Methods and Tools

On May 10, 2010May 11, 2010 By griffinwordsIn Words OutLeave a comment

In my years of fiction writing I’ve tried many different methods for coming up words and making a record of them, everything from writing in pencil on legal pads, to writing with a fountain pen on plain white paper, to some old Atari ST word processor, to Wordperfect for DOS, to Word for Windows, then Word for Mac, WriteRoom and assorted other minimal text editors, and finally Scrivener.

I’m actually quite happy working in Scrivener, which is an integrated outlining, organizing, composing and editing application for Mac OSX, in case you haven’t heard of it. Find out more here, at the Scrivener page on the Literature and Latte developer page. But even though I feel as comfortable with Scrivener as with anything else I’ve ever used, I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to dictate some first drafts sections as a way of capturing a different sort of voice (in the writing voice sense, not the spoken voice).

This made me think about all the different possibilities for writing methods and tools, and I decided to undertake a sort of game or experiment. I have several short story ideas pending, ready to draft fairly soon, and ordinarily I’d draft a new one approximately every month, which is about the rate I finalize stories and send them out. I decided I’m going to try to draft one new story per week this month, using a different method and different tools for each.

The four plans are:

1. longhand on plain paper, working from a normal (for me) moderately-developed outline and basic character sketches

2. voice dictation only, working from an extra-detailed outline — more of a move-by-move synopsis, halfway to story form really

3. draft in Writeroom, a distraction free text editor, in case you didn’t know — web site here — using a normal outline and character plan

4. create a story using my usual workflow in Scrivener, using corkboard planning layout, outlining, character notes, and drafting each scene in a separate file

Saturday I began round one and started drafting using a regular old pen and clipboard and paper, just like the old times. Everything went very well at first, when I was full of energy and knew exactly where I was going. I wrote about 2500 words in just a few hours, which is pretty good for me.

I encountered a problem when I began to doubt my outline, and wanted to take the story in a slightly different direction. For some reason, faced with nothing but blank pages ahead of me, I had an unusual sense of uncertainty about forging off in a new direction. It was difficult to sort back through the handwritten scribbles on a dozen or so sheets of paper, enough to get a good sense that I was really correct about my intuition. In other words, I began to doubt myself, to freeze up and have a difficult time figuring out which road to take. It’s possible this reflects a weakness in my outline or the story concept, but I don’t think so. I think the truth is that the breezy confidence I usually feel when I’m laying out a first draft depends to a large degree on the markers I’ve layed out for myself, not only showing the way ahead but also letting me figure out, at a quick backward glance where I’ve just come from.

So, I’m about 2/3 of the way through this story after a few hours work on Saturday and another frustrating hour’s stab at it on Sunday and again this morning, and I’ve already decided round one has taught me all I need to know. I typed in my fifteen longhand pages earlier, and as soon as I finish this blog post, I’m going to create a new Scrivener document and finish this story in there.

When that’s through, I’ll continue with rounds two, three and four, but at this point what I’ve learned is that writing longhand makes me feel adrift, and lost without any point of reference. It’s weird, because I’ve written thousands of pages of first draft that way in my twenties, but that’s where I am now. I’ll retreat to Scrivener, break this baby into scene bits and re-assess whether one bit of bad news happens to character A mid-way, or at the very beginning, and that will determine how character A and character B treat each other up to that point.

Fun stuff, actually. I’ll report back later one once I’ve had a chance to try some other tricks.

MarsEdit versus MacJournal observations

On May 8, 2010September 2, 2010 By griffinwordsIn Blogging1 Comment

Both MarsEdit and MacJournal appear to have strengths and weaknesses relative to what I’m trying to do, which is compose and edit blog entries in a single location, and post them to both WordPress and Livejournal and thus keep two blogs synchronized while I figure out which to stick with.

Initially I liked MacJournal better, because you can create a single “entry” and once it’s composed, send it first to one blog and then to the other. MarsEdit uses a different organizational structure in that every blog is kept in a separate folder within the window, and each blog entry must be composed in one blog or the other, then copied-and-pasted into the other blog. Though this is less than idea, the two blog folders are only separated by a tiny bit of screen space, so it’s still more convenient than separately managing the two blogs.

When I post images to my blogs — something I’m trying to do less frequently now, unless there’s a good reason, because it makes composing the blog entry more difficult and time consuming and thus something I’m less likely to do often — I upload the images via FTP to my own server (hypnos.com), in a sub-folder, and then link within the post to the image URL. This way, I always know where my images are, what they’re named, and I can download them, mess with them in Photoshop, repurpose them or whatever. Using the image attachment feature of the blog itself just stashes the file away on WordPress or Livejournal’s servers, and isn’t how I want to do it. I have plenty of storage space on my own server and this seems more in line with how I edit and post to the hypnos.com web site and online store.

Here’s where the problem with MacJournal reveals itself. MacJournal is promoted as software for blogging and journaling but it’s really best suited for private diaries, note-keeping, or journals, rather than a full-fledged blogging tool. There’s no means of editing the HTML code of your entry, which reveals just how limited MacJournal is as a blog editing tool. Also, as I’ve worked with this software in evaluation mode for two days, several times it has completely lost track of my Livejournal settings and I’ve had to re-enter them from scratch. I don’t mean just re-entering or confirming my password, but entering all the blog address, username and password information as if I’d never entered it in the first place. For these reasons, MacJournal just isn’t going to work.

MarsEdit has some weaknesses. I already mentioned that each entry must be duplicated from one blog into the other — not a deal-breaker, but I wish there were a way of creating just a single entry and then cross-posting (even if it takes two steps). Another weakness is the lack of tag support within Livejournal. My WordPress posts can be fully edited and manipulated within MarsEdit, no problems I can find at all, but Livejournal posts cannot have tags entered. If I want to tag my Livejournal posts I’ll need to log into Livejournal’s web interface and do this manually. I figure this is the direction I’ll go, just log into Livejournal every once in a while and tag all the entries I’ve made.

MarsEdit HTML support is great, in fact it looks like it could be a perfectly good interface for editing regular old web site pages (though it wouldn’t function for uploading your files — it only works with blogging platforms), as it has HTML code interface, WYSIWYG editing, and a web preview capability.

One final downside to MarsEdit is the requirement for OSX 10.6 (that’s Mac talk, for you Windows fellers), and my old laptop, on which I work first thing in the morning while I chug my iced coffee, is stuck on 10.5 because it’s an old Powerbook G4, and 10.6 won’t install on PPC processors like this. So assuming I work with MarsEdit, which is how it looks at this point, it will have to be only on my various newer Macs.

Note: this blog entry continues to get a lot of views months later, so I wrote a followup entry here.

Getting the hang of this

On May 7, 2010May 11, 2010 By griffinwordsIn BloggingLeave a comment

I’m getting the hang of this new MacJournal system. I tried MarsEdit too, and it’s actually a nicer interface in many ways, but it doesn’t appear to support tags in Livejournal. So to use MarsEdit I’d have to separately log into Livejournal’s admin screens and set up the tags for every post there, which kind of defeats the purpose of having one program that keeps everything up to date and synchronized.

One thing I haven’t figured out is why the images from my WordPress blog don’t properly come through into Livejournal, but I’m sure I can get that straightened out.

Possible blog strangeness through this weekend

On May 7, 2010May 11, 2010 By griffinwordsIn BloggingLeave a comment

I’m converting over from creating each blog post in the blog’s web interface, to a program called MacJournal which lets me write a blog post once and crosspost it to more than one blog. I’m doing this because I’m trying out both WordPress and Livejournal at once and want to run them both in parallel until I decide if I want to use just one.

So far I’d say WordPress creates a much more professional and polished blog, but Livejournal has some nifty social networking or “community” features WordPress doesn’t have. So I’m doing both, and I don’t want to have to remember which posts have been made on which blog.

As I get the two blogs synchronized, and play around with MacJournal, some posts may appear out of time sequence, or posts that previously appeared on WordPress may appear again (until I get the duplicates trimmed out). It’ll look messy for a day or two or three, but once it’s all lined up, it should be pretty slick.

By the way, MacJournal looks pretty great. I like MarsEdit better in some ways (it automatically retrieves your previous blog posts from the server) but it doesn’t seem geared to simple crossposting. If you write an entry for one blog and want to post it to another blog, you have to copy and paste the content into a new blog entry within the folder of the second blog, and post that… which isn’t much improvement over just running two totally separate blogs that I administer from the web admin pages.

MacJournal site:
http://marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=85

MarsEdit site:
http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/

test entry from MacJournal

On May 5, 2010May 11, 2010 By griffinwordsIn BloggingLeave a comment

I’m testing out a blog editing/posting application called MacJournal. Here’s a test post.

It seems pretty handy. It’s worth taking a look at the MacJournal web site.

SF Academy 06 – Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear

On April 23, 2010May 11, 2010 By griffinwordsIn Words InLeave a comment

As I’ve discussed here previously, I believe some science fiction writers are more about the “big idea,” the concept that would be just as interesting in summary as in story form, and others are more about story and character, narration and philosophy, that is to say, the writing. My favorite science fiction writers are good at both, and one of my overall favorites is Greg Bear. His work can be uneven (avoid Dead Lines for example, which can’t decide whether it’s a ghost story of a muddled, supernatural-tinged attempt at sci-fi), but when it’s good, it’s really good. My favorites of his books include Blood Music (which seems to be out of print in the US, which is strange), and Moving Mars (which won Bear his first Nebula for Best Novel). I’ve been working my way gradually through his bibliography.

Darwin’s Radio came out in 1999 and won Bear the Nebula award. The book develops at a modest pace, with the discovery of mummified human remains which may suggest something unusual about human evolution. Coincidental to the very old remains being found, a virus that infects these mummies also begins to manifest itself among modern humans.

Bear’s strength is believable characters (especially scientists) and relationships that seem real, and run the gamut from love affairs to career betrayals. He’s also one of the few SF authors that attempts to write fairly explicit sex scenes in style that’s serious and unexaggerated.

By the end, Darwin’s Radio ends up being about a strange genetic trick that combines qualities of a pathogenic virus, and a mechanism for triggering a new stage in human evolution. The great majority of the book, though, is spent on political wrangling, and the formation and breaking-up of alliances between major characters including scientists, archologists, and political functionaries at the Centers for Disease Control.

The scientific ideas under exploration here are fascinating, but the book is much more about the struggle to understand, and scientific detective work thwarted by the need to compromise, all aspects of the process. The ending builds slowly but once crucial events occur the conclusion happens too quickly. Given that Bear wrote a sequel,
Darwin’s Children, I had to wonder whether he said to himself “Shit, this one’s getting way too long… better chop it off here, and finish it up in a sequel.” Then I looked up the sequel’s publication date and saw that it came 5 years later, so maybe not.

Maybe I’m the only one, but by the time the epilogue arrived, I thought we were just getting to the meat of the action. I’d recommend this one, but with reservations, and I wonder how I’ll feel after I read the sequel, which was not as well-reviewed as this book.

Overall, not dissatisfying exactly, but imperfect. At times, Greg Bear writes science fiction as well as anyone alive, and I’ll continue taking a chance on his books so long as there are more like this Blood Music or this one (successful, or almost), and not too many like Dead Lines.

Q: What do writers like to do more than writing?

On April 22, 2010May 11, 2010 By griffinwordsIn Words Out1 Comment

Q: What do writers like to do more than write?

A: Talk about writing!

I’ve always been the solitary sort of writer, whether it was my teen writing efforts, or my “serious” (in retrospect, uptight) literary writing in my twenties, or even more recently. I always read other writers talking about how wonderful Clarion was, or how much fun they have at their weekly/monthly writer’s groups.

OK then. I’ve signed up for a writer’s weekend on the Washington coast. Sort of like a French restaurant called “French restaurant” this writer’s weekend workshop is called “Writer’s Weekend.”

http://www.WritersWeekend.com/.

This thing is in late July, in Moclips, Washington (have never been there — all my NW beach visits have always been Oregon beaches, except once I went to Aberdeen or Hoquiam or something for a few hours — not good). It will include a couple of “writer gurus,” local Portland-based sci-fi-and-fantasy-award-winning-fancy-pants, Jay Lake and David Levine.

I’m somewhat familiar with the work of both guys, and I’ll probably read up a bit more so by the time I meet them I can say something better than “Yeah, I read this one story by you six months ago and if I remember correctly, I thought it was really great.” Actually that’s a smart-ass-ish bit of untruth, as I’ve read multiple short stories by each guy (hard to avoid seeing a Jay Lake short story if you’ve ever bought a single SF magazine or anthology, like ever), and I have two of Jay’s books on my “really oughtta read some time soon” pile. Probably I’ll bump those up and get a copy of David’s cool-looking short story collection.

By my count there may yet be one slot available in the 15 person (not counting gurus) workshop, so if you live nearby here and want to give it a go, then give it a go!

I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about it as it draws nearer, and particularly during and after. If any of you fellow Writer’s Weekend workshoppers have followed the link in my bio and stumbled over here… hello!

Update of no great consequence

On April 21, 2010May 11, 2010 By griffinwordsIn Blogging, Words OutLeave a comment

I do seem to run hot and cold when it comes to updating this blog. The good news (as far as I’m concerned) is that I’ve been neglecting my writing-blog-writing because I’ve been doing a lot of plain old fiction writing lately.

I’ve also been very busy sending out a ton of story submissions (the flip side to tons of rejections is tons of new opportunities to submit!) and also putting in a ton of effort refining my workflow.

Some writers just sit down and toss the words out onto the page. I plan a great deal, and assemble mountains of notes and try to sort through them and apply them into suitable little piles relating to the same subject or project. I have this fantastic new tool called Evernote, which is a way of sorting all your notes, including even note-like stuff such as PDFs, sound clips, images and so on. You can apply multiple tags to each “note” so you can look through all your notes with any given tag, and a single note may appear every time you look by the appropriate tag. So I might have a photo of a weird looking goth chick with blue hair, and I could tag it as “image” and “character ideas” and “Hum” (after the name of a story I’m working on) and whichever of these tags I choose, I’ll see this picture. Pretty handy, for sorting through things all different ways, especially once you have thousands of notes.

I’m also increasingly using this great online tool called Dropbox, which gives you a folder on all of your computers which is kept synchronized at all times, so anything you drop into the “My Dropbox” folder on your work PC, for example, is automatically updated in the “My Dropbox” folder on you iPad, your laptop, and your MacPro at home. So great! I used to carry around 2 or 3 little USB thumb drives all the time, and now I’m done with those. Everything I may need during the day, no matter where I am — reference documents, web links, my story projects, software installers, everything! Dropbox is great and includes a free option, for up to 2gb of storage, and a paid option for people who want to store a lot more.

I’ll be back soon with subsequent SF Academy entries, and maybe a bit more about what I’ve been writing lately.

E-book publishing will never succeed until…

On April 12, 2010May 11, 2010 By griffinwordsIn Words InLeave a comment

E-book publishing will never succeed until an electronic book version costs less than the printed paper costs, including shipping. That’s all.

Sorry, Amazon, or clueless publisher, or whoever’s at fault. I will not pay $14.89 for a bunch of bits and bytes when you’re selling a nice trade paperback version for $9.89 with free shipping. Seems like elementary economics to me. You can either buy the intellectual property only, or you can buy the intellectual property PLUS a tangible carrier, and the former should be cheaper than the latter.

Probably somebody at Amazon or at the publisher is having a big meeting this Monday morning to figure out why ebook sales are so slow, and I just thought I’d save them some time.

Quick rule for pricing: New-release hardback should cost more than trade paperback, which should cost more than mass-market paperback, which should cost more than electronic version. I’m OK with you charging 50% of the hardback price for the ebook version when the hardback is the only tangible paper version available, but once the paperback comes out, then you need to lower the ebook price so it’s less than the cheapest paper version.

There you go, I won’t even charge you a consulting fee for that one.