One of the biggest hassles of traditional journalistic writing is quoting sources. I don’t even knowhow they did it in “the old days”, when reporters just had notebooks – shorthand, I suppose) but these  days we’re lucky enough to be able to make digital recordings of our sources. Since I do most of my interviews by phone, I use Skype and record all my calls using a free plugin called Callgraph.

So I know I always have a complete record of every source interview, but I still have to dig around in them to find just the right quote, and I still have to transcribe the quote from the recording. For formal interviews, like my Q&A with The Big Burn author Timothy Egan, I need to transcribe the whole interview (even though most of it ends up getting cut to fit the assigned space).

Using a traditional mp3 player or audio software to do this is an exercise in either futility or saintly patience. Since most people talk faster than I can type, I would have to manually drag the slider back and forth, or use fast forward and rewind buttons repeatedly, to get all of a long quote down, let alone an entire interview.

So I was pleased to find Express Scribe, a transcription assistance program that runs in the background and allows you to use your function buttons to control audio playback (e.g. F4 is stop/pause, F7 is rewind, etc.). Since it doesn’t need to be an active window to be controlled, I don’t need to go back and forth between it and my word processor – I just hit F4 when I need a minute to catch up, and hit F9 (play) when I’m ready to start again.

Another nice feature is that I can set playback speed to rates much higher than typical speech (which I never use) or much slower. It normalizes the pitch so that you don’t get Chipmunk-esque screeching or ultra-baritone drawling. For longer transcriptions, I set it at about 45% playback speed, which matches the speed I type at. Of course, everyone sounds like a drunken idiot at that speed – everything’s slllluuuurrrrrrrrreedddd – but it’s a small price to pay. Basically, if I don’t have to take a break, I can transcribe anything at just over twice real-time, so a half-hour interview takes a few minutes more than an hour – not too shabby.

Here’s the kicker: Express Scribe is free! In grad school, my department spend thousands of dollars for a tape transcription machine – Express Scribe does the same thing, better, for nothing. They do try to up-sell you to other products in their lineup, but frankly, I don’t need any of the company’s other products (mostly more advanced dictation and transcription software for corporate use).

If interviews are at all a part of your workflow, download Express Scribe right now. It may not be the flashiest piece of software out there, but it does exactly what it needs to do to get the job done. Highly recommended.

This is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online school for OnlineSchool.net. Enjoy!

The most productive writers know how to use the web and other tools to meet deadlines and achieve writing goals. If you are looking for new sites to inspire and new tools to help you write and edit your next piece, this article can guide you to 15 resources guaranteed to make you more productive on a daily basis.

Writing.com - Created for writers of all levels and interests, this online writing community is a wonderful place for writers to hone their skills, learn new techniques, and become a more productive writer. After signing up for a free membership, site users can create a writing portfolio, participate in writing activities, and utilize Writing.com’s many writing tools.

Writers Write - Writers Write is a comprehensive resource for writers who are looking for information on writing and getting published. The site features a blog, articles, book reviews, author interviews, news, writing jobs, and much more.

NaNoWriMo - NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is an inspiring site for writers who want to adopt a seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Every November, community members pledge to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

WritingFix - This site offers free interactive writing prompts for writers who are having a hard time coming up with something to write on. Simply click on the prompt generator until you find a prompt that sparks your interest.

365 Pictures - Launched in April of 2009, 365 Pictures is a collaborative project that provides a new picture and thought-provoking writing prompt each day. Pictures include photos, illustrations, mixed media imagery, and other artwork.

Seventh Sanctum - Perfect for writers who have a difficult time naming their characters, equipment, or organizations, this site offers multiple name generators for nearly every occasion. Seventh Sanctum can also be used to come up with writing ideas and plot lines.

Grammar Girl - Productive writers can study grammar on the go with this amazing podcast from Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. Each episode is devoted to a particular grammar issue and includes quick and dirty tips for remembering grammar rules.

Style Guide - Given to everyone who writes for Economist.com, this handy guide makes a great reference for writers who need to quickly find answers to style questions. The guide covers everything from capitalization and punctuation to abbreviations and titles.

AutoCrit Editing Wizard - AutoCrit is a paid service, but writers can use it to edit short, 800-word pieces for free. The Wizard searches for overused words, repeat phrases, and sentence length variation.

Booksie - Booksie is a good site for writers who want to electronically publish novels, poems, short stories, and articles and receive critiques from other people. The site allows writers to build a profile, interact with the community, and retain full rights to all of their work.

yWriter - yWriter is free novel writing software that keeps writing organized by separating it into chapters and scenes. The software also backs up work automatically so that you never have to worry about losing a piece in progress.

RoughDraft - RoughDraft is a free, award-winning word processor for older versions of Windows. Features include live spellchecking, instant backup, genre-specific formatting, an HTML converter, a dictionary and thesaurus facility, and much more.

Wridea - Wridea is a free web application for writers who want to organize their ideas and better manage the writing process. The app can also be used to share outlines and brainstorming sessions with friends.

Web-Chops - Web-Chops is an excellent tool for writers who conduct their research online. The tool makes it easy to quickly collect information from around the web and place it on one web page.

Joe’s Goals - Establishing goals is a good way for writers to get on track and stay productive. Joe’s Goals is a simple way to establish and monitor all of your writing goals.

One year with the Netbook (Almost)

As I’m coming up on the one-year mark with the MSI Wind, it’s a good chance to reflect on whether it’s been a good investment. In a general sense, I would answer emphatically yes! It’s such a convenient machine, I end up carrying it most everywhere I go. The portability of it alone has made it worth the investment.

But in terms of writing specifically, I’ve found the ability to use the couple spare minutes I might have between errands or sitting down for a caffeinated beverage the greatest benefit. While I certainly used to go to cafes and the like with my past notebooks, it was always a chore to do so; I had to ensure that the (low-capacity) battery was charged, worry about getting a seat next to an outlet, and carry the machine in a bag I didn’t necessarily want. However, the netbook fits in whatever bag I’m using that day, has great battery life even on standby, and goes from standby to writing in under 30 seconds.

So, in summary, the Wind has been a huge boon not only to my writing (not that you could tell from the frequency of my posts since then), but to my productivity in general.

Software KVM Switch

In the previous post, I describe one of my favorite tools, x2x, used for sharing the keyboard and mouse across two network-connected machines (i.e. a “software KVM”). This solution worked well for me while I was using Linux on the desktop machine.

However, since then, I’ve switched Windows XP on a desktop for some Very Important Reasons (*cough* Warcraft). As x2x isn’t an option on Windows without some measure of elbow grease, I looked again to Synergy.

I had tried Synergy once before, quite unsuccessfully. Although I had tried all manner of ways to install and configure it between the two Linux boxes, I could never get the two to find each other. I put this down (incorrectly, as it turns out) to the application, and washed my hands of it. In the end, it was a typo on the firewall rule that would have allowed Synergy traffic into the machines that was the problem.

Synergy is an excellent tool. While it performs basically the same function as x2x, there are a couple of key advantages it has:

• Most importantly, it’s cross-platform. So you can have a Linux machine, running alongside a Mac, alongside a Windows box, all sharing a single keyboard and mouse.
• In addition, there is a great GUI tool called QuickSynergy that makes short work of configuration.
• Lastly, it has some nice features such as the ability to be lanuched as a server automatically at start-up (on Windows) and a good tolerance for automatic connection/disconnection (I often leave the Synergy client on the Wind running, and when I get back to the desk and plug into the LAN, the Synergy server on the desktop will grab the cursor automatically).

I’ll continue next time with some of the “must-have” apps and tricks for netbooks, in the vein of Dustin’s post here. Only focused on Linux, natch!

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…

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.

But that’s not the real reason to own WriteChain. The “special sauce” of WriteChain is the idea of a chain. Here’s how it works: you enter in a daily writing goal, and every day you meet that goal, you add a “link” to the “chain”. Your goal is to keep the chain unbroken – to keep adding links day after day after day – and WriteChain will let you know if you let the chain break.

If you’re not a daily writer, that’s ok – you can select a longer period in the preferences. So, for example, you could select a maximum timeframe of 3 days. As long as you meet your writing goal in that three days, you’ll earn your link; go three days and an hour (or 14 weeks, or a year-and-a-half) without reaching your writing goal, and the chain is broken – you’ll have to start over again with zero links.

WriteChain is not a revolutionary app. What it is is a convenient and fun way to keep track of your writing. If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, it’s certainly worth adding to your mobile writing toolkit. For more information, visit the WriteChain page on Jamie’s site, or download WriteChain directly from iTunes.

WriteChain: iTunes (99 cents)

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)

Twitter is one of the most significant social media platforms to emerge in the last couple of years. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, have a look at this post where I explain the general concept, then head over to Twitter.com and sign up for a free account.

I’m always interested in finding new people to follow on Twitter, especially writers (because, let’s face it, if you’re gonna read something someone wrote, even in 140 characters or less, it’s always better if that person can write!) and I figure many of the readers of this site are, too, so here’s the deal: drop a link to your Twitter profile (In the form http://www.twitter.com/username) into the comments along with your name, and every few days I’ll shift them into this post to create a single list of Twitterers. Follow them and join the conversation!

Check back every couple of days and see who’s new and who you might want to follow!

Here’s the list to date (names link to website, when it’s given, @username links to Twitter profile):

1. Dustin M. Wax (@dwax)
2. Kimberlee Ferrell (@kimferrell)
3. Sonja Faust (@Sonja_Faust)
4. Johne Cook (@theskypirate)
5. Curt Wingerter (@Artistcw)
6. Douglas (@palisade14)
7. Alex Lobov (@alexlobov)
8. Thursday Bram (@thursdayb)
9. Copywriter Underground (@ChandlerWrites)
10. James Chartrand (@MenWithPens) 
11. Brandon J. Mendelson (@BJMendelson)
12. Elspeth Murray (@ElspethMurray)
13. Monica Valentinelli (@mlvalentine)
14. Rich Chastang (@richcat1989)
15. Tom Colvin (@tomcolvin)
16. Carolyn (@WordCountess)
17. Nathan E. Lilly (@nelilly)
18. Silvia Straka (@silviastraka)
19. Jetse de Vries (@Shineanthology)
20. James Mallinson (@jmallinson)
21. Roy Jacobsen (@rjacobse)
22. Jeff Wetherington (@thewordofjeff)
23. Zoe Westhof (@zoewesthof)
24. Danielle Marie Crume (@sumsette)
25. Michael Pokocky (@michaelpokocky)
26. Carly Tuma (@ThePiratess)
27. J.M. Strother (@jmstro)
28. Sina’i Enantia (@SinaiEnantia)
29. Jennifer Aderhold (@jjaderhold)
30. Who’s next?

A Twitter Tip for Writers

One of the cool things about Twitter is you can search the tweets of virtually everyone on Twitter (except a few holdouts whose stream is marked “private”). Go to search.twitter.com and search on any keyword to see what people are saying about it (try your name or the titles of your books to see what kind of buzz is out there).

I use Tweetdeck, a desktop Twitter client, which allows you (among other things) to set up a live search in a column that is automatically updated whenever a new tweet is posted by anyone on Twitter that contains the keyword for that search. The most useful search term I have is “for writers” (with the quotes), which is updated whenever someone posts a job “for writers”, a question “for writers”, or a link to a good post “for writers”.

Have another good search term “for writers”? Add it to the comments along with your Twitter ID!

Want More Writers on Twitter?

Twittterpacks.com is a site that collects sets of Twitterers you should follow and orders them by category. CHeck out the WRiting Twitterers here.

Image by lingolook via Flickr

Inspired by Aaron Peter’s posts about the MSI Wind (here and here), I finally gave in and bought a netbook of my own. After much consideration, I decided on the Acer Aspire One, a unit roughly the same physical dimensions and with the same specifications as the MSI Wind but which, to my taste, felt and looked slightly better.

The model I bought came with Windows XP installed, instead of Linux — I have nothing against Linux (and claimed my father’s old PC when he upgraded, which I plan to install Ubuntu on when I get some free time) but I was worried that I’d have a hard time finding drivers for some of my older peripherals (like the scanner I can’t use with my Vista laptop because there are no drivers at all available).

After using it for about a week, I have to say I’m very impressed with my Aspire One. It runs smoothly and quietly, handles Office 2007 well, and of course it’s incredibly portable. Acer thankfully didn’t load it up with a lot of “crapware” (unwanted trials of commercial software) — all I had to do to get up and running was uninstall McAfee’s bloated security suite (replaced with the free AVG) and the 60-day trial of Office 2007 (which I replaced with a full install of Office 2007 Pro).

Working with such a small computer does have its challenges, though. The small screen means you look at everything in smaller bits than you would on a full-size screen, and the small trackpad makes maneuvering around the screen, small as it is, a challenge. But I’ve figured out ways to deal with all the challenges it poses, and the Aspire One has rapidly become my primary machine — I might not write a book on it, but writing my typical 1000-word articles on it has been quite simple, and since I can use it just about anywhere (I haven’t tried the bath yet…) it’s quite comfortable.

Here are some of the tricks I’ve discovered to get the most out of my Aspire One. Most of these should work on just about any XP-based netbook, although some depend on the drivers your manufacturer has installed.

• Auto-hide the taskbar for more screen space. With only about 4 1/2” of screen from top to bottom, you’re going to want as little taking up screen real estate as possible. Getting rid of that 1/3” of taskbar at the bottom doesn’t make much difference on a desktop or 15”+ laptop, but on netbooks it can mean a lot. Right -click anywhere on the taskbar, select “Properties”, and select “Auto-hide the taskbar”. Move the mouse to the bottom edge of the screen and the taskbar will pop back up so you can launch your programs, folders, or Windows functions. When you move the mouse away, the taskbar will slide out of view.
• Install RocketDock. RocketDock is an Apple-style launcher that allows you to launch programs, open folders, and switch windows. I’ve got it set up at the top of my screen with icons for the half-dozen programs I use most as well as my most commonly-used folders. Also, you can have programs minimize to RocketDock instead of the taskbar, which puts a little screenshot of the app in the RocketDock. Since I don’t want to use up more screen space, RocketDock is also set to scroll up and out of the way until I mouse to the top of the screen, at which point it drops down and I can instantly access the programs I need or the windows I’m using. (Free)
• Add function to the desktop. Since the goal of having a netbook is to be more  organized and more productive away from home, it helps to have easy access to a calendar. Smashing Magazine, a website devoted to design, published a variety of desktop wallpapers with monthly calendars every month, so you can add a new, gorgeously designed calendar every month. Take a look at November’s calendar wallpapers for an idea of what they offer, and visit Smashing Magazine again next week for a December calendar background.
• “Applify” your favorite web applications with Google Chrome. Google’s new web browser Chrome is faster than just about any browser out there, and it’s optimized for use with web-based applications. While I don’t recommend it as your primary browser, it does something that no other browser does that makes it a useful addition to your netbook’s program menu: it can package any web-based application as a stand-alone app. Visit a web app like Google Docs or Zoho Writer, click the little page icon next to the address bar and select “Create application shortcuts”. Chrome will place an icon on your desktop which will open the application in its own window, without all the toolbars a normal browser would have. Since Chrome has Google Gears built in, you’ll be able to use many apps even when your offline.
• Sync to your home computer with Windows Live Mesh. Since the netbook isn’t likely to be your main computer, you’re going to want an easy way to get files back to your primary computer. Windows Live Mesh lets you synchronize files between multiple computers — create a Mesh folder on one machine and Mesh duplicates it and everything you put into it on every other computer logged into the same account. What’s more, you can access all your synced files online through the Mesh homepage so even if you don’t have the foresight to take your netbook with you, you can still work on your files. Mesh is free, at least for now.
• Crank long pages up and down. The trackpad on the Aspire One is about 1 1/2” tall, which means scrolling a long page involves a lot of pad-strokes. Or you can go into the mouse settings in the Control Panel and make sure that “ChiralMotion” is  enabled. Get there by clicking “Settings” on the “Device Settings” tab to open the Synaptics trackpad settings. Highlight the “Virtual Scrolling” item in the tree menu and check the “Enable ChiralMotion scrolling” box. ChiralMotion allows you to scroll by making a circular motion instead of stroking down, picking up your finger, stroking down again, picking up your finger, scrolling, and on and on. Begin to scroll on the right side of the trackpad as normal, but instead of stopping, change your downward stroke into a counter-clockwise circle. Reverse to scroll back up. To me, it feels like turning a crank to crank the page up and down. (This feature is not limited to the Acer netbooks – check your non-Aspire mouse settings to see if it’s available for you.)
• Change the screen orientation. Reading long files can be more comfortable with the page in portrait layout, holding the netbook like… well, like a book. It turns out that changing the screen orientation is trivially easy — hold down CTRL-ALT and hit the arrow keys to shift the page. Up is for the normal page layout, down turns it upside-down, the left arrow key puts the top of the screen on the left, the right arrow key puts the top on the right. Pretty neat, huh?

That’s all I’ve got so far, but I’ve only had it for a week. Anyone else have an XP netbook? What tips do you have for your fellow writers?

I nearly forgot! One more thing:

• Pinch to zoom in and out. With a mouse, you can zoom in and out of webpages, images, and documents in most other programs by holding down CTRL and using the scroll wheel. And you can usually do that on a laptop without a mouse by holding CTRL and stroking whatever part of your trackpad doubles as “scroll” (usually the far right edge). But that’s not very practical given the Aspire One’s tiny trackpad, so they’ve brought in a gesture familiar to iPhonen users to replace it: pinch. To zoom in to a page, place your thumb and forefinger tips together on the trackpad and spread them apart; to zoom out, pinch them together. No CTRL key needed!

Comparison

Before we start, let’s figure out what each of these things does well, or at least better than the other.

Desktop:

• On a desktop, the wide screen is clearly the biggest advantage.
• Also, the keyboard is likely to be better than the one on the netbook (unless you’re using an HP Mini).
• Graphics- and animation-intensive applications and/or web pages are likely to run better on the improved horsepower of the desktop.

Netbook:

• Although the desktop is bound to have more storage, there is something to be said for keeping certain types of information in one place. For example, I keep my tree-based note-taking application (BasKet, more on this later) exclusively on the Wind.
• I also find it easy to really focus on a particular task when working on the Wind. Perhaps it’s because of the small screen size, and therefore the fact that I can’t have multiple windows open with lots of lights and whistles going off.

Linux Toolset

So, based on this assessment, I came to the conclusion that I wanted some type of set-up that would allow me to access both the desktop and the Wind at the same time. Here’s the tools I use to do just that:

• SSH/SFTP: The Secure SHell, or SSH, is one of my most used applications. I use it to remote into the desktop (which functions for me largely as a server as well) to perform maintenance, install new software, and (via the Secure FTP compatibility), move files back and forth between the two machines. Lastly, SSH will allow me to open an application that’s only installed on the Wind on the display for the desktop. For example, I have the Quanta web IDE installed on the Wind, but I can open it on the desktop through an SSH tunnel.
• SVN: Where I’ll use SFTP for a one-off movement of files, when keeping all of my “working files” organized, I use the version control system called Subversion. Originally designed for managing code, it works very well as a simple-to-set-up document management system. Additionally, it also works through an SSH tunnel, so I can securely access files on my home desktop anywhere there’s Internet access.
• x2x: Finally, possibly the most useful tool in my arsenal is x2x. This “software KVM” allows you to share a keyboard and mouse between two machines with two separate displays (so, I guess it’s really a software “KM”). The effect of this is that I can use the desktop keyboard, and when I move the cursor past the bottom of the screen, control “jumps” to the Wind, and I can use the larger keyboard and mouse to work there.

Based on the above, here’s how I generally use the two machines together.

• I leave my e-mail client and IM window open and tiled on the Wind. Using the smaller screen is useful for things that you need to monitor, such as e-mail, IM, or RSS/news feeds.
• I’ll open non-processor-intensive applications such as text editors/word processors remotely from the desktop (i.e. open the copy of the application that’s installed on the Wind so that it displays on the larger screen of the desktop).
• Twice per day (usually, the start and end of the day) I’ll sync (in SVN parlance, “update” and/or “commit”) changes to files on the Wind into the SVN repository.
• I open windows such as web pages that I’m reading in-depth and development apps on the desktop.

With these two machines connected via the tools above, I have a very functional set-up when sitting at the desk that allows me to unhook the Wind with a minimum of fuss. Drafting on the go and doing layout/coding when “docked” has become my preferred method for working. With the Linux toolset, it’s easy!