I’m a geek. Let’s just get that out of the way before going any further. One of my wonky pleasures of late has been cruising around the Web using StumbleUpon, a sort of remote control for channel-surfing the ‘net. In a bout of weekend stumbling, I came across several websites that might be of use […]

I can hear your eyes rolling. “Manuscript formatting? Great, here he goes again…” Dinking around with MS Word styles is like watching paint dry, I get it. So rather than foam at the mouth yet again about how to properly format and structure your Word doc, I’m going to hand you a shiny golden Easter […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I found myself in a curious position this week. My writing partner and I are expanding our fiction critique group, and as part of that I posted an announcement in the weekly email blast by Willamette Writers, our local writing association. No sooner had the announcement run than writing samples from eager group participants began […]