Because I clearly don't have enough projects that I'm slacking off on...

[mousme]

This is way too cool.

Did I mention that I have very cool friends? Utterly and massively geeky, but that just makes them even cooler in my books.

I want to write an encyclopedia now. I keep referring to things in my life like that.

Of course, I know nothing about writiing an encyclopedia, and doubtless I'd end up with something that had far too large a scope for the type of project that slipjig is describing. Still, it sounds like fun. In fact, it sounds like something forthright would come up with.

Okay, I'm going to attempt to go to bed now.

I have to go to work early tomorrow, because my boss is letting me leave early to get stuff done with the Régie des Rentes du Québec and stuff.

Gah.

Not. Enough. Time.

Comments

[swestrup]

It might be a fun project for you, but its not something I would do. An encyclopedia about me would be tres boring. I've never done much worth writing about.

Still, I can imagine setting up a wikipedia so that you could add entries whenever you wanted, and just seeing where it went.

[slipjig.livejournal.com]

Aw, shucks. *blush*

Seriously, the scope of the project doesn't have to be any more or less broad than you want it to be. The way I look at it is this: Imagine that you wanted to tell some stories about your life, to people who know nothing about you. What are the names and places and concepts that you would have to stop and briefly explain before you go on, or which would inspire you to go on a five-minute tangent? Now imagine that you had this reference book that these people could flip through and find all this information, so that you can go on without slowing.

That's the encyclopedia. It's not an autobiography, so much as an autobiography's appendix. Which is not to say that the appendix isn't going to approach book-length anyway, but still....

(Oh, and if you do write up some or all of such a project, I'd love to see it!)

[mousme.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's my problem. I'd want to write about everything, and then it would get too long. How did you go about selecting what to write about and what not to write about?

[slipjig.livejournal.com]

To be honest, it's rather arbitrary in a lot of ways. It's all according to whim, what I feel like writing about that day (which means that there's a whole lot of short entries *laugh*). The way I have it set up is that any time something or someone gets mentioned in an entry that deserves an entry of its own, I highlight it in red (for example, Mulligatawny is defined as the apartment shared by Lauren [my ex] and me from '92 to '93; both Lauren's and my names are in red). Then I add the red items as their own boldface entries if I haven't already done so—no content, just the entry name. When I get an itch to write some more on the project, instead of adding something out of the blue I'll often pick one of the undefined entries and get that out of the way, so I stay more or less caught up. But it all comes down to whim, and what stories would be fun to tell.

It started out, actually, as being only a glossary of slang. A coworker of mine is writing a novel, and she occasionally asks me to brainstorm, say, names for a sardonic college student's cat, or the like. One day, she asked me for a nickname given to a psycho ex-girlfriend, and I suggested carnivorous plant, which she loved. That inspired me to write up about a dozen terms from that period for her enjoyment, which grew further when I realized that some of the definitions required background information (e.g. if I define whatnots as a menu item at the Etc., I now have to explain what The Etc. is). From there, it blew way beyond my control. Take that as a warning. *grin*