Lynda shermer's blog

Geography

At the moment, in addition to writing scenes for my own future works (alas, each time the impulse takes me, it's a different story concept. I'm not sure this is the way to make progress on a story.)

So I'm feeding the printer-friendly versions of stories into a text to speech engine on my iPhone. (I can recommend Voice Dream, on the app store. It's seems to take the most file formats.)

This approach has terrible problems of cadence, intonation, and basic pronunciation (some of which could be solved by building a phonetic dictionary file.)

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Dysphoria bites

I find, even when it would be inconvenient, after a couple of years, dysphoria builds up and must be satisfied. Reading, anime / movies, or tv; these can only do so much. Even though it is inconvenient, I find I must satisfy these needs, and dress at least a little.

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My Homecoming

I was attempting a drabble, on a concept that had been lodged in my mind for some time, but it can be TOUGH to write that short.

As you can see, I continue to write. I write scenes and dialog, but need to work on my plotting to find where a story is going. I am hopeful my block is clearing, and may have something next month.

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Identity

Much as I've tried to keep a separate existence from myself (confusing enough), Lynda now has a Twitter account and a YouTube logon.

Unfortunately, twitter insisted I tie it to a physical phone number, which can trace back...

In the old days of the internet, it was much easier to juggle identities. Having two email addresses was child's play...

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Confidence Trick notes

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"Fitness Class" was a solo. Or at least, I could have sworn it was.

But here I am, posting a follow up about a third the original's size. The "universe" does not have a name (other than "Fitness Class"), but there it is.

Most of my stories seem to me to be complete when I write them, the length varies, but usually getting them to proper Novelette length (17500 words or more) would be a struggle. They begin at the beginning, move through the scenes I've invented, and then they end, and that's how long they are.

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Additional proofing

I ran the printer version of "The Answer" through text-to-speech on my iPhone. That pointed out some misphrasings and typos to my ear, for all the strange pronunciations it resulted in.

The typos, at least, I'll fix shortly. And I'll think I'll employ text-to-speech as a late proofing stage on stories from now on, to cut down on errors.

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A milestone

My stories are starting to garner comments, written by people weeks after they were posted. This is Good!

Still working on the next story; it's not that much longer, but had scenes I had to add after the first draft. Maybe next week...

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JDrama "Life as a Girl" (on Youtube)

So, in the course of my rambles about the Internet, I became aware of this

"Life As A Girl" (https://youtu.be/2MDctbl32UE) from 2018, 1 season (only 4 episodes) (I've only seen 2. English subtitled. Said to be on SOME Netflix, although evidently not the North American feed.)

Watching it, I find a bit of a mixed bag.

She is living and working as a female, only interested in female partners. "she wants to becomes a girl, hasn't done any thing about her body 'yet'".

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It's weird

It's weird; these days when I do a word search, I'll find something I don't remember reading before, and then I'll realize it's one of MY stories...

(In editing my own stories, I develop a familiarity that seems to prevent me from recognizing the individual sentences, as there are alternate versions in memory, too.)

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Choosing faces, via Cellphone App

No one app will do it all.

First, dealing with the appearance. If you wear glasses, take them off now. Holding the phone above eye level (high angles, everyone!) we snap the base image.

I’ve paid for a month or so of the Pro option in FaceApp, but you really don’t have to for our use.

Hit Gallery, a button in the bottom row in the middle; The app will want access to your photos. Some people worry that FaceApp is being used to strip mine faces for Facial Recognition, but we’ve clearly decided we don’t mind giving them a photo or two from our camera photo stream.

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An attempt at a review of "The Prince & the Dressmaker"

A few months ago, an item of interest to our community came across my twitter, which is unusual, as my twitter is almost totally devoid of gender related content.

It was the graphic novel, "The Prince & The Dressmaker" by Jen Wang. Published in 2018, it has come up again recently.

This will be a "how it made me feel" review to avoid (most) spoilers.

Set in what I suspect is a fantasy of Paris and Europe in the 1800s,

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Notes on sitting pretty

So, I was editing my next story on my iPad when I glanced at my writing folder and remembered “Sitting Pretty” was done. I did a fast proof read (too fast, as it turns out, as there are one or two rough patches), and turned it into an experiment on more rapid posting from an iPad. I don’t think it went too badly. Again, if my notes are to be believed, I wrote it sometime before December of 2013, when I was just a lurker here, before I made my account.

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