Let me preface this by saying that I’m a pragmatist when it comes to the creative process. Often, I hear friends talk about characters who want to do this, or refuse to do that, as if those fictional beings held the reins. I might give a knowing smile or nod, but down deep I’m thinking […]
I’ve been struggling with focus for a week. Maybe ten days. Okay, my whole life. While becoming a writer has been liberating in many ways, it has also highlighted how much trouble I have sticking to one task for any length of time. Each morning, I arise religiously at 5:30 and put on a pot […]
In a previous post, I harped on the importance of not only backing up your writing regularly, but storing it somewhere off-site as well. I use dropboks for my storage, but a friend sent me a link to another service that looks promising: Box.net. Like Dropboks, they allow 1Gb of free storage, which is all […]
Did you ever come across a word you’ve written a million times before, and suddenly it just looks wrong? In combing through my manuscript, I found a pair of terms whose proper spelling I can’t seem to get straight: forward and backward. Or is that forwards and backwards? I’ve written them both ways off and […]
As a writer, Microsoft Word can be your best friend or your biggest irritation. I received a large number of writing samples recently, and in reviewing them it became clear that some of these otherwise talented writers were struggling with basic manuscript formatting in Word. I started to write a series of long-winded posts […]
I started writing my latest manuscript last fall, full of what seemed like ingenious plot ideas. The characters were like family. Their stories were as familiar as my own hand, their yearnings rang true. The deeper into the book I wandered, however, the murkier the path forward became. Characters who were supposed to drive the […]
Most of us have been there at one point or another in our computing lives: you press the power button on your computer and wait innocently for the friendly face of your operating system to appear. As long the long seconds drag by, confusion sets in, then disbelief, and finally the creeping red fingers of […]
