Backing Up Your Writing To Gmail

I love Gmail. LOVE IT. I've been using gmail since the very early days of it's inception because a good friend of mine invited me. Since Gmail is no longer invitation only and it lets you keep over 2 GBs of mail you can use it as a handy backup place for small files. I think the current upload limit per-email is 20MBs.

What I did is create a gmail account solely for the purpose of archiving some of my writing and small files like photos and such. The great thing is that most word processing documents are tiny so I .zip them and email them to my archive account and I have access to them from just about anywhere there is a computer. And they sit there, safe and sound until I need them. It's become a habit now to email documents and small files to this account so I know I'll have them when I need them. It's like a manually operated Mozy.com that only needs a web browser.

Book Plots In A Minute

Book-A-Minute Classics features descriptions of famous novel's plots that are so condensed some are only three sentences long.

If you thought Reader's Digest had condensed books...

Unintended Plagiarism

Maybe I should call it Accidental Plagiarism instead. Back in 2002, Pete Hamill penned a novel entitled "Forever" which is about a character named Cormac O' Connor:

Cormac was killed centuries ago ... and brought back to life _ eternal life. Granted immortality, he lives in Manhattan, still bearing the scar of his fatal wound, learning to play the piano, romancing the city's women until he finds the one who can grant him peace.

So, soon Fox will air a tv series about:

[A] lead character [who was] killed centuries ago ... and brought back to life - eternal life. Granted immortality, he lives in Manhattan ...

If you read the article you'll read about some other similarities between the two stories. Similarities that Fox is claiming have nothing to do with one another...it's all coincidence. And it very well may be. There are so many creative works out there that every now and again two ideas will be birthed which will be twins only from different mothers. But there's something else going on here I think.

If you take the premise of these works there's a natural tendency to create similar story arcs and rules. New York is a happening romantic place, immortals are usually battle-damaged (in fact it's estimated that if you were immortal you'd only live to be about 500 before, based on guesstimation, you'd die in some horrible body destroying accident), immortals would be lonely and they'd have lots of time to learn complex things. The initial premise, to me at least, seems to lend itself to a natural flow of components to the tale and character.

Then there's the old film Highlander too...lets not forget that one about Connor MacLeod, the scarred immortal, who lives in New York...etc...etc...


Connor and his Piano


Connor's Scars

Bonus Pithy Remark: While we're talking about immortals, why hasn't anyone made a decent film about Count of St Germain who also played piano (among a zillion other things)?

3 Million Dollar Book

Roger Shashoua is offering a diamond-encrusted edition of his new book Dancing With The Bear for the sum of three million dollars.

He says Russian tycoons are the target readers for the made-to-order book which features more than 600 flawless diamonds.

The book is an account of how the author made £100m through business in post-Soviet Russia.

I'm offering my unpublished book for 10Million dollars. I haven't finished it yet and I don't have any real ideas other than the title which will be "How To Sucker Rich People Into Buying Crap They Don't Need, To Fulfill Their Empty Souls And Lives Devoid Of Purpose".

Bean, a free word processor.

Bean has been updated. It's a simple word processor for OS X that many people like because of it's small footprint and low requirements yet it has enough features to be handy. It's actually quite nice for things like NanoWrimo or using on older hardware.

Features

Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that includes:
a live word count
a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics
a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
an Inspector panel with lots of sliders
date-stamped backups
autosaving
a page layout mode
an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
an option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces)
selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
a floating windows option (like Stickies has)
easy to use menus
remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats)
all of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)

What Bean doesn't do

Bean doesn't do footnotes, customized headers and footers, columns, pre-defined text styles, floating graphics (but it does do in-line graphics).
Also, no OpenDocument (.odt) format support (but it's coming with OS X Leopard).

Give it a try and see if you like it here. Oh, and it's free.

Cheap G4 iBooks

otherworldcomputing.com has a few used G4 iBooks for sale for around $500 USA. They get these specials in every few months it seems. I've bought one G3 iBook from them and one G4 iBook because at $500 or less (the G3 iBook was around $250 I think) they're -as far as I'm concerned- disposable electronic typewriters that can also do email and surf the web.

They're dinged up, scratched and usually the keyboards are a little warped but they run Mac OS X 10.4.x, Pages (albeit slowly on the G3) and can take a beating overall.

The G4 iBook I just bought has a battery that "ioreg -l | grep -i IOBatteryInfo" tells me has only been power cycled 23 times, the screen has one tiny dead pixel way off to the side and the keyboard was a tiny bit warped which was easily bent back into shape.

I love these things because I don't care if they live or die and I ALWAYS back up my new writing with Mozy AND to a tiny flashdrive at least once a day. I take one with me everywhere because I never know when I'll need or want a typewriter.

The Grandiloquent Dictionary

I'll freely admit I'm a sciolistising lexiconophilist, heck, I even know the difference between hypnopompic and hypnogogic but if you want some really fun words check out the Grandiloquent Dictionary.

Rummaging around the site I get a distinct whiff of sniglets but of the handful of words I randomly tested several were listed in a few online dictionaries. They even have a convenient pdf to download.

But I'm no logastellus, that's for sure. Logophile sure...

Worthless Word of the Day

I'm a word junkie (yes, there's a word for that heheh) so one of my daily sites is the Worthless Word of the Day.


I highly recommend it for such morsels as:

suffisance
cumulose
obscurantist
subreption

and the hilarious:
helliferocious & ambisinister

p.s. no, it's not wordphile, it's logomaniac.

Quotation and Punctuation Marks

I've always been terribly confused with how punctuation works when it's around quotation marks. Do they go on the inside, or outside and how on Earth can you always know? I did a search for it and found this on some quotation marks page:

Inside or outside
Punctuation marks are placed inside the quote marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation (this system is referred to as logical quotation).
Correct: Arthur said that the situation is “deplorable”.
(When a sentence fragment is quoted, the period is outside.)
Correct: Arthur said, “The situation is deplorable.”
(The period is part of the quoted text.)
Incorrect: Martha asked, “Are you coming”?
(When quoting a question, the question mark is inside because the quoted text itself was a question.)
Correct: Did Martha say, “Come with me”?
(The very quote is being questioned, so here, the question mark is correctly outside; the period is omitted.)

From the quotation marks wiki page we find this:

In both styles, question marks and exclamation marks are placed inside or outside quoted material on the basis of logic, but colons and semicolons are always placed outside[2]:
Did he say, “Good morning, Dave”?
No, he said, “Where are you, Dave?”
In the first two sentences above, only one punctuation mark is used at the end of each. Regardless of its placement, only one end mark (?, !, or .) can end a sentence in American English.

So it's fairly simple: if what you're quoting has punctuation, put it within, but if it doesn't, put it on the outside.

The Gender Genie

The Gender Genie purports to autoMagically discern your gender from your blog posts (although I suspect any bit of writing would suffice). What would be fun to do is to test it out with the same blog post and see if minor variances in the way the text was constructed affect the results. For example, I suspect that the more non-contraction word sets one uses would shift its results to that of female since, in my experience at least, I've noticed that females tend to write out "do not" more than they use "don't". But that's me.

Anyways, check it out here.

Just in case you're wondering, this blog post -what's above this sentence at least- caused it to think I'm female. I guess that just means I'm more sensitive than the average male :)

The Literature Author

The Literature Author generates text in several different styles. It uses rather difficult words, but at least they sound genuine. Best results are achieved when used with language you have some knowledge of.
A mathematically oriented aquintance told the algorithm has something to do with Markov Chains.

Try it out here.

Short, Short Stories

This site (which I can't read yet somehow know about) wants short, short stories. The stories have to fit in 160 characters so they can be SMS'd to people. That's pretty cool.

For comparison, this message is 64 words long.

The Sounds of A Writer

Do you miss the old days of actually hearing more than your keyboard when you type? For me I love the visceral sound of typebars striking a ribbon or even the 70's typeballs in Selectrics. Ever wanted to make your computer sound like a typewriter?

If you're using Mac OS X here's how, for free:

01) Launch System Preferences.
02) Hit Universal Access
03) Hit Keyboard
04) Turn "Slow Keys" ON
05) Tick "Use click key sounds"
06) Set "Acceptance Delay" to Short

It's also not a bad joke to play on friends.

The Espresso Book Machine

A company called OnDemandBooks has released a printer like no other. I literally prints out and BINDS books. Yes, you read that correctly.

On Demand Books LLC. is planning to become the first company to globally deploy a low cost, totally automatic book machine (The Espresso Book Machine), which can produce 15 - 20 library quality paperback books per hour, in any language, in quantities of one, without any human intervention.

Rather than describe it, just watch the video.

You know what's cool about this? Not printing out your own books, which is, but the potential to browse a library's library and downloading and printing out your very own copy of the book to run around with and read. Or, if a library doesn't have a book you want, rather than have one shipped, they'll just print it out for you in a few minutes and you're on your way. There's something romantic about having your own copy of a book printed to me. I love the idea.

ThumbThings For Free

A company a while ago was selling something they creatively called a ThumbThing (their website seems down as I post this). Which was a .000001¢ piece of plastic that you put on your thumb while you read a book which held it open for you freeing up your other hand for whatever you need it for while reading.

I was pretty astonished to see these things being sold for $2 or so in bookstores. There had to be something you could use that was readily available that did the same thing and wouldn't set you back $2 if you lost or broke it.



Yes, that's the cap to a drink bottle I had on my desk.

Why is a bottle cap better?
- Doesn't cause even more plastic to end up in our landfills.
- Flatter surface doesn't score a line into the pages of your book.
- Won't cost you a thing usually so you won't be bummed if you loose it.
- Convenient storage place at the top of your drink.

Choose Your Own Adventure Books

I LOVED Choose Your Own Adventure Books when I was a kid. Heck, I still do. In a more perfect world I'd have a complete collection. In fact I partially blame them for my obsession with writing because I think that when I was reading those books, and making my decisions and turning to those pages to see what happened I was trying to predict what would happen and many times what ended up happening just wasn't as exciting to me as what had already happened in my imagination.

However there are volumes that no one will ever collect because they're just for fun.

Some very funny people have retitled some familiar Choose Your Own Adventure Books and the results are hilarious. It was popular not too long ago to re-title scans of book covers. If you take the time to search around you'll find some very funny ones.

Coincidentally I did one myself for a friend just the other day:

Books As Art

Not the words inside, the actual books themselves. I've never been one to deface a book. To me they are like sacred objects containing fragments of the mind of their author. But someone named Georgia Russell does do some interesting things with books by eviscerating and goring them into misshapen splayed open objects.

It's a bit horrifying and intriguing simultaneously. The gallery is here.

What fascinates me is that while they're still books, they're now unreadable. Yet the fact that they are/were books is what makes them more than just abstract art. You can almost hear the information inside screaming.

The 100 "Best" Novels

Random House has a list of the 100 best novels. Actually there are two lists: The Board's List and The Reader's List.

There are some fun and interesting differences between the two lists. See if you can spot the trends here.

The Snowflake School of Writing

Randy Ingermanson has a page up with tips about how to write using what he calls the Snowflake method. While I don't generally like nuts and bolts methodologies (like Syd Fields books on screenwriting) when it comes to creating art some of his tips are more common sense and organization than rote hardcoded rules.

It's worth a read.

Plagiarism, Harry Potter & Dracula?

I'll admit I've never read any Harry Potter book and have no plans to do so. But, a post at a message board led to a search which turns up some interesting parallels between Bram Stoker's Dracula and J.K. Rowlling's Harry Potter.

So, when we arrived at the hunt for Voldemort's horcruxes in order to vanquish him, as made clear in HBP, I knew I'd met this plot device before.

I've read Dracula but not Harry Potter so my opinion is only half-formed ;)

There have been other accusations of plagiarism directed at J.K. Rowling before though.

Harry Potter was a character in a 1986 movie called "Troll." In the movie "Troll" Harry Potter was a dark haired, ordinary boy that discovered magic and battled a troll.

Many see striking similarities between "Harry Potter" and "The Worst Witch," by Jill Murphy. Murphy wrote the first "The Worst Witch" novel in 1974 when only 18. This book was made into a 1986 movie.

"The Worst Witch" is the original story of Mildred Hubble and her life at Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches," which Jill Murphy based on own school. A pointed hat was added to her normal school uniform, and spelling class actually became SPELLing class. "Miss Cackle's Academy For Witches." "The Worst Witch" was written almost 20 years before the first Harry Potter book, and the movie was made 15 years before "Harry Potter" was filmed.

Again, I have not read either but it's interesting if true.

Two Heads, One Idea

It's funny how some people far away from one another will basically have the same idea. Take the idea of a hero without a head.

The first time I heard of an idea like this was for a videogame called "Dead Head Fred" where:

The core gameplay revolves around Fred's missing head. By progressing through the game the player can collect an assortment of different heads which all have different abilities.

But then a while later the Sci-Fi channel aired a pilot for a show called simply enough, "The Amazing Screw-On Head" where:

[The author] imagined a robot with a head that screwed onto different bodies to suit the occasion-hence the "Screw-on Head".

Just thought it was interesting.

Choosing Your Novel's Title

I thought this was interesting. I've been toying with the idea of a steampunk novel for a while so I've been looking around getting the feel of what the genre is about (no, I'm not calling it genre fiction, at least I hope I'm not) and I kept seeing one author's name popping up over and over but oddly enough, the title of his novel would change, seemingly with each interview.

I'm not sure with this person's story is but his name is Trent Jamieson (his blog, which I haven't really read is here) and in three different features on him his steampunk novel is called "The Night Beyond Land," "Roil" and "The Festival of Float." I'm beginning to think this guy is a fabrication of some kind but there are other interviews with him, like this one and this one. Fortunately he is listed on Amazon.

Anyway, the point is that you're allowed to alter the name of your novel all you want, authors do this all the time. However, it's a good idea to stick with one title once you go public with your manuscript because I think that changing the title of it so many times in the public eye doesn't reflect creativity so much as instability.

1500 Books Someone Thinks You Should Read

Someone named Calazet has compiled a list of 1500 books he thinks you should read as well as some serials.

You may have some trouble getting the long list to load. What's interesting is not what's there but what is missing as well as some texts which most would agree need explanatory companion texts. There are also, as of this post, some mistakes like listing Orwell's "1984" twice, once as a number and once as text. Also, Issac Asimov's "I, Robot" is seemingly listed as just "Robot" in the serial section at the end.

There are some good things on the list to be sure but there is a subtle bias present as I suppose all lists of this length would have. For example, there are several religious texts listed, yet no books against religion nor are any books listed that explain religious texts in context, historically.

Still it's worth a gander.

Writing Tips, Advice and Cover Letters

Here are two quick links with advice about writing fiction in general and some advice for writing cover letters. I haven't read much on these two sites, but the portions I skimmed though seem worthwhile reading. Hopefully I'll have time to read more on there in the next few days.

Wordsmitten's Advice on Cover Letters & Holly Lisle's general tips for writing fiction.

Post-Potter Depression

Post-Potter Depression is now listed at urbandictionary.com.

The empty feeling that comes from finishing the seventh book in the Harry Potter series and realizing there will be no more.

Dangerous Laser Printers

Okay, I know this isn't about writing but other than electronic documents the most common format to show off your work is the printed page. Now it happens that if you print things using a laser printer you may be breathing in particulates from the printer that you really don't want to be.

Here's the troubling story.

First-Time Author Gets Six-Figure Deal

And she probably deserves it.

The pitch intrigued the publishing world: "Forrest Gump wins Powerball."
And with that, Patricia Wood's new novel, Lottery, was launched into a bidding war that nabbed the first-time writer a six-figure deal.

And for more inspiration there's this:

She had written three earlier novels and has "a stack of rejection letters" to show for them. Lottery came to her quickly last year. She spent eight hours a day, seven days a week for three months writing it, she says. "I was consumed."

She sent e-queries to agents, hoping to attract interest.

"Most of the time I'm so busy, I don't read the e-mail queries," says Dorian Karchmar, a literary agent with William Morris in New York. But on a slow day last summer, she read Wood's and was hooked by the Gump line and five manuscript pages Wood included.

Full Article Here.

Self-Publishing Online For Free

David Wellington has done well for himself. He's written several popular novels that have been published in real life yet he still publishes them for free, in their entirety online.

They're worth checking out.

It's something I'm thinking of doing with my next "throw-away" nanowrimo novel using something like the Creative Commons Licensing deal. What I'm toying with doing is publishing each day's writing to a blog not only so others can read it while it's still warm from my fingers, but so I can keep track of myself and my word count and hopefully keep myself encouraged and motivated throughout.

We'll see.