S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 143

Freely Ten

Ten Things You Can Have for Free

Freeware Caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

30 Days of Worldbuilding offers an entire month of free guides you can use to create and flesh out your fictional universe.

Compositions is a "minimal, well-designed text editor for iOS and OS X" which "allows you to focus on the content. It features a clean white background, and a full screen mode that gets rid of almost all of the interface chrome, leaving just the text on the screen" (OS: Mac)

Dreamstime is my favorite stock photo site, not only for the great royalty-free images they sell, but also for the large, searchable archive of photos that are free for registered users to download and use (and registration is free, too.)

Eusing Clock is a "small desktop clock application that will place a great looking, colorful clock on the screen of your computer. You´ll be able to not only see your local time, but also the time in cities and countries across the globe. Eusing Clock enables you to quickly customize the looks, time format and standard as well as the background opacity level. You can set alarms to display messages, shut down or restart your computer, and more" (OS:Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7 [32-Bit/64-Bit])

Flashnote is a "quick notes manager created for such cases. When you need a rough copy to save or to process some pieces of a text, Flashnote is small, quick and convenient. Press the shortcut-key combination and a rough copy is on the screen in a flash of a second. Press ESC and the program hides. It's that simple. You don't need to find a place for text, to run Notepad or huge heavy PIM. Flashnote is a lightweight notes manager, everything gets done quickly, simply and in a more convenient way" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7)

The Internet Typewriter is an online writing environment that will "take care of saving your work automatically every few minutes, when you start a new document, and when you open a different document. Your documents will still be here when you come back later. The site remembers you by placing a cookie on your computer. Click here to choose a login just in case you lose your browser cookies or if you want to use Writer on a different computer. Totally optional. You can customize colors, fonts, and other settings in your Preferences. Saved documents are listed at the bottom of the page. Open one by clicking it. The document you are currently working on will be saved automatically first." Seems to work best in Chrome and Firefox.

JustNotes ($9.99 to buy, but they offer a 15 day free trial download) is a "simple, beautiful and powerful notes app. The nice user interface lets you focus on the important things – just notes. JustNotes synchronizes your notes with Simplenote, so you have access to your notes also from your iPhone" (OS: Mac)

NotePuppy is a "minimalist text editor designed to keep your notes and ideas in text files, in one place. If you like keeping a lot of notes in text files, and would like to keep them all in one place with the minimum of fuss, this could very well be the text editor for you. The editor saves the files as you work on them, saving you from the chore of having to remember to press Cmd+S every few minutes or (worse) having to find places and names for however many text buffers you have open if you should need to reboot. It also protects you from crashes if you are on an OS which isn't overly stable: NotePuppy has been succesfully deployed on a bleeding-edge crash-prone Linux machine before, and so that was useful. All the files managed by NotePuppy are stored in a central directory. If you are on a Unix machine (Linux or Mac), you can add symbolic links to the directory, and keep files from several places under the loving care of NotePuppy." (OS: Linux, Mac)

Task List Guru is a "free task list organizer ideal for personal task management and small project management. You can organize not just tasks, but also task lists, notes and reminders. Task List Guru has a hierarchical task list tree with icons that allows you to organize all your todo lists and notes in a structure with icons. You can choose from 48 different colorful icons for your to-do lists - this makes using this organizer fun" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)

One final reminder, to do my part for NaNoWriMo I've posted my writing how-to, Way of the Cheetah, online for anyone to read, download and print out for free; it goes back into the vault on December 1st.

I Write Like

I write like
Anne Rice

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hmmm. Can't really say I agree, but I'll take it.

Who do you write like?

Battling

For once the other day things were going fine. I caught up on my chores and made my guy's favorite dinner (which he deserves because he works in retail and for him every day from now until Christmas is a bad day.) I also took the pups out for a long walk and had a chat with a friend who's out of work and needs the moral support. I felt great and was ready to knock out some words. Only the minute I sat down to write crickets began chirping in my head.

Besides the crickets there was nothing. I had plenty to write, but no idea on where to start or what to put on the page. My brain flatly refused to cough up a single word of fiction.

Sometimes I do go blank like that, like the page I'm not writing, and there are a couple of ways I shake it off: I get up and walk around for a few minutes, or I listen to a song from my novel playlist, or I fold laundry or do some other mindless task. Then I go back and try again, and usually that works.

Not this time. I repeated my shake-it-off routine until I ran through everything that usually works and I was still drawing the blank.

I have a long-standing agreement with my creative side; I do not abuse it and it does not bail on me. Even now and then one of us violates that agreement, and then it's time to engage more directly. When I overwork my creative side, it messes up everything I do until I take a break. When my creative side runs out on me, I go after it and drag it back to work.

When all my gentler methods fail, I sit down and start typing story. What comes out on the page is always boring and mechanical and about as much fun to write as an obituary. My internal editor immediately rears her pointy little head and starts blowing raspberries at the page. I churn on, typing whatever makes sense because I know writing badly is not just bad writing, it's bait.

My creative side is smug, full of herself and generally thinks she can do no wrong -- she has to be that way, and I accept it because she makes the magic happen. I'm just the dumb assistant who does the grunt work, and that's all I'm ever going to be, and that's fine because I know what every other stage hand knows: can't have a show without the stage.

The time I spend writing absolute crap varies; sometimes it's an hour of plodding, other times it's a few minutes. At some point in the process of typing, my creative side shows up to have a look. If she had any sense at all she'd let me trudge on for hours, but no, Ms. Busybody can't stay away. Naturally she zeroes on something particularly lame so she can sneer and make fun of it.

I let her have a few snickers as I back away from the page and let her get in front of me. See, I've got her now, and I know what she's going to do: tell me how to rewrite it. Which I do, and then continue on until she makes another snide suggestion, and another, and then loses all patience with me, pushes me aside and takes over from there. No matter how many blank cards I draw, writing through them until the creativity shows up and takes over always works.

How do you get your creativity to kick in when it wants nothing to do with you? Let us know in comments.

Elsewhere with Pearls

I hope all those who celebrate Thanksgiving are having a great holiday. Today I'm over at Literary Escapism to help kick off their Black Friday author event by taking Lucan shopping. Yes, that Lucan. Stop by if you get a chance, and enter to win this collection of goodies, all packed in my Victorian Pearl Girl tote, which I beaded and quilted by hand with sumptuous fabrics, all sorts of laces and ribbons, freshwater pearls, Swarovski crystals, chandelier gems and pretty much every sort of glass bead in the house.

Wishing You

NaNoWriMo Week 3

I was so busy the third week of NaNoWriMo should have flown by, but oddly enough it kind of stumbled, staggered and during a few memorable moments sat down and refused to go anywhere -- like me after I moved all the furniture for the carpet cleaners and then moved it all back. My sewing table looks like Victorian Armageddon; must tidy that up for sure today. I did something to my one working thumb (feels like the jammed sprain you get when you catch a basketball the wrong way, although I wasn't shooting hoops) and that's been throbbing all morning.

I have today and tomorrow to finish the rest of the housework before the family arrives and we kick off four days of Thanksgiving festivities. My voice is just coming back after a brief bout with laryngitis, and yesterday (this really made me laugh out loud) more work arrived from an editor so now I'll be juggling four novels until the end of the month. My response to the ongoing chaos? I work hard, so I'm being nice to myself in little ways. This morning I slept in until 7 am, and this afternoon I'm going to break out the watercolors and paint for an hour. It can't be all work/no play.

Life is busy and relentless and very messy. It interrupts you, it gets in your writing space and sometimes throws all the wrenches it owns at you. I believe in fighting it by not fighting it. I do what I can, and once I've managed the latest disaster I let it go and pick up where I left off with the writing. And I am regularly nice to myself because that also keeps me going.

For most of us that perfect writing life I mentioned last week will never happen. We don't exist in bubbles; we are involved with people and homes and activities and holidays. While the amount of responsibilities they bring with them may seem a little ridiculous at times, think of how lonely we would be without them. Life in a bubble might be perfect, but it isn't really living.

We have nine days to reach 50K and cross the finish line. It doesn't seem like a lot of time, especially with a holiday arriving for us Americans in the middle of it, but it's all we're going to get. Seize the opportunity to write whenever you can. Right now I'm going to log off and write the rest of Chapter Seven, and maybe even start Chapter Eight. Because whatever happens this last week, whatever my messy life throws at me, I'm going to finish and win this thing. I hope you do, too.

Mirror Me

There's an interesting article in the October issue of Smithsonian magazine about how our brains process music (How Music Works by David Byrne of The Talking Heads; and if you don't subscribe you can read it here); apparently excerpted from his book by the same title. In it he talks a lot about how we experience music, and how that's changing now that the world is basically immersed in music.

In the article Byrne also cites some studies by UCLA neurologists who monitored human brain activity as they were exposed to actions and emotions of other people. By determining which of the observers' neurons fired, they decided that we physically and mentally "mirror" what we see. Basically what that means is when you watch someone running track or having a temper tantrum, the neurons associated with the muscles used for running and the emotions deployed for a snitfit light up in you. They concluded that while we can't physically benefit from the neurons firing (to get the benefits of running track, you actually have to run the track) we're all hard-wired to be empathic.

As with music establishing empathy with ficition is not a face-to-face process; readers depend on writers to provide a story that engages and entertains them while writers are dependent on the readers' interest and imagination. Musicians use instruments, lyrics and their voices to do this while writers are dependent solely on words, but they work the same way. When you hear an engaging song it produces an emotional response: happiness, sadness, nostalgia, regret (which is why Adele had so many sniffling through the morning commute; the songs she wrote after having her heart broken seem to resonate with anyone who has ever been burned by love.) Writers go after the emotional connection primarily through characters and conflict but also by creating an artificial reality for the reader to explore. The strength and endurance of that emotional response is the empathy yardstick.

I've heard it said that there is nothing more artificial than art, and in some cases that may be true, but I think it depends on the artist and maybe what neurons are firing in their brain during the act of creation. I know how I feel when I write in the zone, which is always my goal; I've often described it as sneaking out of the house at 2 a.m. on a school night + going on a wild midnight joyride + waking up Christmas morning. A quote I read in a Times article on Sunday summed up some of that in six neat words: "Get on my train. We're leaving."

When you're working on a story, you are both the author and the beta reader. You may not be conscious of the emotion you're pouring into the story, but it's there, and at some point you should consider how the reader will probably react to it. You may be able to do this while you're actually writing; I use my daily editing session to think about how what I've written will impact the reader. Having several hours break between the writing and the editing allows me to put a little emotional distance between me the writer and the story to allow me the editor to analyze it. One of the most common ways to spot readers empathy problems is when we find ourselves skimming our own stories; if we're not interested in reading it then there's a good chance the reader will have the same reaction.

Once I've finished a book, I do a comprehensive technical edit, revise, and then a second complete read-through to make my final changes. It's during that last, start-to-finish read that I again consider the reader's response to the story. Is it exciting to read? If I'm skimming any part, that's not. Did I deliver interesting characters? Are these the kind of people a reader will care about and root for? Is the pacing consistent and absorbing? Nothing kills the momentum of a story than passages that slog along. Are there plenty of good reasons to keep turning the pages? That's really the final question -- will it be read by someone I can keep engaged from start to finish, and afterward will they feel it was time well spent? If I've served the story by genuinely investing it with my energy, my emotions and my sense of wonder, then there's a good chance that the readers will mirror me.

NaNoLinkage Ten

Ten Things I Discovered via NaNoWriMo

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

750 words is a free writer motivation site that awards you points and badges for how much you write during the month.

Booktrack allows you to download or create soundtracks to play along while you read e-books. Some of the booktracks are free, and according to the FAQ the ones you pay run between $1-$4, with $2 being the average cost.

Cliche Cleaner does exactly what it says, plus it offers a free demo download.

CreatingMinds.org has an entire list here of different methods for creating and problem-solving.

If you're still looking for a title for your NaNo novel, try feeding some of the text to the Cut Up Machine online word jumbler to generate some new ideas (sort of like the Bonsai Story Generator.)

My tomatoes is an online timer site that times you working for 25 minutes (the time it takes to cook a tomato) before it rings for you to take a break.

Panlexicon is an online thesaurus that uses the cloud approach to providing synonyms for your searches.

Online text scanner Story Analyzer will inspect whatever text you feed it and report back with common word overuse, excessive punctuation, adverb flags, passive writing, cliche and fad phrases and more. Seems to be a quickie version of Smart Edit.

Tagxedo is a Wordle knockoff onlin generator that you can use to create word clouds from URLs of your blogs, Twitting or other taggedy stuff.

ZenWriter, a free writing environment program, offers soothing music, calming backgrounds and can be customized so that your keyboard work produced typewriter sounds.

Making It

This is a simple but imaginative short film that has a wonderfully wry twist at the end (for those of you at work, some background music with this one):



(Video link swiped from Kuriositas)

Elsewhere with My Chicas

Today I'm visiting the lovely ladies at Southern Fried Chicas, which is my favorite writer group blog, to confess the reasons why I won't shop at book stores in December. Drop in when you can and you might win this tote with signed books and a gift basket of lavender aromatherapy products to calm your shopping nerves.