Doug Farren's Blog, page 23

Writing tools I use

Over the years, I've built up an essential toolbox full of the things a writer needs. Like a good mechanic, I have a few select tools I use more than others and a few that sit idle for long periods of time but are indispensable when I need to reach for them. Your list of tools may be different, but here are the ones I find to be most useful.

The first tool any writer will pick up is something to write with. When I fist began writing I used a typewriter, now I use a keyboard. My primary writing instrument is an Acer netbook running Windows 7 Pro. This small PC is the ideal writing instrument because it's portable and relatively lightweight. I can easily carry it on a plane and it is comfortable to use almost anywhere. The battery life is decent and it runs all the other tools I use. The netbook however, would be incomplete without the programs I use to write - Scrivener and Microsoft Word.

I used Scrivener for the first time when I began working on Peacekeeper. I found it to be an indispensable platform on which to write. If you're a writer and you like to keep side notes, you must check out this wonderful program. The Mac version has more features than the Windows version I use. The program takes some getting used to but stick with it and you will not be disappointed. I also suggest getting yourself a copy of Scrivener for Dummies . I use Scrivener for the first draft and the second pass. After that, all editing is done in Microsoft Word.

Scrivener is not designed to produce final output although it can. For the final editing phases I use Microsoft Word. I compile the Scrivener manuscript into a Word document and then use Word's built in grammer-checker and spell-checker to do another quick pass. I print it out and give it to my wife for her to proof. This will take some time which gives me a break from the project. After my wife is done, I input her changes and then make a final pass. She approves any changes I make (using Word's track-changes feature) and then the project is done.

Another tool that is an absolute must for any writer is some sort of simple, set and forget, cloud storage. I use Dropbox for this. This wonderful, free, program keeps my manuscript synchronized between all my devices as well as keeping it safely backed up in the cloud without my ever having to think about it. It also hangs onto several past versions just in case I screw things up so bad I've got to start over. If my hard drive were to fail, my manuscript is safe and sound. If you don't have a cloud backup system in place STOP READING AND DO IT NOW!

If I'm ever at a loss for a word I fire up The Sage. This is a free (I use the paid for version) super thesaurus. I don't use it very often but when I need it, I need it badly. Give the free version a trial and if you're satisfied then please give the developers a little financial help and make a contribution. In return, you get the most up to date version of this wonderful product.

Don't forget the internet. It is perhaps the most powerful tool ever developed for writers. From the comfort of your home you can do complex research in a matter of hours that in the not too distant past would have taken a long trip, a healthy wad of cash, and more time than most of us have these days.

The final tool is education. This comes in the form of books, formal instruction, and feedback from your readers. Never stop learning! Broaden your horizons and experience the world by reading something you might never have considered reading. Be observant of the world around you -- you never know when a story idea will present itself.

In between writing projects

With Peacekeeper out in the wild (and selling quite well I should say), I'm taking a break from writing for awhile. I've recently received a book I ordered from Amazon titled "The 2014 Guide to Self Publishing" which I've started reading. Although I've been publishing my own books since 2009 it can't hurt to read up on the subject because you never know when you might run across something of interest that you didn't know about. I will be posting my review on Amazon and GoodReads when I'm done with it.

I am also reading "Conflict and Suspense". This is the book I leave at work and read before the morning meeting while I'm having breakfast (yes I eat breakfast at work) and having my morning coffee. This book might take awhile to read because of the limited time I have at work. It will be coming home over the holidays while I'm on vacation.

In the meantime, I've been working on where to go with the next book in the Galactic Alliance - Peacekeeper spin off. I've pretty much decided to write at least one and perhaps two more Peacekeeper books. That's why I wrote Peacekeeper in the first place. I have several interesting ideas but I need to let my brain work on the details for awhile before starting on the next book. I also have a very interesting idea for a follow-up to Off-Course. I will work on whichever story line is best developed when I decide to start writing again.

I did manage to finish watching all Firefly episodes and now I can begin watching "Falling Skies". I caught a few episodes a couple months ago and it looked very interesting. I had no idea it was into the third season. So, I signed up for Amazon Prime so I could watch the show from season one. I'll have to wait until season 4 starts so I can catch season 3 for free on Prime.

So that's what I've been doing. Not writing but doing a lot of thinking and reading up on how to write better. If there were some online courses I could take and if I had the time while working, I would be taking them as well. I would love to try to go to one of the Clarion's but I do work for a living so that will have to wait until I retire - if that ever happens. With healthcare so screwed up in this country I'm beginning to think I will have to work until I can no longer do the kind of work I do. Personally, I think this country's healthcare system is going to be our ruin. A man can work and save all his life only to have a single health emergency wipe out decades of savings putting him in the poor house. Insurance these days is a joke and the cost is so high as to be out of reach of most people. So, until that gets fixed, I think I will just continue to work and hope for the best.

I will let you know how things are going next week.

PS: I would like to write a few more blogs along the BSinSF series. I'm open to suggestions right now.

A Writer's Brain never stops

After the final click which sent Peacekeeper on its way to Smashwords, I leaned back and thought, "Time to take a break and catch up on some reading and other things I've missed out on while working on the book." Well, that's sort of what's happened. My work schedule has gotten in the way with all last week being 12-hour days. I have managed to get some reading done as well as watching a few episodes of Firefly. But my writing brain has not taken a vacation.

I do a lot of thinking about my stories while in the shower (strange but true) as well as just before drifting off to sleep. Instead of taking a break, I find I'm still thinking about any one of the several stories that are waiting to be written. My brain has refused to take a break. I've come up with a possible Galactic Alliance novel that is a follow-up to Peacekeeper. This would create a parallel series based on Peacekeeper. I also keep thinking about a sequel to Off Course where an Akuda super-ship is discovered causing the Ba'Ruta to become involved. I've come up with a really cool twist concerning the mysterious Ba'Ruta. I've also had a few requests to make a third Dragonverse book and there are ideas floating around for this as well.

My biggest seller is the Galactic Alliance series and my wife strongly suggests that I focus more on that series than the others. I'm torn about this. I enjoy the large sales from the GA books but I also have stories that are itching to be told. I have been quite surprised that the Dragonverse books haven't sold better given the fact that many people are fond of dragons. I've often thought about going back and doing a complete re-edit of the two Dragonverse books and then continuing on with a third in the series.

I would also like to put together a 'meet the author' chat session where anyone can join in and chat live with me online. I don't know how many people would be interested in doing this either and even if there is a lot of interest in it, I don't know how to pull it off. I used to be a rather decent computer programmer but I've never done any internet programming. The sad thing is, I've been falling behind in the technology and now there's a lot of things out there on the web I'm not familiar with. There might be a way to do a massive chat but I can't tell you what it is.

I'm going to stick to my plans and take a break from writing at least until next year. But just because I'm not actually writing doesn't mean my brain is on vacation. The dumb thing keeps working even when I'm asleep.

10-20-2013: Galactic Alliance (Book 4) - Peacekeeper has been released

At long last I can finally report that Peacekeeper has been released. This book has occupied much of my free time for the past 9 months. I did take several forced breaks to build a new fence around my house, attend DragonCon, participate in two refueling outages, and make a trip to Minnesota. I cannot thank my wife enough for putting up with my desire to finish this book and for her help in doing the grammatical review. She's not a big fan of science fiction but she does have a knack for spotting the grammatical errors I tend to miss.

As she was finishing up her first review, I was doing my second pass through the book and making additional changes. Although I wrote the novel using Scrivener, the final editing is done in Word. This gave me the ability to use Word's track changes feature so my wife could have her chance to review the changes I made. This process was finished on Friday. I made one final quick pass looking for spelling errors and seeing what Word claimed was not proper grammar. Only a very few minor changes were needed. This process finished up Saturday morning.

The next phase involved making 3 copies of the manuscript; one for Amazon, one for Smashwords, and one for Createspace. Each one is slightly different. Amazon is the easiest and it's pretty much a direct upload to start the publication process. Smashwords requires a different header page with a mandatory license statement on the first page. The hardest one to create is the one for Createspace. This gets reformatted into the 5.25 x 8 inch PDF that will become the interior of the book. I have to add page numbers and tell Word to use mirror margins so the printed pages will align correctly. I also have to do a page by page check to make sure the chapters don't end with only a couple of lines on a page. When everything is formatted properly, I print it out to a PDF file. The different versions get uploaded to the various sites and the process is complete.

I will be taking a break from writing for awhile. At the moment, I don't have a project in mind. I could write another Peacekeeper edition creating a spin off of the Galactic Alliance series. I also have an idea for a follow-up to Off Course and there's the possibility of a third Dragonverse book. I have a germ of an idea for a short story as well. But for now, I'm going to catch up on some of the things I've missed out on while working on Peacekeeper.

I was adding a recently completed book into Goodreads and it occurred to me that even though I read the entire book, I don't recall much of anything I had learned from it. On reflection, however, I know I did learn quite a bit. When you think about it, the human brain is always learning--it never stops. Reading a book on how to develop better characters will help me develop better characters even though I can't write down what I learned. The learning process takes place on a level that we can't directly access. There are books out there that give the reader these large checklists to run through to make a book better. Does anyone actually ever do that? I seriously doubt it! When you write a paragraph, do you go back through it, word for word, and do an analysis of sentence structure and word usage? I hardly think so. Instead, your brain integrates what you've read in the past into how you write. The bottom line is this: If, after reading a book on how to make your writing better, you set the book down and think, "well that was a waste of time", you're wrong. Learning has occurred--you just don't know it yet--now go write something!

10-09-2013: Late post - Peacekeeper editing

This week's post is late due to a number of factors. Since the blog is about "Working and Writing" I should perhaps include some of the things that I do for a living other than writing.
I am a nuclear power plant worker. The company I work for owns 4 reactors. These reactors must periodically shut down about once a year (my plant is only every 2 years) so the reactor can be refueled. This is called an outage. It's a major event for a nuclear plant with lots of work going on. The plants that are not being refueled send a few people from each shop to the down plant to help with the work. That's where I am now. I am working 12 hours a day 6 days a week. That doesn't leave much time for anything else. Luckily, I only have one week left on this schedule.
My one day off is Sunday and I had to make a quick trip home to fix my Media Center server. Let me explain this as well: Instead of using a cable company DVR box, my cable comes into the house and goes to one of my computers. I have a quad-tuner installed and my computer serves as a whole-house DVR. I use Microsoft Media Center for this. My two televisions have an X-Box connected to them that then connects to the Media Centerserver and that's how I watch and record television shows. Last week, the server stopped responding and neither X-Box could connect to it. I found that Norton-360 had suddenly decided that the X-Boxes were new devices and blocked them. I spend last Sunday removing Norton and installing Microsoft Security Essentials. The server is now running smoothly.

Peacekeeper update: My wife has finished proofing the book and I am on the last chapter of my final edit. Because I'm not at home, I can't put her final changes in and she can't look at the edits I've made. We plan to take care of this as soon as possible. My hopes are to have the book available for sale by 10-19. If I can swing it, this date will be moved up.

09-29-2013: Peacekeeper update

Last week we put 2026 miles on one of our cars. We drove from Ohio to Minnesota to visit friends and relatives. It was a whirlwind trip with almost no time for proofing or editing. My wife did manage to knock out several chapters and I did the same but we are not done yet. I am currently on chapter 36 with my final editing and my wife has about 12 pages left to proof. Once I'm done, Cheryl will go back and check my editing to make sure I haven't introduced anything bad and then it will be off to the presses (so to speak).

In case you're wondering, here is how I get a novel done. I use Scrivener to write it and also for my first editing pass. I then convert it into Word, do some minor reformatting, and then print it out for my wife to look at. She does her editing using a red pen. I then take her changes and enter them into what is now the Word master of the manuscript. I will also make a second pass through the book doing final editing changes. I use Word's track changes feature so Cheryl can find the changes I've made to give them a final look. This is how Peacekeeper is being built and the process has been refined over the last couple of books. My wife and I work very well together.

I am now sitting in a motel room in Beaver Valley Pennsylvania. Tomorrow morning, I begin working 12-hour days, 6 days a week in support of the Beaver Valley power station outage. I won't have a lot of time to write or edit but I promise to get some done while I'm here. I do have Sunday's off and if all goes well I hope to have the book done by the end of that day so it can be made available. I will fire off an email to everyone on my mailing list when that happens.

That's it for now. Stay tuned. Peacekeeper is coming soon!

09-22-2013: Peacekeeper cover

This week's post will be a bit short on words as I'm on vacation in Minnesota. I've already visited my brother in Stillwater and we are now visiting my best friend from high school in Braham Minnesota. His wife is the one who did the covers for the Galactic Alliance series and Off Course. She has just finished the cover for Peacekeeper. Here is a sneak peak of the artwork:


My wife has made great progress on her grammatical proofing and I'm about half-way done with my final edit. I still have high hopes of getting the book out within a week or two of returning from vacation.

09-15-2013: BSinSF-Things that blink, pulsate, hum, etc.

This week's BSinSF (Bad Science in Science Fiction) deals mostly with the motion picture industry although I'm sure there are a few stories out there with similar faults. The film industry seems to think that high-tech stuff, especially power generators and sensing elements, have to glow or make some sort of noise. A very recent example is the fuel cell in the defense drones in Oblivion. They glow like they're filled with the juice from a thousand fireflies. Sorry folks, fuel-cells do not glow. Neither do nuclear reactors (unless you can directly see the core) or super-batteries like the ones that power a terminator.
How about eyes? Virtually every robot, android, or cyborg seems to have eyes that glow. Why the heck would they? What purpose would the glow serve? Certainly not to illuminate the object being looked at; the glow is too weak and emitting the light from the sensing element would tend to interfere with the sensor. Light amplifying eyes or eyes that can see beyond the normal human spectrum are possible using today's sensing technology—none of which glow.

Advanced technology usually comes in indiscrete packages. Modern computers do not have giant banks of flashing lights (unless of course you own a tricked out Alienware machine). Even the computers of old only had a small section of indicating lights. They could be used by technicians to view the state of the machine's internal registers as well as for troubleshooting a broken computer. The list of Hollywoodcomputers with huge banks of row upon row of flashing lights could make a long list (Time Tunnel, Star Trek, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, etc.). What on earth could be the purpose of all those lights, especially since not a single one of them is labeled?
Visible laser beams in space? Nonsense! An energy weapon in space is invisible. A laser is a beam of coherent light. The only way for someone to see a laser beam passing in front of them is if the beam reflects off something in its path and some of the light is bounced toward the observer's eye. In an atmosphere, this usually happens because of dust particles or microscopic droplets of water. In space, there is nothing for the beam to hit other than the intended target and therefore it will be invisible.
The bottom line in all this is if you have something that emits light, it had better do so for a very good reason. Indicating lights are okay if they serve a specific purpose. The glow of a warp reactor is explained in the Star Trek Technical Reference manual as well as the Hayes manual on Klingon bird of prey repair but that technology is well beyond our ability to reproduce.
So how about my other pet peeve—noises. I am confident that most people realize that space is silent. You will never hear the explosion of a ship or the whine of a phaser blast or the roar of a Viper's propulsion system. But movies would be pretty dull if Hollywood made their battle-scenes deathly quiet. I'm happy with this too since I'm a big fan of science fiction movies. But, there are some things that should be fixed. For example, nuclear reactors do not pulsate. About the only thing you can hear inside a nuclear power plant is the whine of running motors and the rush of water and steam flowing through the piping. Computer interfaces should not make a significant amount of noise. Try programming your keyboard to make a different short beep, boop, or a series of chirps each time you pressed a key or executed a command. You'll quickly grow tired of it and turn the speakers off. On a bridge with many computer interfaces, audible feedback would be a serious distraction.

The absolute worst offender I have ever seen in regards to sound and visual effect is the depiction of the nuclear reactor powering Captain Nemo's submarine in the B movie "The Return of Captain Nemo" (it is also known as "The Amazing Captain Nemo"). It looked like a giant upside-down turnip which glowed and pulsated with 'power'. When the captain wanted to fire his ultimate weapon he called down to the reactor room saying he needed "Full nuclear capability". The operator grabbed a hand wheel turned it using an indicator that showed reactor power. Of course, the reactor's glow brightened, the pulsations increased in frequency, and the deep, pulsing sound of the reactor became louder and increased in tempo. There is absolutely nothing right with any of this. Wrong, wrong, wrong! The reactor on "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" is another whopping error.

As a writer, I do try to make the science in my books at least believable. Things do not glow, pulsate, or make noises unless there is a specific reason for doing so. Consoles beep for attention. Motors and engines whine. Lasers and particle beams are invisible in space (there is one exception in the Galactic Alliance series but it has a valid explanation). To keep the science realistic a writer should research and become knowledgeable on a subject he or she intends to write about. If your ship is powered by a fusion reactor, you should at least understand the basics of how such a device might operate. Try your best to keep the science in science fiction.
PEACEKEEPER UPDATE: It's beginning to look like the book will not be available for release for another few weeks. The cover is not yet done and the final editing is still being worked on.
LAUNCH PAD ANTHOLOGY: The anthology with short stories from most of the Launch Pad 2012 attendees is now available as an e-book from: http://brittonknowles.com/ProductInformation/ProductID/224

09-09-2013: BSinSF - Thermodynamics, the bane of science fiction

Before I get into the meat of this week's post I would like to give you a brief update on some other items. Firstly, I'd like to remind everyone of the soon-to-be-released Launch Pad anthology. It's filled with short stories from the Launch Pad 2012 attendees. Next, you will be happy to know that my wife is nearly finished with her grammatical review and I've started my final pass through the manuscript. My wife will have to make sure I didn't screw things up with the changes I'm making and then the book will be ready for release. I recently received a possible cover and the designer is working on making some requested changes. It's beginning to come together folks.
This week's BSinSF topic is on thermodynamics; it's the bane of science fiction in my book. Nothing is 100% efficient and most of the loss in efficiency shows up as heat. A perfect example is something I deal with every day—power production. Nearly every large power plant has a cooling tower and all that vapor pouring out the top is waste heat. How much? About 65% of the energy generated in the reactor or boiler! This waste heat creates a MAJOR problem for science fiction. In order to understand why, let's take a step back and talk about heat transfer for a moment.
Heat can be transferred in three ways: convection, conduction, and radiation. Convection and conduction require the heat source to be in physical contact with the transfer medium. A spacecraft is isolated from everything else by the vacuum of space which rules out both of these as a means of dumping waste heat. That leaves radiation, which is the transfer of heat through the emission of electromagnetic radiation. This means that if you want to keep your ship cool you need large radiators to dump the excess heat.
If you look at a picture of the International Space Station (ISS), the first thing you will most likely notice are the huge panels extending away from the primary truss. The largest of these are the solar panels that provide the station with electricity. The others are the heat radiators. Damage enough of these and the station will quickly become uninhabitable. Ever wonder why the space shuttle kept its cargo doors open the entire time it was in space? Because the inside of the doors served as heat radiators to keep the shuttle cool. If you're building a nuclear powered warship equipped with directed energy weapons, you're going to have to get rid of a tremendous amount of waste heat. To do that, you'll need a heat radiator with a very large surface area. Now you have a problem.
Take a close look at any science fiction movie ever made and try to point out the heat radiators. I'll bet you won't find any. The starship Enterprise would look pretty silly if you tacked on enough heat radiators to keep the ship's internal temperature within limits. To be honest, I never considered this problem until I started reading the articles on the Project Rho website. I took a stab at a possible solution in When Ships Mutiny by explaining that the entire ship's external hull was designed to be an efficient heat radiator. But I'm sure it wasn't enough.
If you want to write science fiction that is based 100% on known science then your incredibly powerful, massively armored warships are going to have to be equipped with extremely large arrays of heat radiators. If these are damaged or shot off you're warship becomes useless. Temperatures on the inside will quickly rise and your fusion reactor will end up turning your ship into a molten blob.
Even if you make the claim that your ship's power systems are 99% efficient you will still have to deal with the waste heat problem. Heat dissipation by radiation is very inefficient; that's why thermos bottles use a vacuum as an insulator. If your ship's main reactor generates 1,000 megawatts of power then you're impossibly efficient system will still have to find a way to get rid of 10 megawatts of waste heat.
If you're a math nerd and you want to find out just how bad this problem is, I invite you to do some research into thermodynamics. I could have run the numbers years ago when I learned about heat transfer and fluid flow in the Navy's nuclear power school but many years have passed and I simply don't have the time to learn about things like black-body radiation. The math isn't terrible difficult but you need to have a thorough understanding of thermodynamics to get the numbers right.
If you do read the associated articles on the Project Rho website you'll also discover that the heat problem also means that stealth in space (i.e. cloaking fields, stealth ships, etc.) are pretty much impossible. Sorry, the Klingon and Romulan cloaking devices simply aren't possible.
So what's the solution? Actually, in this case the only possible solution is to ignore the problem. That's right—I said ignore it. Until someone comes up with a way to dump excess heat into space without the use of large surface-area heat radiators then you're just going to have to sweep the problem under the rug and hope nobody asks how your ships deal with waste heat.

Next week I'll be tackling a pet peeve of mine by asking: Why do things in science fiction movies glow, pulsate, or generate light? Why do they hum, scream, or make sounds?
PS--This post was late because I got stuck working 12-hour nights at the plant. That doesn't leave much time for anything other than work and sleep.

09-01-2013: DragonCon Day 4

Once again, this post is being uploaded the morning after I wrote it due to problems with the hotel wireless.
Our last day at DragonCon began with lunch at the Sun Dial restaurant located on the 72nd floor of the Westin hotel in Atlanta. We were joined by Jody Lynn Nye, Farah Mendlesohn, Stu Segal, and his son Steve. Farah was dressed in a Starfleet uniform. During lunch we were treated to a spectacular thunderstorm with huge bolts of cloud-to-ground lightning providing quite a show. We were a little worried because this was the first day we had decided not to carry our umbrellas.
Jody had to depart early as she was sitting on a panel at 2:30. We said our goodbyes and wished Farah a safe flight back to London—her flight departed at 7:00pm. On the ride back down (inside a glass elevator that rides on the outside of the building) we noticed it had stopped raining. Lucky for us, it didn't rain for the rest of the day.
At this point I had two choices. I wanted to attend Jody's panel at 2:30 but it was now nearly 2:50. I desperately wanted to attend a panel at 4:00 with Larry Niven and Jody and I realized the line would begin forming quite early. My original plans had called for me to bug out of the 2:30 panel early so I could get a good place in line for the 4:00 panel. But lunch had taken so long that it no longer made much sense to attend the 2:30 panel. I decided to start the line for the 4:00 panel. After several false starts caused by a lack of knowledge on the part of the conference room gatekeepers, I finally found where the line was to begin. So did several other people.
I stood in line for about 45 minutes and then found myself in the front row of the 4:00 panel—"The Logic of Magic". It was a wonderful discussion and I thoroughly enjoyed it. While I did all this, my wife wandered the dealer's room. Afterwards, I met her at Durangoe's for dinner and then we caught the bus back to the hotel thus ending our last day at DragonCon.

We have had a great time and now we must bid Atlanta farewell. We are heading back to Ohio with a stop in Wytheville to rest. During the return trip, my wife has said she will try to continue proofing Peacekeeper. In the meantime, I will begin my own final pass through the manuscript to make sure everything is as good as I can make it.