So I finally got round to installing Lion a couple of weeks back and now I am going to give you my belated review. Everybody else upgraded about six months ago but what the hell-- I am not much of an early adopter. In case you want the edited highlights-- I basically like it, I find most of it an improvement and some of it just a little weird. Of necessity this will be quite limited since I don't use all of the new OS's features and am in no way qualified to comment on them. This is the first OS upgrade I have ever bought directly over the net. I bought it through the App Store and I have to say it all went impressively smoothly. There were no problems with the download and installation. For the price you get to upgrade on all of your … [Read more...]
Freedom
I have mentioned before how I waste a lot of time wilfing (What am I Looking For) on the net. It is a constant temptation. What starts out as a simple look at my sales figures on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing can turn into a multi-click odyssey in which I scrabble around the whole Amazon site chasing up things that interest me just because they appeared on the also bought list of Death’s Angels. A fact check for my current project can turn into a trail of breadcrumbs which leads to articles on 80’s role-playing games. Sometimes I am not even aware of how these things start. One link simply leads to another and before you know it you’ve gone from the front page of the Guardian to the home page of some obscure Norwegian … [Read more...]
How To Write 10000 Words a Day and Other Recommendations
I am finally tying up Angel of Fire. I've had one of those rewrites where changing one thing led to changing another which led to changing another and on and on. I've simply not had time to keep up to date with the blog over the past couple of weeks. In a pitiful attempt to actually post something this week, here are a few things I can recommend. First up is Rachel Aaron's guide to writing 10,000 words a day. Yes, you read that right, that's how to write 10K a day, not a week, which is what I aim for. I've looked at this and I have to say that it all seems sound and sensible. I have written 10K a day in my time before old age and RSI took their toll and I recognise the good sense in what Rachel is saying. I don't see myself writing 10K a … [Read more...]
Software For Writers
As I have said before I am a sucker for any piece of software that threatens to increase my productivity and I have tried out most of them. However there are some that I have used constantly for years now and I really recommend. Scrivener I’ve doubtless gone on about Scrivener until you're sick of hearing it. So I’ll just say this. It is the best tool for writing novels that I know of. It used to be that Scrivener was only available on OSX. This was my main reason for sticking with the Mac. As of a few days ago, it is available for Windows and even Linux. I can move my work from Mac to PC and back as I feel like it and I am very happy about this. Scrivener is available here. David Hewson has an interesting comparison between the OSX … [Read more...]
The Tech Roundup
It’s a big week in tech for me. Asus and Acer have just announced their new ultrabooks, Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) is due any day now and, perhaps, most importantly Literature & Latte have (sort of) announced a release date for Scrivener for Windows. First up, the ultrabooks. I have long lusted after some version of the MacBook Air. It seems to be just about the perfect size for a travelling laptop to me. Somehow I can never quite make myself pull the trigger though. £1000 is a lot of money and to tell the truth I have been less than impressed with what I have seen of Lion. Heretical as it sounds to many people I actually prefer both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I have been living in hope that Intel’s Ultrabook initiative would … [Read more...]
Angel of Fire Done, Back to Scrivener
I finished the rough first draft of The Angel of Fire earlier this afternoon and I transferred it to Scrivener. I wrote most of the first draft in a combination of OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word. I switched from Scrivener to these more generic word-processors on a whim. I'm still not entirely sure why. I do know why I am going back to using Scrivener for the edit though. It simply gives more control. You can make changes to a scene and revert them back at the touch of a button. You can mix and match different versions of takes on a scene quite easily. You can mark up the scene titles and notecards in different colours to indicate tension levels and see at a glance the peaks and troughs of the story. (I use a simple red, amber, … [Read more...]
WINE
For those of you not familiar with it, WINE is a compatibility layer that sits between the software and the operating system and lets you run Windows programs in Linux without actually having a copy of Windows. The results have been very impressive. So far I have the Windows versions of Evernote 4.4 and Microsoft Word 2007 running. I used the Playonlinux front-end for WINE to instal Word without a hitch. (There is no option for Evernote on this software so I did a manual install.) There have been one or two graphical blemishes occasionally but both programs run well enough to work with. Even more impressively they integrate with Gnome Do so I can launch Word by calling up Gnome Do and typing in the first couple of letters of the name. I … [Read more...]
A Month Without Scrivener
Around one month ago I transferred all my files out Scrivener and started using OpenOffice Writer. This was an experiment and I was not even particularly sure why I was trying it. I said I would keep you all posted as to how it was going. The answer is surprisingly well. There are some things I miss about Scrivener, the little touches like countdowns to deadlines and daily word targets in particular. Making the change has not really affected my productivity any. I managed my usual word counts for the month. Some things are easier now. I can open the file on any machine from Dropbox and get to work right away. I have instituted a versioning system that lets me keep backups of my work as I go along. Basically I use the week number and a … [Read more...]
Dropbox
Of course, you've heard of Dropbox. It's a simple idea but it's a game changer. It's a piece of software that creates a folder. It stores anything you put in that folder in the cloud and on every computer on which you have installed Dropbox and it keeps all of these different folders in sync when the computer carrying them is online. It's so useful I have set it as the default save location in my Wordprocessor. It deals with the vexed problem of backups by ensuring that I have the file in Dropbox on that computer, on any machine I log in on later and in the cloud. I can access the files through the Dropbox website. That said, I don't rely on it for all my back up needs. I also use Time Machine, Back in Time and their ilk. I store … [Read more...]
Scrivener on Linux
I just downloaded the .deb package from the Scrivener forums and installed them on a Linux virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.10. It worked flawlessly. I am looking forward to testing this next week. Below is a screenshot of The Angel of Fire imported from OpenOffice Writer. In case you are wondering why the word Scene appears so often in those Binder headings it's because I put it there to mark scenes in my OpenOffice file before I imported it into Scrivener for Linux. I then performed a search for the word and used the Shift+Control+K hotkey combination to split the file into individual scenes in Scrivener. Yes, I spend my time doing this stuff and it really amuses me. I am a sad, sad man. … [Read more...]
Working in Ubuntu
I went out to the cafe today carrying my Acer TravelMate 8371 running Ubuntu 10.10. I opened my present manuscript from Dropbox and I began work immediately and I did not stop writing until I had done 1500 words. I was very pleased with myself and very happy with the Ubuntu writing environment. Of course, when I came home, I had a setback. I opened up Dropbox in Windows 7 on my desktop replacement and looked at what I had written. I decided that I did not like the way Open Office Writer handled chapters and scenes. It does not allow you to fold the lower headings into the higher headings in Navigator. Libre Office does so I decided to uninstall OpenOffice and installed Libre Office. Unfortunately, uninstalling OpenOffice also corrupted my … [Read more...]
Scrivener to Writer
This morning I compiled The Angel of Fire, my work in progress, in Scrivener, saved it as an RTF file and transferred it to OpenOffice with the intention of completing it there. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of what my reasons were since I love Scrivener. I'll try and list them in order – that is the order they come to me – probably not the order of importance. I have become very enthusiastic about Ubuntu recently even as I am becoming less fond of the increasingly control freak attitudes displayed by Apple. I find myself increasingly attracted to the idea of open source software. There are lots of reasons for this and this is not the place to go into them. That will probably be the subject of a blog on another day. I work on a … [Read more...]
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