We made a long-overdue trip to our favorite little used book store today. I yielded the following tall tales from my to-be-read list:
Virtual Light
by William Gibson
Crystal Express
by Bruce Sterling
Farnham’s Freehold
by Robert A. Heinlein
Night of Light
by Philip Jose Farmer
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
by H. P. Lovecraft
Now that I’m all settled into my new office I’ve been able to organize my work flow a bit better. I’ve setup one workspace specifically for writing. Having a dedicated area to go where I can write undisturbed for an hour or two should help. I’ve already participated in my first Flash Fiction challenge at Absolute Write.
I’m happily back to using WriteRoom for my first drafts. I’m also looking at two other applications: Scrivener and Storyist. I’m going to give each of them a try and see if either one is useful to me.
I’m considering going to Confluence in July. We’ve been meaning to take another road trip to the New York area to visit friends and family and a stop in Pittsburgh could be arranged. If anyone knows of any other cons that are worth going to, let me know.
The Cliché Finder is a fun little tool. It compares the list of clichés published in the Associated Press Guide to News Writing to your text and highlights any matches:
Ken Starr, who is spearheading the campaign to get the President,
says he’ll leave no stone unturned in his intensive investigation
to discover the true facts behind the latest sworn affidavit.Taking leave from his prestigious law firm job, Starr has left
gentle hints that so far we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
He paints a grim picture of the the red-faced pillar of society
who has tried to sweep the facts under the rug.Both sides have unleashed a storm of protest in the ongoing battle
for the reins of government. But defenders are few and far between
for the disgraced and dishonored President, who aides say is
nervous and distraught.
I don’t know if it’s particularly useful, but it won’t help you find that forgotten can of corn.
I’m somewhat obsessive/compulsive. Today, I finally took care of one of the little things that has bothered me for years: I reorganized our entertainment center.
I pulled out the TV out and vacuumed up two years of dust bunnies.
We have a pair of Sauder Audio Piers on either side of the TV. One we use for storage of movies, the other holds all of the various electronic bits that keep us entertained. Because of the heat build-up, I’ve had to keep the glass door opened for as long as I can remember (or whenever we got the XBox 360). With the addition of a PS3, and my general frustration at the dangling cables that were growing like weeds, I decided to pull everything out. After two hours of rearranging and cutting out air holes in the backing, I have the DVD changer, stereo receiver, cable box, HDMI switch and Linksys switch inside the cabinet with the the doors shut. There’s minimal heat being generated by the cable box, but it should be okay. The PS3, XBox 360, HD DVD drive and Vision camera are nicely sitting on top where they can vent heat unobstructed.
It’s the little things like disorganization that always end up distracting me. A couple hours of work and I feel a lot better. Tomorrow we’re going to finish loading our movies into the DVD player and connect a keyboard to it so we can enter the titles. Maybe this motivational streak will keep going long enough to finish my “honey do” list. I know Dena won’t complain about that.
One of my favorite applications for writing is WriteRoom. It’s a “full-screen, distraction-free writing environment”. It’s good for people like me who are easily distracted or compulsive multi-taskers. Unfortunately it’s only for OSX (Dark Room is the Windows equivalent). Since I won’t run Windows on my Thinkpad and Apple has blacklisted OSX against running on non-Apple hardware, I needed to find a Linux equivalent.
With the full screen plugin for gedit, you can make it look and feel almost like WriteRoom.
Hit F11 and gedit will switch to full screen mode. It’s not quite as specialized as WriteRoom but it gives you the same distraction-free environment to write.
I finally took some time out today and wrote myself a little WordPress plugin today (screenshot) that lets me manage the stories I write. The first step of this is to track the story, word count, and if it’s been submitted, accepted, and/or published. It gives me a nice little running synopsis of my progress for the year. You can see this now, on the right side of my blog.
The next step to this is a daily writing log, so I can track how much I’ve written each day. The statistics from that will be nice, such as average words/day, number of days since I’ve written, etc., but the motivational factor makes it worthwhile.
The last step will be an actual submission tracker. When I send a story off, I want to track where I sent it, how long it lived in the slush pile, etc. With enough data, it should provide some useful information about the lifecycle of a manuscript submission. I think this kind of tool would be useful enough to put up somewhere that anyone can use. I know about the black hole but I don’t think that’s an effective way to organize the data.
The in-flight movie during our trip to California today was “The Illusionist”, starring Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti, and Jessica Biel. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so all I will say is that you need to see it. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in recent memory.
Dena and I went to Las Vegas last weekend for a mini-vacation and to meet with some of the supportive folks from Calorie Count. We’ve been to Vegas once before, but that was a one-night layover on our drive from Chicago to Los Angeles, so we had spent most of our time playing Vietbet after reading this Vietbet Sportsbook review which told us everything we needed to know about the game. (and we stayed at a cheap motel). We stayed on the strip this time, at the Luxor.
Talk about a mish-mash of people! Las Vegas is one of the biggest tourist spots in the world, and the strip is the heart of that activity. There’s a lot to do and see, but we chose to watch Penn and Teller at the Rio Hotel. The show was fabulous. Afterwards, the cast hung out in the lobby and signed autographs and shook hands. It was pretty cool.
It was a little creepy to see the men and women handing out coupons for strippers and escorts to everyone walking by.. and I mean everyone. I saw them try handing them to men, woman, (young and old) and children. Next year we’re going to have a contest to see who can collect the most coupons, for the most services.
There’s a ton of shopping to be done. Walkways connect the Luxor, New York, New York, and the MGM Grand. We also walked through Caesars and a few other random hotels. I think I wore a hole in my shoes from all of the walking we did. That’s probably a good thing, given the food we ate. We didn’t have a single bad meal while we were there. We originally tried to get reservations at Emeril’s New Orlean’s Fishhouse for dinner one night but it was booked up. We went to Wolfgang Puck’s Bar and Grill in the MGM Grand instead and it was the best food we’ve ever eaten. Their Truffled Blue Cheese Chips were unbelievable and the Bread Pudding was to die for. Highly recommended.
We finished up on Monday, tired and poorer. We headed to the airport nice and early. Our flight ended up being delayed a few times. We eventually got home at 3AM Tuesday morning. I’m still catching up on sleep. I could never live in Las Vegas (my mom and brother used to) but it can be a fun place to visit. Next time I’m going to play some poker.
Business is going well these days. I went ahead and moved our servers and business internet to Eatel (learn more about EATEL Business) and I find myself needing to delegate more and more work. I need to find a person or persons, part or full-time, to design web page templates. You can work from home, the coffee shop, or wherever you like, as long as you’re able to communicate via phone or instant message and meet reasonable deadlines.
Required skills:
Preferred:
If you’re interested, send me an e-mail. If you know someone who might be interested, send them a link and if I hire them, I’ll send you a t-shirt or something.
November is going to be an exciting month. I’ll be spending the first four days of the month in southern California for work. Dena and I are taking a four day jaunt to Las Vegas before Thanksgiving for a well-deserved mini-vacation. We’re going to go hiking at Red Rock Canyon and other fun stuff to be determined. Finally, at the end of the month I will spend few days in Paris, France for the Search Engine Strategies show. I’m really looking forward to the trip to Paris. I won’t get much time to do the tourist thing but I plan to see the Louve and Eiffel Tower during a caffeine-induced trek of the city at night.
Aside from travel, this is also National Novel Writing Month. I’ve been trying to do it for four years now. Each year work and life gets in the way. This year may not be an exception, unfortunately. Because of the time crunch, I’m going to focus on rewrites and exploring the current work in progress. It’s the first short story I’ve written in nearly two years. It was critiqued by my writers group at the last meeting. I’ve got a stack of notes to sort through and some pretty interesting ideas to explore. I’m going to focus on that. There are a few stories-worth of material I want to explore so I’ll take the time to do so now, instead of writing something I would likely be embarrassed by. I think, at this point in my “career” (I don’t know if you can call being an unpublished writer a career path), I would rather write 5,000 good words than 50,000 bad ones. If I end the month with one polished short story that’s ready to be sent to live in an editors slush pile, so be it.
