Drinking Ink

Everyone's nibbled on pen caps or pencil erasers or even chewed the wood on a pencil and some have even been forced to eat their own books but not many have chugged raw ink before. There is that old saying about feeding the writer inside but I think this kid takes it a little too far.

A boy in Southwest China's Chongqing with an alias of Yang Yang has a unique taste - drinking ink, toilet water, shower gel and things of the sort, the Chongqing Evening News reports.

Tips for Writers

I absolutely love Mac OS X's text clipping feature which I shouldn't because it's been broken for years. However, I still clip gobs of text and the little clippings collect like used tissues in a wastebasket when you're battling the latest bird flu or monkey pox.

I've been sorting though some of the detritus that's eating up space on my hard drives and ran across this tid bit of writer's advice. I have no idea where I clipped it from unfortunately:

- write every day, try to get around two or so pages. Just keep writing and worry about the editing later.
- every scene must have conflict. Introduce it, act it out, and then resolve it.
- Every 'hero' must have an equal and opposite 'villain' opposing them.
- empathy for your characters, NOT sympathy.
- the list of things you have already heard goes on and on and on...

Atlanta Nights: A Novel

I've run across this a few times but only recently did I actually remember what it was called. What's Atlanta Nights you ask?

Atlanta Nights is a collaborative novel created by a group of science fiction and fantasy authors, with the express purpose of producing an unpublishably bad piece of work and testing whether publishing firm PublishAmerica would still accept it, which they did.[1]

Why target PublishAmerica?

It has been the subject of controversy because it has been accused of being a vanity press or author mill by some writers and authors' advocates,[1] despite its claims to be a "traditional" advance- and royalty-paying publisher.

If you sniff around enough it's possible to turn up a downloadable copy. I can't make it through the whole manuscript but reading it in chunks can be a laugh out loud experience.

DIfferent People, Different Perceptions

Something interesting happened to me this week after I hit upon what I think is a really interesting idea for a short story. Part adventure, part creep-me-out I ended up staying up very late jotting down notes for it. The next few days I told a handful of close friends the idea and got different reactions from nearly each one:

One friend said it was boring because nothing happens at the end. There's a build up and then nothing.
Another friend went off the rails and put a comedic spin to the whole story.
Yet another said, "Don't tell me things like that. That's just creepy."
A fourth friend didn't really offer an opinion but helped flesh out the details of the events in the story.

To me the very fact that something doesn't happen at the end of the story and we leave it just as we begin, but with a greater awareness of what's going on is what creeps me out. It's a story that won't be difficult to write mechanically speaking but on subtler levels it still pops in and out of my thoughts every day since I came up with the original idea.

It's like the old saying about how you can't please everyone all the time. Different people have different life experiences and interpret the world through different filters. I suppose the trick to being a successful writer, or painter or musician is not the quality of the work you're making but with how many people it resonates with. Maybe it's an inverse proportion quality vs popularity, I hope not.

Jack Kerouac, Scrolls and Ginsberg

This is just kinda neat because it combines to things that I'm fairly passionate about, writing and photography. Jack Kerouac was photographed by fellow writer Allen Ginsberg.

Also interesting is that the original scroll Kerouac used to write On The Road has been published by Viking so if you want you can finally read the original draft of it. Somehow the idea of writing a novel on a scroll is very appealing to me. I can just see myself now carrying around a scroll and handwriting a novel or short stories on it.

Despite several friends and even two strangers giving me copies of the book I've never managed to read the entire thing which is something I plan on correcting this winter.

A Novel In Weeks, Six Weeks

Just about anyone can write a "light-hearted" novel in 6 weeks, probably less really given the popularity of NanoWrimo or a novel in a weekend or a Novel A Day contests. (Btw, nothing against them, I'm going to do Nano again this year.)

But when you're hired to write a novel in an incredibly popular series, one that is literally a household name, it seems to me that you should spend as much time as you think you need to hammer out something worthy of the brand you're keeping alive. Maybe this guy did, I dunno, I have not read his novel yet.

The deal is that:

Author Sebastian Faulks has revealed that he completed the new James Bond novel, ‘Devil May Care’ in just six weeks.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I know a writer who clackity-clacks their way though 10,000 words in a day then doesn't touch their keyboard for days, and I know another who is lucky to get maybe 200 words a day every other week. Writing isn't about speed, it's about telling a good story. If this guy can do it -and do the brand justice- in six weeks more power to him I say. But that's something I, personally, wouldn't brag about unless it was for something like Nanowrimo.

Pushing Reality Aside At An Early Age

Reality is a hassle; that's why many people like to read and it's something that's not just attractive to young adults onward, apparently preschoolers can find themselves swept away by a good yarn...

A large part of enjoying a good book is getting immersed in the life of a character, especially a character's thoughts and feelings. A new University of Waterloo psychology study shows that preschoolers can already perform this impressive perspective-taking feat and get into the minds of story characters.

Pulp Fiction Cover Art

Someone has posted a really fun gallery of pulp novel cover art over at Flickr.

Check it out.

Need iWork Templates?

iWork from Apple is nearly a complete package now that there is a spreadsheet application called Numbers. However, as great as the templates that come with the suite are you can always do with more. Here are some places that have additional templates:

iworkcommunity (lots of free ones)
KeynotePro (they sell their templates so I have no idea how good they actually are)
Jumsoft has some very orange ones for sale.
Oneeyedgoldfish has some for sale and a free one.

Those are about the best I could find. I'm sure there are more floating around though.

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.