Category: On Writing

Horrorfind March 2008

My days have been full since last weekend, tests, work, all this real life. Last weekend I took off from all of that and went to a convention.

It was a new hotel for March, and they were not ready for us. They say by August they will have enough people, support, back-up support and even moral support, but we will see.

On Friday night there was Rocky Horror Picture Show by the Satanic Mechanics, a group I am familiar with. The show was great. Afterwards found myself and a new bunch of friends and argued, talked and drank about movies, books and of course, Godzilla.

I had a reading on Saturday at 3:00. I read two stories, Island in my Head and “Untitled” which I wrote that morning. I went to most of the readings. The reading rooms were great, but they were so far from the main part (aka, the dealer room and bar) that not many people even knew they were there. We will need signs for August, and whiskey.

Sunday Scares that Care did an auction for some collectibles. It was good stuff and for a good purpose. I wandered home, tired and ready to do battle once again with the real world.

Which is much more scary than anything I found at Horrorfind.

Mark Time as: BUSY

I’ve been busy lately. Really busy. Too many things that need to be done, too many things that I want to do. Just too many things and still only one of me.

So what happens when I get busy? The writing is first to go. Unfortunatly, while I consider myself a writer, since I am not a ‘professional’ writer, there are other priorities which involve a paycheck. Perhaps that will change one day, but for now writing is something I do when I am not at work.

My own personal interests do not help the situation. If I were simply fixated on writing, it would be easier to find the time. Instead I am drawn to writing and web coding and video games and camping and aikido and reading and … you get the idea. I am the jake-of-all-trades after all.

I don’t have an answer, this isn’t a post about how you can change your, or my, life and make it better or more organized or what have you. This is more of a statement. This is who I am. I am busy.

Software for Writers, part one

I’ll probably write a few posts on this sort of stuff. There are so many tools out there availible for a writer (or any artist for that matter) it is hard to know what to pick. Most of my posts will be about free software. Why? Well, as a starting writer, free is a good thing.

The idea being that your creativity shouldn’t be hindered by your wallet. Perhaps you won’t have that sound studio, or that top of the line movie editing deck, but you can get tools that well get you there.

So let’s start with some basics.

You need a word processor. For a writer, this is a part of your creative process. For an artist in general there are countless reasons why you’ll need to sit in front of that blinking cursor, from resumes to reviews. There are two great choices out there that are both open source, and free.

AbiWord (http://abisource.com)

Simple. Light. Easy to use, but still powerful. AbiWord is just a word processor, but it does its job efficiently. Most of the tools you will need are here.

OpenOffice.org (http://openoffice.org)

This is a monolith. Openoffice.org is a competitor for Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, a spreadsheet app, presentation, even web and database tools. There are forums everywhere to help with the program.Templates, tutorials, all availble online. If you are thinking of buying an Office Suite, try this one first (it’s free!) and see what you think.

Both of these programs can save in either MS Word formats (.DOC) or in Open Document Format. The advantage of ODF is that it is an open standard, so you don’t have to worry about not being able to open them down the road. The disadvantage is that Word can’t open them natively, so you may have to convert to DOC or RTF before sending them out to friends or editors.

Are these the only two options? Not a chance. There are lots of open source word processors, and some closed source, but free ones, like Google Docs, for instance.

That’s a start, there will be more as we go along.