The Writer's Technology Companion

I recently ran into a strange problem. I was asked to present an academic paper at a conference, and while writing fell automatically into the habit of referencing all my quotes and other citations with traditional parenthetical citations. When I went to produce the shorter copy that I would read from at the conference, I wanted to remove all those parenthetical citations — they were just clutter and I Knew I’d stumble over them while I read.

Here’s the thing: normally, I could just use the “wildcard” to search for anything inside of parentheses, like this: (*). The problem is, when you enable wildcards in Word’s search, you also enable a bunch of operators, and parentheses are among them — Word uses parentheses to group together different parts fo the search query, the same way you use them in math, e.g. 12*4+3 vs. 12*(4+3). So a search for (*) simply returned everything.

Here’s how I solved the problem:

1. With wildcards disabled, I did a “find and replace”, replacing all left-parentheses “(” with an ampersand “&”.
2. Then I replaced all the right-parentheses  “)” with a dollar sign “$”.
3. With the parentheses all turned into something unique (if I’d used dollar signs or ampersands in the paper, I’d have replaced the parentheses with carets or percent signs or any other punctuation or symbol I hadn’t used) I could enable “Use Wildcards” and search for the phrase “&*$” (without quotes).
4. Because there might well be other statements in parentheses, I used “Find next” and “Replace” rather than “Replace all” to go through the paper and delete only the citations.
5. Finally, I restored the parentheses by running the above find-and-replace operations backwards, turning dollar signs and ampersands back into their respective parentheses.

And that’s it. It wasn’t particularly intuitive, unless you’re deeply familiar with how wildcards work in Word, but once I grasped that the parentheses were the problem, it was a simple matter to replace them and blast them out of my paper.

And the presentation went well, though of course I found plenty of other things to stumble over, like words and my tongue…

Image by ClawzCTR via Flickr

One of the things I’ve had the hardest time figuring out since my freelance writing began producing a significant income was how to manage my estimated quarterly tax payments. For the time being, I’ve been over-paying my taxes at my day job and hoping that it was enough to cover the taxes I wasn’t paying on my freelance income. Last year my overpaid taxes just barely covered my freelance taxes – assuming my income keeps climbing at the rate it is (and especially once I start scaling back my day job) this jury-rigged system isn’t going to work for much longer.

Enter Outright, a free online service to help freelancers manage their taxes. Using Outright is fairly simple – you just enter in your income as it comes in, and your expenses as they go out. Around the end of each quarter, Outright sends you a reminder saying your upcoming taxes are about due, and figures them out for you (including Social Security – both employee’s and employer’s contributions) and Medicare). Where several methods exist to figure out your taxes, Outright uses the one that requires the highest payment, on the principle that  its better to overpay a little now and get it back at the end of the text year than to underpay and get hit with fees.

[NOTE: Outright is designed for the US tax system and, as of right now, does not support non-US taxpayers.]

What makes Outright really shine, though, is its integration with other services. On the “income” side, Outright integrates with online bookkeeping system FreshBooks, importing paid invoices every night and updating your tax estimate. On the “expenses” side, you can track receipts using Shoeboxed, an online system that allows you to scan receipts into the system so you can dispose of hard copy (paid versions even allow you to mail your receipts in and have them scanned for you).

Altogether, Outright, FreshBooks, and Shoeboxed create a full accounting system freelancers – particularly at low- and mid-range incomes. Outright scales pretty well, though – as your tax needs get more complex and demand the attention of a bookkeeper or accountant, you can easily give them access – a couple clicks and the system sends an email with a link to set up third-party access to your books.

With a system like this, there’s no longer any excuse to avoid paying your quarterly estimated tax payments. Entry-level versions of FreshBooks and Shoeboxed are free, as is Outright – why not set them all up and give it a try?

Jamie Grove of the excellent writing blog How Not to Write has created something special for iPhone or iPod Touch owners who write: WriteChain. More than just a word-count tracker, WriteChain is built around the principle of the chain, encouraging you to write every day to avoid “breaking the chain”.

WriteChain is a simple app. On the home page, you enter how many words you write each day. If you want, you can add notes by editing the day’s session under the “Sessions” tab. WriteChain will keep track of each day’s session, and let you review the sessions and notes whenever you want. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Today I bring you a guest post from Gavin Nachbar. Gavin is a freelance writer who cannot be found anywhere in the world without his iPhone. As a writer, he has written for a couple of magazines including Hyphen Magazine and The Escapist Magazine.

Gavin doesn’t have a site of his own right now, but says you can feel free to email him with any questions about the iPhone!

Back in 2007, Apple.’s iPhone was released to a crowd of cheering fans who couldn’t wait to have their phone and iPod together in one. They were excited to be able to get their email and go online in places where WiFi had previously said “no”. In two short years, though, the iPhone has turned into so much more.

The iPhone has not gone without criticism, though, and many people will swear by their Blackberries. Throughout the election, we heard about Barack Obama’s obsession with his Blackberry, and many of us couldn’t help but think “Maybe I should get one of those?” Both iPhones and Blackberries are great in their own right, and either would be a great choice for a writer.

Then what sets these two phones apart? The iPhone has over 25,000 third party applications ready for download, and that number is only growing. Different applications serve different purposes, and they do all kinds of things. Some of them can identify a song on the radio while others can give you directions back to where you parked your car. Of all of these applications, here are 6 of the best for writers to use. [Read the rest of this entry…]

For writers looking to improve their blogs quickly, Darren Rowse’s “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” program might be just the thing. Rowse runs Problogger, one of the top blogs on the Internet and the place to go for information about making a living as a blogger. For the next month, starting April 6, he’ll send out an email every day to everyone in the “31 Days” program with a quick, 10-15 minute task they can do to make their blog a little bit better.

I know little beyond that — like you, I’ll have to wait until the 6th to see what kind of tips Darren is sending out. But, Darren is a) super-smart about blogging, b) very good at explaining things, and c) about the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, and therefore one ofthe givingest, so I’m sure the tips will be effective, well-written, and generous.

The program is free — you just need to give your name and email address to receive the daily emails. IF you need to get your blog in order — or maybe even get your blog started — this looks like a good, quick way to pick up a little steam.

The writers at the group blog Magical Words have developed an interesting little piece of software called Character Keeper, an AIR-based program intended to keep track of character profiles and other snippets of information related to your book. Becuase it’s AIR, Adobe’s stand-alone Flash platform, it will run on any computer that can run current versions of Flash (though you’ll need to install the AIR runtime if it’s not alreadyon your system).

The program is quite simple - each note has a descriptive headline, a category (intended to keep separate your notes for different projects), and a large text space for free-form text writing. On the right-hand side, notes (they call them “clips”) are organized by category, allowing you to skim through all the notes related to a particular project. The program features one-click copying of theentire note so you can easily copy-and-paste your notes into whatever document you’re working on.

Character Keeper is a simple little application that doesn’t do much, but it may well fit into your writing workflow. It’s free at the moment; the site seems to implythat they’ll be charging for it in thefuture, but unless they add significant new features Ican’t imagine it being worth paying for. As a free app, though, it’s certainly worth a try.

Character Keeper (free)

Saving documents as PDFs has become trivially easy. A huge number of PDF creator apps have emerged, most of them free, and almost all of them quite simple to use. Programs like Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org have “save as PDF” built in (you need an add-on from Microsoft to do this in Word 2007, but it’s part of the normal interface once you install the add-on). Adobe’s Acrobat.com lets you save to PDF from their word processor, Buzzword, and includes a PDF converter that will transform any document you upload to PDF.

What if you want to go the other way, though? That is, what if you want to get the text back out of a PDF so you can edit it in your normal word processor? This is quite a bit harder than creating a PDF — strange things happen to the original text when you create a PDF that make it quite difficult to pull the text and, especially, the formatting out.

Enter PDFtoWord, a free web-based service that has just begun offering its services publicly. PDFtoWord is simple — you select a PDF file on your harddrive, select whether you want the output to be a Word (.doc) file or a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file, enter your email address, and click “convert”. Within an hour or so (like I said, this kind of conversion is difficult!), PDFtoWord emails you the output of the process — a very nicely formatted and ready-to-edit word processor file. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Image via Wikipedia

For most people, “becoming a writer” means first and foremost getting published. And really, getting published for pay. That first sale is a watershed moment for the fledgling writer, a moment of validation that you have something to say that other people want to hear.

These days, getting published is less and less of a challenge – but getting that first paycheck can be harder than ever. The Internet has opened up a huge range of opportunities for people to publish their work free or for insultingly low rates – blogging, article sites, search engine optimization, and so on. While these can be great ways to start building a reputation for yourself and even earn a couple of dollars here and there, they simply are not the basis of a strong writing career, and the low barrier to entry makes it hard to feel like you’ve made much of an accomplishment. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Image via Wikipedia

So, you want to be a writer.

It can be daunting to know how to get started as a writer. A lot of us feel we can write, know we can write – or better yet, know we can’t not write. We love the unfolding of stories beneath our pens, the spray of words across a computer screen, the sound of imagery narrated in our heads. We are story-tellers, truth-seekers, teachers, and sharers of life’s joys and sorrows, beauties and uglinesses.

But there’s a huge gap between scribbling our thoughts in a journal or writing a couple of essays in a college class and actually being a writer. I know I’ll be contradicted by… well, by everyone on the Internet trying to make a buck selling you their Super-Amazing Get-Rich-Quick-Writing-from-Home System for only $97 or $297 or $497, but while writing may come easily to you (and it doesn’t especially matter if it doesn’t), actually being a writer is hard, hard work. Not the hardest ever, but hard enough.

I don’t say this to discourage you, or to test your mettle, or anything like that. I want you to be a writer. Or I want you to at least have given it a shot, to have at least tried it on – better that you try and fail than to not become a writer out of fear, laziness, or simple lack of knowledge. But if you’re going to become a writer, I’d like you to be prepared for the long haul, and all those scammy “anyone can write” programs and products do a piss-poor job of preparing would-be writers for the job of actually writing. [Read the rest of this entry…]

We writers have many tools.

We have our words, the nouns and verbs and adjectives and even the woefully despised adverbs, poor dears. We have our talent, our rare gift for putting the right words in the right order to make our readers weep, laugh, thrill, buy — or just turn the page. We have our minds, straining through the days and nights to create and hold onto the ideas that fill our words with meaning.

And we have our word processors. The tools we use to actually capture those ideas and put them down in words, the software and laptops and notebooks and ballpoints. These tools aren’t quite so glamorous. They seem so everyday, so mundane, so… boring.

And yet, there are few writers that aren’t infinitely fussy when it comes to their physical tools, who don’t demand just the right pencil on just the right paper, or who don’t secretly thrill at the prospect of a new notebook computer to carry down to that oh-so-perfect café. (We’re a little fussy about places, too.)

And why not? The tools we use to get our thoughts out of our head and onto paper (or increasingly, the screen) are the medium of our calling. You wouldn’t look askance at a painter who demanded the right brand of oil paint and a canvas prepared just so, right? A word processor or legal pad is a writer’s canvas; a keyboard or fountain pen her brush. [Read the rest of this entry…]