Has anything I have said to date on this blog has led you to believe that I read the Harvard Business Review?
Go on, you can be honest. 😉
Well, occasionally, I do, as I believe in broadening the mind (and, you know, himself sometimes brings one home from his flitting about on planes).
Anyway, in the December 2011 edition they had a FASCINATING article about research done by one James W Pennebaker on how the use of pronouns reveals one’s personality.
Two Wednesdays ago, I mentioned that one of my works in progress is set in picturesque Portsea (that’s Portsea, Victoria, Australia, not Portsea, Portsmouth, England, just in case you were wondering).
As part of my research, I looked at (and took) a lot of pictures of the Portsea pier, which is on the beach behind the Portsea Hotel (which featured in the other post).
In the process of finding these photos, I came across some gems from the Australian screen archives.
They show happy people – probably mostly day-trippers from Melbourne – frolicking on the beach and pier at Portsea in the 1920s.
I love the stripey beach shelters, the variety of 20s beach fashions and the blase attitude people show to being filmed. I wonder if we would be more or less relaxed about a camera on the beach these days?
It’s also interesting to see how many people were there. Now wonder someone thought it was a good idea to set up a pub in those sand dunes!
My novel is set in the present day, but I still found these fascinating and thought you might too.
I’m sorry, I can’t embed them, but if you click on the links you’ll be taken to the page. Don’t bother turning up your sound – they’re silent!
http://aso.gov.au/titles/newsreels/picturesque-portsea-pageant/clip1/
http://aso.gov.au/titles/newsreels/picturesque-portsea-pageant/clip2/
I love little snippets of history like this. What about you? Have you come across anything interesting in your travels lately?
For those who aren’t up (or is it down?) with writerly abbreviations, a WIP is a Work In Progress. I have a couple on the boil at the moment, along with several on the proverbial back burner, where they can just stay until these others are finished!
For one of the current ones, I had to do some research on key logging software.
I knew about key loggers in the vaguest sense from warnings I have received about hackers. They are programs that the sneaky hacker tries to load onto your computer to track what keys you hit, with the aim of finding the strings of keystrokes that are passwords. Which they then use to steal your money, one imagines.
But I had no idea that you could go out and buy the software, quite legally.
Wine, Women & Wordplay 