Category Archives: Writing

Quest of the Quill 2025: 6,000 words in days 1-3

PolyWogg.ca
November 3 2025

I replaced NaNoWriMo with a quest of my own, and I’m calling it the Quest of the Quill. The goal is to write 30,000 words in a month. I even have my graphics ready:

I’m only 3 days into the month, and I’m already confused a bit on my numbers. I wrote a bunch of post content, and then I decided to split it into several different posts. So, it’s written, but not finalized or posted yet. So I’m ahead of the curve a bit, and thus I’m only counting the ones that are “done” so far:

Which means my working total so far is 6,077 words, not including this post. A pretty good start.

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Replacing NaNoWriMo as a writing challenge

PolyWogg.ca
November 3 2025

If you’re not living under a rock, or even if you are but have done creative writing in the last 25 years, you’ve probably heard of NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month or National Novel Writing in a Month.

It was created in 1999 with approximately 20 participants as a writing marathon to complete a first draft of a 50,000-word novel in a month. You didn’t have to polish it; you just had to finish writing 50K words. Over the years, people tweaked the rules to fit their needs:

  • The 50K gave way to personal choice in length of writing goal, with some going longer, some going shorter;
  • The “novel” gave way to novels, non-fiction books, plays, poems, blogs, cookbooks — literally anything with words and a wordcount;
  • The “write every day” gave way to focusing on just the wordcount;
  • The “share your work” online gave way to share your wordcount, talk about your work-in-progress, connect with other authors online, join mini-writing groups to motivate you, etc.; and,
  • The “month of November” gave way to “mostly November”, with some variation by users.

About the only thing consistent throughout was that it was a sprint/marathon for one month, with a focus on word counts.… Read the rest

Was attending #Bouchercon2025 a success for me?

PolyWogg.ca
September 14 2025

That’s a bit of a strange question, isn’t it? I went to a book conference; I was NOT looking for an agent or to promote a book; I had no real defined goals in advance. I didn’t ask “Did I enjoy it?” or “Was it fun / interesting / illuminating / horrible / terrible / no good very bad 4 days?”

I asked if it was a success.

It wasn’t cheap…registration was fine, $250 or so. But staying in the hotel for six nights at $179 US plus my flights plus all my meals, taxis, and minor souvenirs isn’t pocket change. I haven’t added it up completely but it’s probably between 3.5K-4K overall, Canadian. Which I knew in advance, not whinging. Food was a bit more expensive than I expected, with fewer cheap options in the area to get to, but I’ll come back to that.

But with the cost, and the experience tied to it, I find myself wondering of course if it was worth it. Particularly as this wasn’t a family trip, it was just me on my own doing my own thing.

And the trip was a bit of a test for me in three different domains. So if I ask if it is a success, I guess I have to ask if it was worth it in those three areas.… Read the rest

Day 4 of #Bouchercon2025 in New Orleans

PolyWogg.ca
September 7 2025

Friday was a late night for many attendees, I understand, and things lasted until the wee hours. I was not part of those shenanigans, I am old and boring. And I don’t know anyone nor do that kind of thing anyway. I digress. If you want to read about my non-conference aspects of the day, check out my personal blog at https://www.thepolyblog.ca/day-4-of-bouchercon2025-in-new-orleans/.

There was an early morning “Debut Mystery Author Breakfast” where a number of attending debut authors would get a chance to speak about themselves for a minute and introduce their books to the audience (if they haven’t been on panels already, for instance). The list included Brian Tracey (aka J.B. Abbott), Tom Andes, Faye Arcand, Valerie Biel, Andrew Bridgeman, Elise Burke Brown, Hunter Burke, Chelsea Conradt, John Dingle, Laurie L. Dove, Leigh Dunlap, Wendy Gee, Amran Gowani, Walter Horsting, R.L. Carpentier, III, Elle Jauffret, Georgia Jeffries, Christy J. Kendall, N.L. Lavin, Andrew Ludington, Josh Mendoza, Jennifer K. Morita, Mark Nutter, Mark O’Neill, Joe Pan, Ryan Pote, Jenny Ramaley, R. C. Reid, Michael Rigg, Jennifer Sadera, Diane Schaffer, Amie Schaumberg, Rob D. Smith, Suja Sukumar, and Mark Thielman. Tracey, Walter Horsting, Ryan Pote, and R.C. Reid were on panels I attended, and I’ll get around to checking out all of the new authors’ offerings, in lieu of actually getting up early enough to attend breakfast.… Read the rest

Day 3 of #Boucheron2025 in New Orleans

PolyWogg.ca
September 6 2025

My cold limited some of my conference going for the day, but if you want to read about the non-conference portion, you can over on my personal blog at https://www.thepolyblog.ca/day-3-of-boucheron2025-in-new-orleans/.

But if today is Friday, it must be day 3 of #Boucheron2025 in New Orleans!

The ninth set of panels started at 9:00 a.m., and I was all set for Panel 9-1: Multiple Series: Maintaining Storyline Silos. As I mentioned yesterday, I have plans for one pseudo-fantasy series and it will not interact with anything else. However, I am interested in a second series where a bunch of the characters WILL intersect, and there might be three or four mini-series within a larger series universe (yeah, kind of like the Avengers movies without superheroes of course). So, I was keen for the topic. But I also stalk Lee Goldberg online and I was really looking forward to what he had to say about his various series — Monk, Diagnosis Murder, stuff with Janet Evanovich, three active series now, TV shows out the wazoo, he’s got it going on. And his Facebook posts are frequently amusing. This week’s was about the word benippled. 🙂 A little fanboy-ish, I suppose, on my part.… Read the rest

Day 2 of #Bouchercon2025 in New Orleans

PolyWogg.ca
September 5 2025

I had a slow start to my morning. I had missed Tai Chi (yay), some sponsorship rooms, morning speed dating sessions to link people in Column A of the industry with people in Column B of the industry, and alas, half of the fourth set of big panels. I had hoped to catch “Hooking the Reader” with great first lines, but I needed breakfast first. You can see the non-conference portion of my day on my ThePolyBlog site at https://www.thepolyblog.ca/day-2-of-bouchercon2025-in-new-orleans/

I made it to the fifth set of panels at 10:30, and went to Panel 5-4: Kickass Female Protagonists: Prince Charming Is Out of a Job. The panelists were Steph Cha, Tori Eldridge, J.T. Ellison, Taylor Stevens, and Nina Wachsman. I knew of J.T. Ellison’s work in advance, and my brain is mush as I didn’t realize Tori Eldridge writes the Lily Wong Ninja series (I’ve only read two of them). Steph Cha was new to me but she’s written the new series called Butterfly (Amazon Prime). I’ve heard of the show as it has Daniel Dae Kim in it, but I haven’t checked it out yet.

So, I’ve been thinking about something over the last two days of being here.… Read the rest

Day 1 of #Bouchercon2025 in New Orleans

PolyWogg.ca
September 4 2025

Today was Opening Day for Bouchercon2025 in New Orleans, and my first Bouchercon ever. The non-conference bits are covered on my other site, ThePolyBlog, at https://www.thepolyblog.ca/day-1-of-bouchercon2025-in-new-orleans/.

I registered at 9:30, picking up my conference bag, program, t-shirt, badge and lanyard, and four hot little tickets for books in the Book Bazaar.

There are over a hundred books to choose from, and you only get four. I picked up two by Heather Graham, the chair of the conference, entitled Legacy of Blood (part of a series called the Blackbird Files) and The Rising. I’ve started reading The Rising already, but I’ve only read about 35 pages so far. I would have loved to spend hours browsing the tables, but my cold is still kicking my butt, so I opted for a Scarpetta novel by Patricia Cornwell as book #3 and Calico by Lee Goldberg, which has been all over his Facebook feed for some time, as #4. The fact that I don’t have any room in my carry-on for the return flight home in no way impedes my bookgoblin tendencies.

I chatted with Devlin Chatterson from Montreal on the way to the first panel, as he’s here representing Crime Writers of Canada.… Read the rest

FFF: Managing in the public service like a Sheepdog

PolyWogg.ca
April 5 2025

As you can see on the PolyWogg.ca site, I have a PolyWogg Guide to HR competitions in the Canadian Federal Government. I cheekily called it Be the Duck as an extended metaphor, and I wanted something similar for another book in the same vein about being a manager. So this week’s FlashForwardFriday project is my future guide on being a manager, called Be the SheepDog: Managing from the Middle.

I went with the idea of a sheepdog rounding up sheep. It’s cutesy, a bit whimsical, maybe, and the dog is cute. The challenge is to know what to cover in a general guide to managing in the public service. I could, for example, talk about all of the different parts of government, but that gets to be more like an “introduction to public administration” than a management guide.

I could do something spunky like the 7 Habits of Highly Bureaucratic People, but I hate the term, and it’s not what I’m about.

I could do it like a business case study and talk about five or six complicated examples where features are added just to complicate the scenario, and after going through it, you feel good that you unravelled the mystery (that all started with the Big Bang).… Read the rest

Four interesting interactions with AI prompts

PolyWogg.ca
March 26 2025

I’ve been working on various projects over the last few months, some of which I will eventually talk about on my FlashForwardFriday previews of upcoming work. Many of them are still in the research and info-gathering stages, and I thought I would use some Chat AI functions to see what it could give me. In the end, I used AI in four different ways.

Using AI as a brainstorming partner

The first was for a project I’ll talk about later this week, a review of music of different years. I’ve written a previous take on 1943 as a year’s worth of music, what was going on, what music was everlasting, etc. But while I was planning to treat it as “A PolyWogg Guide to Music”, part of my ongoing series of serialized guides, I was having trouble with branding it. So I booted up the AI prompts and told it generally what I was trying to do … namely, look at the various lists of the “best songs of a year”, mostly from Billboard, and write my own review of a year’s music, comparing my list to the published one. With a touch of “Billboard got it wrong!”.

I had the Prompt give me a list of 10 titles to work from, and another list of 10 slogans to consider.… Read the rest

FFF: My updated guide to HR competitions

PolyWogg.ca
March 21 2025

Last week, I mentioned that I would start doing FlashForwardFriday (FFF) where I will talk about upcoming projects. At the time, I outlined my plans for an introduction to astronomy. This week, I’m revisiting my first, only and original guide, Be the Duck: Succeeding in Canadian Federal Government Competitions.

The current version

The short version of the long history is that, way back in 2004 or so, a friend asked me to present to a bunch of new, young civil servants on how to prepare for competitions. Two weeks later, I got an email from someone asking me about my deck. Except I didn’t know them; they hadn’t been at the presentation nor on the distribution list for it. They weren’t even in the same department! Somebody had shared my deck with 2 friends, and they told 2 friends, and the next thing I knew, I was a shampoo commercial.

My friend Vivian and I called it the Completely Unofficial and Totally Unauthorized guide so that HR people wouldn’t get nervous that I was kind of, sort of, a little bit talking about HR, but not THEIR version of HR, rather about how we get ready as applicants. I subsequently put it on my website, I’ve done dozens of presentations over the years, and my guide has been downloaded about 15,000 times now from the Polywogg.ca… Read the rest

Working on some non-fiction writing goals

PolyWogg.ca
March 8 2025

My biggest output to date is my HR guide, in all its forms, going back to 2004 or so. I’m happy people like it, the price doesn’t hurt ($0, downloadable PDF with no friction to access), and there is limited competition in a narrow niche. But I have plans for other guides, and to that end, I’ve been working on some cover pages for the books to serve as inspiration. My list of planned books is growing, though, and I have decided to start working on some of them before I retire instead of waiting.

HR-related books

First and foremost, I’ll update the HR Guide to competitions, aka Be the Duck. It’s relatively given that I’ll update it, and I’ll probably do three more significant updates before I call it quits when I retire.

Secondly, I am doing one called Be the Swan, which is more about managing your career.

Thirdly, I’ll do one called Be the SheepDog about being a manager with some elements about becoming an EX potentially.

And finally, one about “when things go wrong” and you have to deal with conflict, grievances, staffing complaints, etc. I’m not entirely sure what that one will look like. I’ve considered a few formats, but none particularly resonate with me yet.… Read the rest

FFF: A future guide to astronomy

PolyWogg.ca
March 4 2025

An author that I follow online does something called Free Fiction Mondays. I like the premise, but I’m going with FlashForwardFriday (FFF). Each Friday, I’m going to give you a preview of something I’m working on, with all the bells and whistles. For the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about an astronomy guide that I want to write. In short, I don’t like a lot of the guides out there already, not because they’re bad or anything, but because they don’t resonate with the way I approach astronomy. Nuances here and there, gaps over there, a metaphor that doesn’t land. And most of them without a “framework” to guide what they are trying to communicate.

My approach is simple — what would *I* need to know to do stuff? Nothing more, nothing less. An overview of the various topics, with enough information to get my feet wet and to be able to move on to the next piece, along with a framework of how it all fits together. That’s my goal. That’s what I want to share.

Let’s start with the cover

Astro cover

When I first started my HR guide, I framed it as a series, aka A PolyWogg Guide to Government.… Read the rest

It’s official…I’m heading to the Big Easy

PolyWogg.ca
February 22 2025

In previous posts, I talked about various book and writers’ conferences that interest me. I had it relatively narrowed down to ThrillerFest (in NYC every year) or BoucherCon (in New Orleans this year).

I really wanted to go to Thrillerfest because I love David Morrel and he was going to be there again this year (he goes every year). I looked at flights, had it worked out for some good options, and then went to book the hotel. Except I ran into a glitch. The main parts of Thrillerfest that interest me are Friday and Saturday. So I tried to book in Thursday and out on Sunday — four days, three nights. Except the main hotel is/was sold out. Well, dang it. Okay, it’s Manhattan, there are lots of choices. Except when I went to look for similar bookings, I was getting prices in the $1800 US range. Wait, it was only $300 a night at the conference. I started playing with options to maybe only go for one night (Friday), nd maybe fly down Friday morning, leave Saturday night. Quick down and back. I went back and was fiddling around with the main site and saw that you could see other room options even if sold out.… Read the rest

My brain won’t let a creative idea go for PolyWogg guides…

PolyWogg.ca
February 19 2025

I think I’ve mentioned more than once (hah!) that I think in frameworks. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote my HR guide. I have a framework that works for me, it makes sense to me. More importantly, it lets me make sense of the HR world AND to be able to communicate that approach to others in a way that often resonates with them and let’s them understand it.

I’m not the smartest guy in the room. I don’t have the deepest insights. I’m not the most experienced with the most profound understanding of a topic. But I often can find a way within a framework approach to figure out how **I** understand it, and then explain that same approach to others in a way that they tell me they find helpful.

It works well for HR, but I am confident enough to admit that I know it is an approach that works in other areas too. I might have trouble EXPLAINING the framework until I’ve actually created it or written it down, but once I have it down in some form of written or graphic form, it’s clear. And then I own it intellectually, spiritually, physically, mentally. It becomes part of me.… Read the rest

So, I want to go to a book conference

PolyWogg.ca
February 18 2025

I’m a book nerd, born and bred. I’m replicating that with my son, who has gone from having a book collection resembling that of a small town library to going through series after series to taking a book whenever we go anywhere. It is one of the things I am most proud of with him, even if most of it is just his personality and I get no credit for it. Having a literacy practitioner for a mom probably doesn’t hurt his support network either.

With that love of books, I’ve always wanted to go to a book conference. I minimally helped to organize a mystery one here in Ottawa the year Jacob was born, and the weekend that it happened? Yeah, that’s the weekend Andrea had a premature partial rupture of the membrane (PPROM). Fun times, I hung out with her at the hospital, scared out of our gourd. No book conference for us! I haven’t tried for another one since! 🙂 The conference or another kid!.

Which leaves me wanting to attend a conference somewhere. I don’t know if I want to attend a book festival or a writing conference, although either will do for my interests. 🙂 I’m scouring the web for some options; let’s see what I find.… Read the rest

Curation: The 26th Annual 101 Best Websites for Writers (Writer’s Digest)

PolyWogg.ca
February 9 2025

Every few years, I try to review the list of what WD thinks are the best websites for writers, as included each year in the Writer’s Yearbook. You don’t need to read the list every year; for 2025, 91 were included last year with only ten new “additions”. They don’t say which 10 they dropped to make room.

The first set, Creativity, has 6 sites listed, all repeats. I’ve looked at the sites before, but I confess I find nothing “inspiring” in most. Many are light on craft and heavy on reading recommendations in multiple ways, but they do interviews with writers that may reveal their creative process. It includes one software package (MasterWriter). However, I confess the site TerribleMinds.com/ramble is worth its weight in gold, assuming you’re willing to do some panning. The blog part that you want to read is primarily from Chuck Wendig, a very candid and opinionated writer when it comes to writing and the publishing business. That might sound bad, but it isn’t. He definitely has clear views, but he’ll tell you why he has those views and what experiences he has had, and he is very transparent. When he started sharing his experiences, some people thought he was nuts.… Read the rest

Curated: We Need To Talk About Professional Jealousy – Electric Literature

PolyWogg.ca
January 20 2023

I occasionally like to share online articles that I like, and you’ll see sporadic posts entitled “Articles I Like” throughout the blog. But honestly, Curated is probably a more accurate title. I recently found an article by Benjamin Schaefer on the website Electric Literature, although I was led there by ThePassiveVoice website. The article is entitled “We need to talk about professional jealousy,” but if you read through it, you’ll see that the term isn’t quite right.

We Need To Talk About Professional Jealousy

He is writing from the perspective of a writer who is not as successful as some other writer friends. And when he saw their successes, he tried to hide from what he was feeling, telling himself that it was jealousy. But as he notes, it is not really jealousy. If you accept that jealousy is usually experienced from the perspective that someone else has something, it is finite, and therefore you can’t have it, or even more pointedly that it is something that can be taken from you by another, seeing someone else’s success is more about envy than true jealousy.

And I find that an incredible nuance. I have always felt that “jealousy” was never the right term in careers, writing or otherwise, even when it was a position you competed for and didn’t get.… Read the rest

#NaNoWriMo2022: Days 11-19: A wasteland revisited

PolyWogg.ca
November 19 2022

The last week has been a wasteland of productivity with many other things intervening. School, appointments, ambulance rides. Yeah, not a great week.

Jacob checked in tonight on his book, Draconic Earth, finishing a chapter and starting a new one. Some of it is foreshadowing major pieces for his eventual conclusion. About 400 words in total.

Andrea is still working on her “cancer journey” story, suitable for future blogging installments but for now, she is writing without editing as she goes. About 2700 words in total.

I did a few blogs in the last week, but not much new writing. I also received some really great feedback from a beta reader on my updated HR guide, Chapter 2 (Understanding yourself), and it took a while to get everything incorporated, updated and saved. It’s mostly camera ready, I think at this point. 3475 “final” words added to the book, bringing the edited total to 7962. That’s a little under 10%, I think. But I’m happy with the progress considering everything else going on in the last week.

Onward!

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Holy crap, I missed two milestones!

PolyWogg.ca
November 11 2022

I’ve been doing a fair amount of blogging in the last two years here and there, I’ve moved some stuff around, added some content that was pending. And somewhere in all of that, one of my “tools” stopped functioning. I had a word count plugin that wasn’t very good, and it even reached the stage where WordPress wondered if it was abandoned before it was updated recently.

So, I haven’t been keeping track of my word count overall between my two sites. I knew I was up there. I had hit 1.5M words quite some time ago, and I figured I was probably over 2M now easily. I had to be, right?

Today I did a quick dive to find a simple word count stats plugin to replace the old one, which is not as easy as it sounds. There are lots of REALLY complicated ones out there, but I don’t want all that extra bloat. I just want the basic stats.

Basic stats

For the number of posts, I have 1591 here at ThePolyBlog, although 26 are still in draft. PolyWogg has another 147 with 3 in draft, although that will likely increase as I revamp that site a bit more and add some regular blogging posts about HR or astronomy.… Read the rest

#NaNoWriMo2022: Days 07-10: From blog to dragons to blog

PolyWogg.ca
November 11 2022

We’ve all had other stuff going on the last few days, so our word count was a bit lower in there. Tonight we re-engaged, with different pieces:

a. Andrea is working on a blog about her cancer experience over the last while, which will eventually show up on my blog here somewhere, probably a series of shorter posts in the end. But she added 3700 words tonight.

b. Jacob struggled a bit, which isn’t surprising, but he managed 170 words. He’s been tired the last few nights and had some challenges with his computer earlier this week. Funny story in there actually…we went to the local computer shop, thinking we might go for a full new gaming rig, but it would have been a desktop instead of a laptop to keep the cost down. So he would have lost his mobility factor when he goes to Peterborough or the cottage. Just to be “sure” about options, I took his laptop with us in case there were other config things we could do. Most of the time, they’re backed up in service, you have to leave equipment and they’ll call you, nothing unusual about that though. Instead, they were perfectly happy to open it up on the spot, not forcing me to wait in the bench queue, to see what internal upgrades were possible on the existing chassis.… Read the rest