Of shoes and ships and sealing wax-- Of captcha and kings (who stand on platforms)

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Guys, I'm not planning a huge post today. Rather, I thought I would catch up with you all. How are you going? We're two months into 2012 now - is everyone meeting their writing goals? I must confess that I've been struggling a bit, though that's starting to turn around now. I've been trying to re-plot FROM THE OTHER SIDE, which I've renamed REVENGE, ahead of a giant re-write. You know the feeling, when you've got such a huge task ahead of you that it all seems too daunting...

But I've been taking inspiration from this passage of Mary Kole's:

So if you feel like you’re just tinkering, shoveling text like a kid pushing peas around his plate, be brave and try starting over completely. You know what you want to accomplish with the section, so just take a brand new run at it. Or maybe you’ll realize that the section wasn’t working and trash it entirely, or find another, better part that fits. Change is tough, especially when you’ve been working on something for years and are eager to see it in print. But it’s once you kick the ladder out from under yourself completely, I’ve found, that you discover resources and ideas you never could’ve imagined.

If you're facing the thought of big revisions ahead, Mary's post might give you some helpful insights - it did me :)

Talking about motivational posts, did you catch this post by the legendary Angela Ackerman of The Bookshelf Muse (in a guest post at Write to Done)? It gives a number of practical ways in which you can turn your writing weaknesses into strength, and is a must-read for all writers. And Angela was kind enough to mention me and my Beta Matches in her point about finding critique partners to help identify your weak areas and offer strategies to improve.

Captcha

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It used to be bad enough, but the word verification (now commonly known as captcha - "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," according to Wikipedia) at the bottom of many bloggers' comments boxes is causing all of us huge headaches! In their quest to trick spammers, the writing has become almost indecipherable to us mere mortal humans. So we're forced to squint, guess, re-enter words over and over again, all of which is a waste of time. Many bloggers refuse to comment if they know you use captcha, so you might even be missing out on comments if you use it!

Did you know you can turn word verification off? While I can't speak for other blogging platforms, Blogger does a pretty good job of filtering spammers. True, you receive an email telling you exactly what the spam message is, but the message isn't seen on your blog. So I guess it's worth considering. Anything to make things easier, right? Here's a recent post by Siv Maria, who's definitely not feeling the love. She tells you how to turn word verification off, with step by step instructions for those of us who are more technologically challenged :)

Writers' Platforms

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You know I'm all about platforms, right? Well, it's important to build one, of course. But have you thought about what happens then? And what a platform is anyway? Sher A Hart has written an awesome post about what exactly a writers' platform is, and more importantly, how not to fall off once you've built one. Check it out - I think you might find it useful.

Well, my not-so-huge post has gone on a little longer than I planned. So that's it me for today :)

How about you, any thoughts or helpful links you'd like to share? Do you just want to tear captcha to shreds? Have you got the philosophy *behind* your writers' platform in place?