S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 242

Wishing You

Mid-week NaNoPost

Including today, you NaNo'ers out there have almost a week left to work on your novel. Of course there's also a holiday tomorrow for those who celebrate Thanksgiving, the holiday weekend that follows, and assorted celebrations, visitations, possibly traveling . . . plenty to do, and to derail you during this last stretch.

I'll tell you a professional secret: there's always the possibility of something to derail you. Holidays, domestic crises, disappointments, arguments, family emergencies, ...

T-Day Prep Secrets

For Thanksgiving this year I bought our bird a week in advance because last year I learned that all the other home cooks in my town buy theirs a week in advance, leaving only 5- or 35-lb. turkeys for those of us who'd rather wait. If you did the same, thawing a frozen turkey by transferring it from the freezer to the fridge is still the ideal method. I was taught was to allow 24 hours thaw time in the fridge per 5 pounds of frozen meat; Butterball say 1 day per 4 pounds, and has an entire p...

For the Writer on Your List

Ten Things That Make Great Gifts for Writers

Books: We write them, we read them, we love them. There isn't a single book gift I've received that I haven't wallowed in during the holidays, especially when it's a surprise book. One year a friend of mine filled a stocking with a mug, some packets of hot chocolate mix and some new mystery paperbacks she thought just sounded cool; I discovered three authors (Harlan Coben, Linda Fairstein and Sue Grafton) I still read ($7.99 for most new paperbac...

New Moon

The kids and I went on Saturday to see New Moon, mainly to avoid all the crazed Twilight fans who packed the theaters for the Thursday midnight and Friday shows. Still, the show we planned to see was sold out when we arrived (15 minutes before start time; traffic on the way there was really heavy) so we bought tickets for the next show and went and had a leisurely lunch.

When we came back for our show, they sent us to the largest stadium-style theater, and it was packed to the rafters. I ac...

EndWeek NaNoPost

I'm hoping by the time this post shows up on the blog that I've completed 50K and made my NaNoWriMo goal. But if I haven't, I'm sure you'll forgive me; we've still got nine days left.

This past week for me has been all about striking back. I got over a major disruption and took back my writing space. Every time I sat down to work it felt like victory, as if I'd taken back my Road Runner lunchbox from a schoolyard bully. Life can interrupt and shout and hit and stomp you, but at the end of ...

No-Cost Ten

Ten Things You Can Have for Nothing

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

ALEX Personal Knowledge Base is "a very simple tool to organize your knowledge, notes, ideas and other information" (OS: Windows32/64, Linux32/64, OS X, Solaris, AIX and etc.)

Eldy is "the first easy software dedicated to the elderly, from European Eldy's non-profit organization. Eldy allows seniors use computers and enjoy the...

Newsy Bits

NY Time bestselling author Bob Mayer has joined the line-up over at my group blog, Genreality, and his first post is already up.

Google has this image search thing called Image Swirl that is currently in demo stage, but looks pretty neat; evidently it's set up to operate a bit like ThinkMap's Visual Thesaurus (link swiped from The Presurfer.)

I'm going to be doing some blog renovations during the month of December, when I'll also be wrapping up my 2009 online art project, PBWindow. While I w...

Mid-week NaNoPost

We've passed the mid-way mark of NaNoWriMo, and I really felt the burn this past week. The words were not interested in me or my novel and tried to avoid me. All the fun went out of town. I got mired down in scene after scene and slogged, slogged, slogged. If there was an Olympic slogging event, I think I would have qualified five times over.

A couple of times my mercenary self (a bit like TssVar from StarDoc, but with more teeth) tried to reason with my writer self (a lot like an exhauste...

Snow and Trees

In addition to my NaNoNovel, I'm working on the third Kyndred book, and one major obstacle I have with this one is the setting for one of the early chapters of the novel: snow and trees, trees and snow. There are mountains (background) a road (lost early on) and one cargo truck (ditto) but that's about it. During the length of one chapter I have to move my characters through a setting in which there are no other people, vehicles, houses, towns or any sign of civilization.

This is the sort of p...