[Aside: Would we call a string of linguistic bits a linguine?]

[Aside Followup Fact: The word “linguine” literally means “little tongues” in Italian.]

I have on occasion been accused of the crime of pedantry in the sphere of language. I will confess to bouts of nitpickiness bordering on pedantry, but as to full-on pedantry, I don’t think I have the qualifications for that. One thing’s for sure. I need to loosen up a bit. While I’m not prone to fits of letter-writing when I read or see something that is grammatically, punctuatively, or orthographically incorrect, I do often cringe, and I do often complain about it.

The English language is going to evolve and grow whether I like it or not. It doesn’t need, or even know anything about, my permission. I might just as well try and stop the tides from going in and out or ask the moon not to change its phase quite so often. That would be sheer lunacy. Pun intended.

I do, in a rather informal yet wildly egotistical manner, consider myself a defender of the tongue. A staunch defender of the tongue, to be ridiculously specific about it. I don’t like lazy language, particularly in written form, and my hackles near scrape the ceiling when I encounter obvious carelessness in wording and phrasing.

But there’s medication for that.

My uptightness was brought home to me in no uncertain terms two days ago, when my friend Asheyna (who often comments here) sent me a link to a YouTube video in which no lesser a literary luminary than Stephen Fry takes the pedants of the world to task for their pedantry. I’m embedding the video at the bottom of this post. Go and watch it now if you want. I’ll wait.

Uptightness aside, I do care about the written word and language in general, and I would no more discourage someone from learning the craft of writing than I would discourage them from blinking at appropriate intervals. Communication is the essence of our humanness, and the better and more clearly we can communicate, the better off and happier we’ll all be.

So, for the aspiring writers out there, I’d like to submit a little list I recently put up on Protagonize, a site I’ve mentioned many times in my blog posts, and one to which I have recently returned. Coincidentally, it’s also the site where I first met Asheyna, who may well be now blushing as she reads a second mention in a single post.

Another Protagonize user started an exercise called “Ten Things You’d Tell Yourself Re: Writing”. I added a page called “Ten Fucking Things I Keep Fucking Trying to Learn About Fucking Writing”. Except I used “@#$#%&” instead of the expletive, as the exercise was not flagged “mature”. For some reason I feel compelled to use the actual jarring word here on the blog, perhaps simply because I can. And get away with it. Maybe.

Anyway, here’s my list as posted on that exercise:

1. Keep writing.
2. Don’t stop writing.
3. See # 1 and 2 above.
4. Do not stop to edit. Editing is a separate undertaking. Stop worrying. In other words, see # 1, 2, and 3 above.
5. Learn the rules. I’m talking spelling, punctuation, and grammar here. If you don’t know the rules, you can’t break them intelligently when the story calls for it. There’s a big difference between breaking the rules for a reason and breaking the rules because you’ve been too fucking lazy to learn them.
6. Don’t let anyone tell you what to write or not write about. It’s your writing.
7. Let the humor come naturally. Don’t force it. If you force it, it will be lame. There is no way around this.
8. Let the muse speak through you. You are a vessel for the creative forces of the universe. Don’t edit the fucking muse. In other words, see # 1, 2, 3, and 4 above.
9. Contrary to what others have said here [in the exercise], there is nothing wrong with fan fiction. It can be done well. It isn’t often done well, but it can be done well. And playing in someone else’s sandbox can be a lot of fun. Go ahead. Prove ‘em wrong. Write a really good fanfic. Just deal with the fact that you can never publish it for money.
10. Don’t be verbose. Don’t use more words when less will do. I mean it. Seriously. For reals.
11. (Bonus point) Have fun, for cryin’ out loud!

And so we rumble towards the end of the single most expletive-ridden blog post I’ve heretofore written. If you’re cringing at my cavalier use of “bad language”, understand that I do it with intent and for effect rather than gratuitously, and please, whatever you do, do not go to YouTube and search for Samuel L. Jackson’s reading of the recently published Go the Fuck to Sleep.

Just sayin’.

Here’s the video I mentioned above. It’s mildly mind-blowing.

I don’t mind, really. I like September 1st. It always speaks to me of the start of fall, and to me, fall has always been more of a beginning than New Year’s Day could ever hope to be. January 1st might begin a new calendar year, but it’s stuck in the middle of winter.

Fall, on the other hand, marks the start of school, the end of vacation, and harvest time. The air becomes cooler and crisper (though, unfortunately, we’re in the midst of a heat wave as I write this), the sun’s angle gives everything sharper edges, and there’s the smell of change in the air.

Call me crazy, but I like fall better than I like summer. I’m no fan of the heat (or humidity), and the cooler, crisper weather gives me energy I could never hope to drum up in the dog days of summer. The only real down side to fall is that it leads directly to winter, of which I’m not such a huge fan.

So it is with fresh starts and changes in mind that I write this, the first official post of the new, improved, streamlined, redesigned, and rebooted Faltarego.com.

I don’t know how the hackers got access to my website, but they did. They managed to get ftp access, create a subdirectory, and put a whole whack of malware files in it. I have my suspicions about what allowed this—there were a couple of things I had recently started to do differently—but I don’t think I’ll ever really know for sure.

What surprises me most about all of this is how calm I’ve been about it. I can chalk this up to two things: First, this website has not been a source of income for me, just a place to express myself; and second, there’ve been a number of other stressors in my life over the past month or so that really make a website hack look like a Christmas card from Aunt Tilly.

Anyway, enough said about that.

Perhaps it’s fitting that I should start this thing over again. After all, I wandered all over the map during my first year of blogging, and I’ve been—shall we say—a trifle self-indulgent in many of my posts. I think readers might be a tad more interested in reading about things I’m passionate about rather than just reading about… well… me.

So, when I read Trevor’s comment on the placeholder post I put up a couple of days ago, basically suggesting that it might be time for me to reinvent myself, I didn’t just dismiss it. I started thinking about it, and that thinking turned to action. As you can see from the page you’re now reading, I’ve done a redesign of the header and the color scheme of this blog, and with that, I’ve begun to narrow my focus.

So… Thanks, Trevor! And I’m assuming you’re the same Trevor that I know from Twitter and Facebook. Oh, wait. I know three Trevors on Facebook. Now I’m confused.

Anyway, it’s time for me to put up or shut up. There are things in this world that I believe in, and—gee, will you look at that?—I have a forum right here where I can talk about them. I have a set of skills, and if I don’t use them for promoting things I believe are worthwhile, then I’m basically just building castles in the sand.

Oh, I’ll still throw in the occasional movie or book review, but I want to primarily focus on doing some good and making people think. Maybe even impart some useful information once in a while. Wouldn’t that be something?

If you have a look at the blog’s “About” page, you’ll see a description of some of the things I believe are important, and how they tie into my new blog header graphic. So, rather than just take up more space by reiterating it here, I’ll point you over there.

Happy New Birthday, blog! And many happy return visitors!

Keep it real out there.

(Here’s John Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over”. I’ve always liked the “airport boarding announcement” just before the end of the song. You have to listen for it, but it’s there.)

As some of you know from my Twitter and Facebook updates, my site was recently hacked. This has proven to be a powerful pain in the ass, as my web hosting provider later informed me all my files had been compromised and my account needed to be reset.

This has now been done. All my files and databases have been removed, and all my account settings have been reset back to their defaults.

Because I had no proper backup, I am basically starting this site over from scratch. I do have all my earlier blog posts saved in text format, and I have copies of all the images I’ve used, so that is some comfort.

I also had a backup copy of the theme I designed, as you can see from this page.

I have more tweaking to do, but at least the site’s look is back. I’ll mull over what to do with all my older posts, but I’m going to start blogging anew over the next couple of days.

Thanks to all who’ve been reading this blog, and here’s to better days ahead.

Stay tuned.

All the best,

–Eric (aka Faltarego)