How?

Being a Very Frequently Asked Question

There are two secrets to a happy life.

I do not know either of them.

My own personal trick, which I'm not sure I'd recommend because I'm not sure how happy I am, comes down to the ability to focus on things. When I'm interested in something, I find it very easy to ignore everything that distracts me from it, including things like "hunger" and "sleep". That's how I get things done. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on things I find less engaging. That's why, throughout my entire academic career, I always did my worst in the really easy classes. Challenge me with a novel problem and I will pour myself into solving it. The great thing about generative linguistics, from that perspective, is that it's one of the youngest major scientific fields—Syntactic Structures turns 50 in 2007—and so most of the big problems are still completely unsolved. Hence, I was good at it, because unsolved problems are interesting as hell.

I am a perfectionist by nature, and I don't believe that's necessarily a good thing, for several reasons. One is that, for a long time, I found it easy to decide not to do something if I wasn't certain I could do it perfectly. I'd like to think I've more or less rid myself of that tendency. The other major reason is that I sometimes care so much about getting things right that I get lost in details. No matter what I end up doing with Fear Sweeney, it was a good thing for me that I wrote it, because participating in NaNoWriMo led me to discover a new mantra: Write First, Edit Later. Accepting WFEL as my personal savior was the most important thing I've ever done in fighting my inner perfectionist. Now my goal with everything (but especially with writing) is to worry about getting it complete first, then worry about getting it perfect. So now, as I near a final draft of Fear Sweeney, is an appropriate time to try and find a Tuesday in the year 393 that happens to land on the seventh day of one of the months of the Delphic calendar1.

When I am at the stage for research, if it isn't obvious from the underdotted links everywhere, my first stop is Wikipedia. Ah, Wikipedia. I could write such poetry. Caveat lector and so forth, sure, but it's still the closest humanity has yet come to a complete compendium of the knowledge of humanity. Plus, I can use it without moving, which is a bonus. I love reference books, don't get me wrong, and even though the internet is gradually rendering them irrelevant have a fairly impressive collection of foreign language dictionaries in particular. Granted, I have never really needed my Catalan↔English, and even if I ever did need my English→Khmer I'd have a hell of time actually trying to read the entries, which are all in untransliterated Khmer script. But really these are minor issues. Where else am I going to find an illustrated guide to the Arabic words for fourteen different marsupials?

As for the more mechanical side of things: my word processor of choice for fiction is RoughDraft, but I did actually write part of the first draft of Fear Sweeney on the misted-up Plexiglas of a bus shelter once, when inspiration struck and the 14 was running late. This site (with the exception of the Eleventh Volume) is powered by a number of idiosyncratic PHP scripts of my own creation—I'm a PHP autodidact, and it probably shows—collectively (and increasingly inaccurately) called BlogHead. I write code in vim, though I've never gotten around to learning to do so properly. The Eleventh Volume, on the other hand, is powered by MediaWiki, though I finally managed to fix it so it matches the rest of the site, right down to converting hyphens to em dashes.

I would be lost without the following reference materials:

• Online:
• General Reference:
• Wikipedia knows everything worth knowing.
• Google knows everything else.
• Languages/Linguistics:
• The Online Etymological Dictionary is a half-decent (if confusingly abbreviated) free substitute for...
• The Oxford English Dictionary, which, as of this writing, I still have access to, despite having graduated two months ago. Choke on it, UMD library system!
• The Language Construction Kit is the definitive guide to creating artificial languages for fun and probably not profit.
• Omniglot is very much like those big expensive books documenting all the writing systems of the world, except it's not a big expensive book.
• phpSyntaxTree is a glorious little device that translates ugly bracket notation into pretty little syntax trees for you. Mind you, I don't have that much use for it these days, but I'm sure I can think of something.
• Online Dictionaries:
• LOGOS will translate just about anything into just about anything, when it's working.
• Lexicool is also panglottal, at least in theory, and very good for technical words.
• LEO kicks it German↔English, German↔French, and German↔Spanish. Most German words link to declension and conjugation information. As close as I've yet seen to the online dictionary greater than which none can be conceived.
• ARTFL is a mediocre French↔English dictionary. France remains way behind from an internet lexicography perspective.
• Geiriadur ar-lein is a Welsh↔English dictionary that, while lacking somewhat in the depth of its lexicon, is still the best place to go if you want to know how to say "pancake" in Welsh2. Pronouncing it is left up to you.
• Perseus doesn't make their English→Greek, English→Latin, or either→English dictionaries too obvious, but every true Johnny knows they're there.
• Zhongwen is okay as an Chinese↔English dictionary, but what's really great about it is the torrents of information about the various hànzì, with detailed etymology—and, crucially, links to other dictionaries (about half of which work), giving the pronunciation and meaning of the hànzì in Cantonese and Japanese.
• Not a dictionary, but still incredibly useful: a Japanese transliterator that can convert between kanji, hiragana, and romaji. But why can't I find one for Devanāgarī and the rest of the Brahmic family? It should be so simple!
• Most people never need a Mandinka↔English lexicon and grammar (both PDFs), but then I'm not most people.
• Books (links go to Amazon.com):
• General Reference:
• Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is perhaps the ultimate in nerd candy.
• The Layman's Parallel Bible displays four different Biblical translations side by side. Certainly worth owning3.
• Languages/Linguistics:
• The Oxford Spanish Dictionary is large and heavy and will dissuade intruders.
• The Oxford Russian Dictionary is much the same, but more boring-looking.
• The 19^th century Portuguese↔English phrase book English as She Is Spoke is legendary as the worst phrase book ever published, and with good reason—the author didn't know English. Is it, strictly speaking, a reference book? It is if I say it is.
• The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association was the first linguistics book I ever read for fun—and, if you're me, it's pretty damn fun.
• Richard Kayne's The Antisymmetry of Syntax has an inaccurate name4, but if you know a little about syntax it's very fun to read, because it's completely insane in every detail, and yet the insanity seems to be justified at every turn. Hint: "one"-substitution.
• Noam Chomsky is a really boring author, but a total cutie-pie nonetheless.
• Serendipitous Discoveries:
• Schott's Original Miscellany is, as the title implies, a collection of miscellaneous bits of pointless trivia. If you're not intrigued by that description, don't bother.
• The Book of Imaginary Beings is a book by Jorge Luis Borges—and it could only be by Borges—which describes a collection of fantastic beings taken from the very depths of folklore and fiction, most of which you've never heard of before.

(There are, of course, a thousand other wonderful reference books in the world, several of them, albeit never enough, on my shelves. These are the ones that came to mind as being particularly important or interesting, which is hardly a fair criterion, but it's the only one I've got.)