Writerly Ways

[cornerofmadness]

Made it back to OH. My phone lines are down but other than that, it was fine. The knee did not hurt until I tried walking on the gravel. Only half the crap is in the house. I didn't want to over tire myself going up and down off the porch because yeah I am terrified of falling.

So for writerly ways I have to say I find character sheets very helpful. I write multiple stories at a time and it's EASY for me to forget little details like scars or tattoos or which arm I amputated.... So do you have a favorite character sheet? Can you share it?

I want to start them for my nano novel. For once I might loosely outline something. I know this will be at least two books long so that will take some doing.

Another question for you. In my YA novel I meant for synesthesia to give the Irish protagonist psychic abilities (you can see that listed as a possibility in some write ups). The trouble is that was a nano novel and in multiple attempts to edit and add it I've failed. It would be a herculean effort to do it right. Also someone in the writers group was constantly telling me he saw it way too often. I've seen it twice myself but maybe he's right. Anyhow, how would you think about surviving a lightning strike, another listed cause of psychic abilities?


How about some links?

From around the web

Writeability Resources

Fairy Tales from Around the World on Google Earth

Pay attention! Your Next Novel Can Come From Anywhere

Cliché Finder



Kevin Hearne: Five Things I Learned Writing Paper & Blood

From Betty

One Thing That Works For Me with guest Audra Jennings: A Good PR Inquiry Email

It's Okay To Fall Down

Don’t Let Excess Baggage Bring Down Your Character’s Plane

Creating Creatures for Speculative Worlds

How to Hone Your Fiction Craft

How Pain Kills Creativity for Writers (oddly for me it crystallized my time for writing)

How to Banish Shiny Object Syndrome.

Relationship Thesaurus Entry: One-Night Stand Lovers

Bad Apples (about agents)

How an editor at a publisher acquires a book

Comments

[ysilme]

Glad to hear you made it back ok!

I should to character sheets for my larger works, also because I often don't even think of some necessary background things for them until it happens to fit in the story, and then I have contradictionary stuff before that... OTOH doing character sheets sometimes gives some odd side character too much room in my head and makes them demand their own story, or much more screen time... /O\
Was it you I talked about trying out Campfire after last NaNo? I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm having the older, offline Version installed on the PC - I don't want to have an important writing tool which is dependent on the internet; it happens too often that I'm writing somewhere I don't have access, or go into fly mode to not be distracted. I'm using it on two computers by means of cloud synching which works fine, and the options the software offers are in theory just what I need. In practice, though, I find it too awkward and too much work to use it. In some modules the options are too limited for me, and I can't have two windows or instances of it open at the same time, which is rubbish for me - I might need to see my timeline to do edits on my character sheet, or work at two character sheets at the same time or so. Also, the loading times of each module are slowing me down because I have to wait for a moment each feckin' time I'm switching to a different module or file (and I'm working on a really fast and powerful PC). And while the font etc. is customizable there's just too much space wasted with things I don't need/want to see at any given time, and the size of what I can display on the screen is just too little to be satisfying.
TBH I'm seriously thinking of either building my own Wiki for this purpose (I need a huge amount of world building in various fantasy settings for the major works) or even just use my Scrivener as before but with more internal links (which I hadn't really used before), as the interactivity is a feature I really like.

[cornerofmadness]

I'll be honest character sheets help but on the other hand some times they still go off the rails and/or I think of something cool half way thru the novel and have to go back. Go me.

I don't think it was me you were talking about Camp nano or maybe it was. My memory is rubbish any more. I'm older and I admit it, I do things old school. I often hand write and then edit as I type it in. I only work in Word, no writing programs nothing like that.

But I get you, some times if I had the internet I piss away time all the time when I should be writing. I can understand wanting to build an off-line resource.

Go for it as far as the Wiki goes. that sounds like a lot of work. I do pull down and make files of research if I have my shit together (which I'm trying for this upcoming novel)

[ysilme]

I'm not young and old-school in many regards, too, but I also prefer to work as comfortable and efficient as possible, which is how my current writing set-up came to be.

As I'm left-handed I can't write on my knees or on any tiny wonky surface like others can, and since I often write things down under such circumstances being able to get a very small 10" netbook I mostly carried with me was a godsent, and even more so my phone once that became a possibility. I'm using Open Office not Word - too expensive, not Linux compatible, has shitty code if you need to convert them to be useable on another platform (Linux), and the file sizes are blown up - I've worked with other's files I had to convert for beta/editoring, and had to convert my own ones, all had twice the sice in word. Today it's no longer a problem but about 10 years ago working with a MS office file of over 1MB in size was a pain in the butt, as both Word and Open Office froze for every saving process for at least a minute or two. As I've set my files to auto-backup every 3 to 5 min because I'm prone to delete large blocks of text through clumsiness you can imagine how annoying that was! Discovering Scrivener therefore was the next godsent for me, and long since is so saving my ass as I'm disorganised as hell as far as story files go. I have myriads of WIPs and noted-down ideas, started stories, variations, edit stages; and when I was still only using a regular office software I've spent half of my writing time with selecting the files I currently needed and did I not have another draft for this or have I already deleted that? ;op
But then again, I'm mostly writing high fantasy with tons of worldbuilding, and particularly my fannish stuff is seriously interlocking in parts.
Scrivener is so comfortable for that as it's not batting an eyelid about the size of texts I feed it - the one with my Drawer Chronicles I'm working on since ages has over 500.000k words by now but isn't having any issues with response time etc.., and I have so many options for more comfortable working which is great. One I frequently use is being able to have the same page (equals a word doc) open twice to work at in two different places without needing to make a third version, which is great for the way I'm working in edits.
The few non-fantasy things I'm writing are much easier to handle and I could do that in Office as I usually don't need more than two pages (files in Office) but at this point it's more comfortable to stick to Scrivener; I'm not having separate Scrivener files for these but like one Scrivener for the fannish stuff, one for the drawer chronicles, one for the original fantasy, and one for original non-fantasy. Very handy also when I want to look up something I'd written before.
For editing, I just copy the pages in question (I usually use one per chapter or even story) into an Office doc and send them to my beta, works like charm.
Another serious drawback for me working with Open Office was the language coding: I'm writing mostly in English but on a German Windows on a German computer. I don't know if you know this but operating systems are language-coded depending on their installation language. This normally isn't an issue when using browsers, email progs or whatever, als the progs are programmed to convert the language code used for input to unicode (which is also what the U.S. uses) for interacting with the internet, or sending out mails and such. But it's not working like this with office softwares, based on the underlying workings of the software. When I set up my office software in German I have to convert every single new file to British English, mainly so the punctuation marks are the ones needed for the language (yes, several are different enough to create problems, and you can't convert them later) which is a pain in the ass as I often forgot this - and even having to manually replace quotation marks on a 2k story is a major pain in the backside (we use different ones for the start and the beginning, so search & replace doesn't work). When I set the software up in English I'm having issues with special symbols on any document that isn't English text, which wouldn't do as I need office for a lot otherwise where I interact with people online.
In Scrivener it's much easier: I just change the language globally, for the whole Scrivener document I'm currently working at, and can change it in-between if necessary without the coding of things already written being screwed up (which is what the offices do).
I'm not married to Scrivener, and the downside is that I can only use it in Linux with a virtual machine so I'm also looking for similar alternatives. But I certainly won't go back to a text processing office software, it's just too bothersome.
(Edit: no, I'm not sponsored by Scrivener or anything, just in case you were wondering. LOL )

[cornerofmadness]

That makes a lot of sense. I disliked Scrivner when I did a trial and never looked at it again. That said I could USE it with this damn research paper of mine that is going to require a crap ton of reordering but I nearly never do that with my stories regardless of genre.

That said Word is a pain in the ass (less than Google Docs though, now that's something I really hate and one of many reasons I never want another Chromebook) and I used Open Office for years but of course I never worked on a linux machine or one in a different language than what the program is written in. However Word not saving things (ditto OO) correctly has and still is an issue.

I figure you can ask a dozen authors and get a dozen answers as to what works best

[spikedluv]

I haven't seen it done at all that I can recall, so I'd ask that person to bring their receipts.

If only Jeff Davis had thought of doing character sheets, lol! (Teen Wolf was a hot mess of contradictory information.)

Also meant to say that I'm glad your trip home was uneventful, and I'm glad you didn't try to overdo it.

[cornerofmadness]

me either and I DID ask. He never offered.

Oh lord to Teen Wolf. Honestly these shows should have a Bible (I think in theory they do) because they have so many outside writers.

thanks. Now if it would only stop raining