Writing update–FAILURE!

Okay, so I didn’t finish the story this weekend. In fact, I didn’t even work on it once from the moment I wrote the last post.

Now, you all have a job to do. In order for my shaming scheme to work, you must hit me with as much scorn and derision as you can muster. Only with your well-deserved blows to my self-esteem can I possibly hope to finish writing anything. Oh, I know that many of you are loathe to point out my flaws, but you’ll just have to make yourself do it somehow. You can do it right here in the comments section–public humiliation is probably the most effective–but feel free to email me directly, to call and harangue me if you happen to have my number, or to simply make fun of me in your own blog. I deserve it.

—

DG and I have been playing a lot of Scrabble lately. I once considered myself something of a decent Scrabble player, but I’ve been very much relieved of that misapprehension over the last few weeks. I think my record is something like 2-12. I had to print out a chart of two-letter words just to compete. DG prefers to play with the rule that you can look up words in the official Scrabble dictionary to see if a word exists before playing it, resulting in an average turn length of approximately fifteen minutes.

I find that an extended vocabulary from a lifetime of reading is fairly useless when the strategy involves looking at the board, looking at my letters, and asking myself, “does the word ‘skoog’ exist?” DG hit me with “skeg” last night, which is allegedly a stabilizing fin located at the rear of the surfboard, according to Wikipedia. Personally, I suspect a conspiracy between the authors of the Scrabble dictionary and the surfing community to create random words for use in Scrabble.

That’s the only sane explanation for why I keep losing.

—04/10/06