Publishing Tribulations

Okay so I will start here...

Now I have that out of my system, what am I talking about?  I am talking about English.

As you may notice I am English, I speak English, I write in English I am fluent in English.

I recently sent a piece literature for publishing, I've self published before, this time it was going to a publisher.... Their reply:

Sorry to hear you are unable to response in person for your trities will not meet our publishing guideline.  Please check and correct spelling, punctuation and parographing, formatting and font.

Very seriously this was the reply I was sent.

I have withdrawn my manuscript for consideration with them, sending it to penguin... No no the publisher, just a penguin, it'll be able to give me a more coherent reply.

ChatGPT Poetry

I've had a play with ChatGPT, completely away from asking it to write or improve code snippets I asked it to generate some poetry...

Could you tell me a poem in the style of Wilfred Owen but about Strawberries and Skunks?

And here's the reply....

The strawberry fields, so red and sweet,

Are guarded by the skunk, so discreet.

He sprays his scent with such disdain,

To keep the birds and beasts at bay.

But man, with greed in heart and mind,

Does not let the skunk's defense bind.

He steals the fruit, so plump and ripe,

And leaves the skunk with nought but spite.

But in the end, the skunk prevails,

For though the berries may be hailed,

The smell of skunk, it lingers still,

And serves to remind us of our ill.

So let us honor the skunk's defense,

And give the strawberries their due recompense.

For in this balance, all is fair,

And all may share the bountiful air.

Prodj, Praw or Pro?

I've just had one of those moments, I speak with an accent from the British Midlands.  I've been told my accent is fairly neutral, but I know I have a Nottingham twang to certain words, and when I'm being lazy I can sound right common (that is lower-class).

The vowel constructs I know I'm worst at are "Op" such as "Open" and "Operation" and "Ov" as in "Over", and I often made even my wife's eyes twitch when I say "it's upen uver there" pointing at a shop or parking space.

Today however I'm picking on "Pro".... Now, as a British English speaker I've never had this issue locally, we all say "project" with a "prodject" sound, we don't stress the "pro"... It's a prodject, not a PROject to my ear.  It's like saying "podge" as in stuffed full of food, but with an 'r'.

Right or wrong this distinguishes that word with "Projector" and "projection", you know the habit of shining light through something to put an image on a screen or wall... that is "PROjection" when I say it.  And this has been automatic to me all my life and I've known what my peers at school, home and work meant we were all very local, so we all knew the distinction and never really thought about it.

However, working in game development with a very wide range of folks I've just been called out.

Talking about a project with graphics the projection matrix came up.... And yes, you guessed it, in the meeting I said (something like) "the prodject is coming along well, I'm using the inverse PROjection matrix to check a ray intersection".

I literally got called out at that point, never noticed it before, I've heard folks saying "PROject" but ignored them... The problem?

One of the folks happened to be from the North West of England (Manchester I believe) and he said... "PRAWject".... and "PRAWcessing".... Yeah, even I was twitching then.

Either way, it was an interesting moment.

By my But

I'm a little tired of my touch typing being out of practice, having been coding for a long time, I've let my actual narrative writing fall by the way side, and I've noticed a decline in the accuracy of my typing that must be addressed.

This will mean time, time writing, time throwing things on this blog perhaps!

However, the biggest problem at the moment is my fingers being asked to type the word "by" and I'm often caught out typing "but".

Which is very very annoying.

Speak More Slowly Please

I'm English, this means I speak English, or at least a dialect of it... This mere fact has furnished me with the ability to communicate to a myriad of other people, of different nationalities and inclinations.

However, it completely alienates me from the French.

Well, a certain sub-set of French speakers, whom simply are rude... Now, I'm sorry, but these people exist, and good on them, they want to protect their beloved French language from the likes of me, coming along speaking it with a terrible rich British Midlands accent.

I accept that.

I'm not trying to compose poetry in French, I'm just trying to communicate with someone, so when I say:

"parlez plus lentement sil vous plais, je ne pas parlez Francais bon"

I think I'm asking them to speak more slowly please, as I don't speak French very well.  I don't expect them to stop the conversation completely, roll their eyes and then turn their back on me.  That's rude.

And this wasn't an isolated case, since the mid-90's it's happened a few times.  And every single time it annoys me more.

When a French person speaks to me with strongly accented and semantically incorrect English, I of course listen to them, I'll even take a stab at working out what they were intimating, I'll smile and maintain eye contact, reassure them they are okay to just try... Very much a "we'll get there together" feel to the conversation.

Some French speakers however... Just Rude.

There, I've said it, I'll leave this here....

This post also may give away why there's been a small break in posts for the last half month... No I've not been anywhere, but I have been extremely busy.