialogue or action should be enough to get a feel for the story without anyone needing to remove their eyes and roll them about like marbles.

Rolled her/his eyes (across the floor?)
Turned away (lazy way to imply a character is pissed off or upset)
Smiled (constantly smiling like the Joker is not a good thing)
Looked (are they constantly looking at things? Kind of obvious if the book is about them)
Walked/hurried away/towards (doesn't add much to the story)
Shook her/his head (constantly. Like a nodding dog)
Sighed (that's going to get annoying after a while)
Stood (exciting stuff)

Useful sites for working on overused words:

Word Usage and Abusage is a massive list of words that are overused or incorrectly used.
Five words you can cut
Ten overused words in writing

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What Jane Austen Ate

It seemed like a great idea to write a book set in a quasi-Victorian era, yet the further I got, the more I realised I know very little about the 19th century. Sure, I can make some of it up, but it seems a bit lazy to completely rewrite the past. So I have been doing a bit of research to brush up on my history and found this book really interesting. It has loads of useful info on 19th century England, such as when the fox hunting season commenced and how much certain professions could hope to earn, and I have found lots of interesting bits and pieces to stick in my book to make it seem more authentic.
See it on Amazon

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Posting Code on Blogs

This HTML encoder is useful if you want to paste code onto a blog post without it being parsed so people can read it!

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Making div's clickable

The original template for this site had clickable titles in the little summary boxes on the front page, but I wanted the entire content to link to the full post. Turned out, it is a bit more complicated to do this than I had hoped. This article is the one I followed, and I have simplified it for use with blogs like my own below.

1. Download jquery and jquery.biggerlink Both of these need to be saved somewhere online so you can link to them. I put them on another of my web sites so the locations are http://ilovebacteria.com/jquery-1.3.2.min.js & http://ilovebacteria.com/jquery.biggerlink.js

2. Link to these in your template (replace the yoursite.com bit with the location of your own jquery files). Before the </head> tag paste:
<script language='JavaScript' src='http://yoursite.com/jquery-1.3.2.min.js' type='text/JavaScript'/>
<script language='JavaScript' src='http://yoursite.com/jquery.biggerlink.js' type='text/JavaScript'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.biglink').biggerlink();
});
</script>

3. Now you need to find the code for the summary posts on the front page and add the biglink div to surround it. For blogs based on the Prometheus template, find <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;item&quot;'> and add <div class="biglink"> after it. Then find <span class='rmlink' style='float:right'><a expr:href='data:post.url'>Read more</a></span> and add </div> after it.

4. Finally, I wanted the pointer to change into a hand when it hovers over the link, so I added cursor:hand; after .post:hover {

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