This is too good - an alphabetical list of phobias! Personally, I like “Epistemophobia” (fear of knowledge - I know some people who might even claim to have that one - our orange cat for one - he is as dumb as a box of rocks) or the delightful “Pentheraphobia” (go look and find out the definition for yourself).

Found this online - most interesting!

Rick Warren: The Purpose Driven Pastor
David W. Virtue interviews Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren.

He has the evangelical commitment of a Billy Graham, the social justice concerns of a Tony Campolo and the compassion of a Mother Teresa all rolled into one; Rick Warren may well be the 21st Century story of the American Church.

And the amazing thing about him is that he seems to be totally unaffected by his enormous success both nationally and internationally. He eschews notoriety and fame, gives away his millions and seemingly practices what he preaches - a habit rarely found among many high flying American evangelicals, many of whom have crashed and burned over money and sex.

I saw this on MSN’s Lifestyle website this morning, originally from Discovery Health

The Top 10 Myths of Marriage
By David Popenoe for Discovery Channel

1. Marriage benefits men much more than women.
2. Having children typically brings a married couple closer together and increases marital happiness.
3. The keys to long-term marital success are good luck and romantic love.
4. The more educated a woman becomes, the lower her chances of getting married.
5. Couples who live together before marriage, and are thus able to test how well suited they are for each other, have more satisfying and longer-lasting marriages than couples who do not.
6. People can’t be expected to stay in a marriage for a lifetime as they did in the past because we live so much longer today.
7. Marrying puts a woman at greater risk of domestic violence than if she remains single.
8. Married people have less satisfying sex lives, and less sex, than single people.
9. Cohabitation is just like marriage, but without “the piece of paper.”
10. Because of the high divorce rate, which weeds out the unhappy marriages, people who stay married have happier marriages than people did in the past when everyone stuck it out, no matter how bad the marriage.

In each case they tackle the myth with a fairly general couple of sentences. It would be nice to have seen some hard numbers / research / sources cited but I cant complain - at the end of the day the author made sense of things. The one that caught my eye though

5. Myth: Couples who live together before marriage, and are thus able to test how well suited they are for each other, have more satisfying and longer-lasting marriages than couples who do not.

Fact: Many studies have found that those who live together before marriage have less satisfying marriages and a considerably higher chance of eventually breaking up. One reason is that people who cohabit may be more skittish of commitment and more likely to call it quits when problems arise. But in addition, the very act of living together may lead to attitudes that make happy marriages more difficult. The findings of one recent study, for example, suggest “there may be less motivation for cohabiting partners to develop their conflict resolution and support skills.” (One important exception: Cohabiting couples who are already planning to marry each other in the near future have just as good a chance at staying together as couples who don’t live together before marriage).

I did it!

At 5:05pm yesterday, at the Sunday Nanowrimo write-in here in St Louis, I did it:

The nice thing about the Ultraedit text editor is that its word count feature agrees exactly what the official Nanowrimo word counter. So, yeah, colour me surprised. I didnt think that I would make it to the end and succeed at this Nano thing!

Oohhh. How could I resist?

Nano Update: 38637 words (77.27 %) with 15 days left

Highlander :: Evolution is rated PG-13, due to acts of violence and some instances of bad language. Feel free to read it and give me your thoughts.

In my plan I had given over 12,500 words for Act I, set in Paris initially and moving to Geneva. I thought that it would begin with Duncan dying, then slowly recovering and conclude with a fight between a soldier (Conwel) and the hero (Duncan MacLeod) that ends with a twist. It started OK but he stayed dead. Act I concluded with them reviving him. Act II shifts the focus from Geneva to northern Iraq. In the original plan, the show-down between Conwel and MacLeod should have resulted in him needing to leave the country and Iraq was a convenient opportunity. I had some writing to do! He got shipped off in a hurry and my inner editor (that I tricked and subsequently locked in a cage back in October) has been screaming to rework that entire section. Ive resisted so far. Wordcount for Act II was planned to be 25,000, concluding Act II at the 37,500 word mark. The plan, such as it was, included running an extended flashback all in 3rd person concurrently with Duncan in present day Iraq. Characters didnt cooperate (Grrrr) and it took a Vindaloo curry, plenty of beer and some fine brandy before one was drunk enough to start telling the tale of what he’d done bck in 720BC. What was planned to be 3rd person became 1st person monologue. (note: I was very temped at that point to serve the character a Phal curry, but relented at the last minute) So, where are things at? Right now Im at 38,637 words and the show-down between Conwel and MacLeod is finally happening. What should have ended Act I is finally on the page as the conclusion of Act II (25,000 words late, no less!) Everyone who has read the story to date has hated a particular secondary character, and she has just died a tragic death while saving someone else (and I heard cheers of “Finally!” from someone already). It looks like the Nanowrimo goal might actually be achievable, but there’s still a lot of story to tell!

Chris Baty (the founder of Nanowrimo) sent out the latest “ra-ra” email to stirr the troops. In it he said,

The more you write, the more inspired you’re going to feel. If you’re feeling pokey now, it’s because you’re not writing enough. Push yourself to write every day, and make a point of adding something to your word count any time you’re within striking distance of a keyboard. Harness the power of micro-sessions.

I believe that is exactly what I have been doing. I have a plain text format for my novel (its getting formatted automatically online, on ht fly, when people read it). I have a text editor lurking in the background and while automated tests are running and I would otherwise be reading some piece of technical documentation or browsing Slashdot I have been writing. Evidence of this is the fact that I am at 37,000 words so far. Thats further than I ought to be at 1/2 way through the month. Its dawning on me rapidly that I might actually finish this thing! I might beat the Nanowrimo goal of 50,000 in 30 days.

So, back to work I go. Write some tests. Write some code. Run some tests. Write some Nano. (lather, rinse, repeat).

Movies to look forward to:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Opens Noveber 18th (trailer)	Aeon Flux Opens December 2nd (trailer)
Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe Opens December 9th (trailer)	King Kong Opens December 14th (trailer)
Underworld Evolution Opens January 20th (trailer)

I wonder who those are for?

Pushing 1/2 way

Highlander :: Evolution should probably be rated PG-13. Let me know what you think - I plan to post it on a site like FanFiction.net eventually so will need to think of such things. Until then please feel free to read it and let me know what you think.

Is it something about Monday / Start of the week? Both weeks have begun with a big push, though the second week was less productive so far. Im sitting at a shade less than 1/2 way through my Nano novel and it’s only day number 9. There has been an email from the main organizer to everyone saying “keep up the good work” (or words to that effect) and also from one of our municipal liasons (ML’s) saying how tough the second week really is. According to my calulations that was sometime last Thursday … in the push for 20K. Yes, it was like chewing on cardboard (or, St Louis style pizza, same difference). I had a particular scene that seemed never ending. I was / am writing chronologically rather than dipping into a scene here and there. That meant I “had to” finish the day out, had to finish the scenes with a particular set of characters before I moved on to the other one that I really wanted to write. Why did yesterday drag on so long? Probably the threshold guardian that I introduced at the last minute - a nasry biker known as “vermin”. I gave him a nice long back-story (hey - its all wordcount!) and to my surprise a different character than I expected stepped to the fore to deal with him. The end result was far more satisfying though: Gabe had a part to play, earlier events have been explained, and a new subplot introduced. Questions sprung out of that scene and the long one that followed it. If Alison’s reactions are anything to go by, it worked - she was asking me the right questions after reading it. All in all, I think its going well. Now to get over the hump of 25K - the mythical 1/2 way point - and get into the next phase of the story. 720BC here I come!