The Writer's Technology Companion

Image via Wikipedia Ideas are paradoxical. While hours of urgent deep thought might leave us without a clue, at other times ideas seem to pop into our heads effortlessly, dazzling us with their perfection. Alas, these brilliant moments of inspiration come all too often when we’re busy doing other things  —  driving, showering, drifting off to sleep, […]

Image via Wikipedia While coming up with ideas might be easy, coming up with good ones is a bit harder. You increase your odds, of course, by coming up with lots and lots of ideas  —  out of a hundred or so, surely there ought to be one or two you can do something with! Brainstorming is […]

Image via Wikipedia “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” poet Robert Herrick advised his readers  —  for all too soon, you’ll be old and rosebud-gathering will be just one of many things you are no longer capable of. That’s the normal reading of the poem, but it occurs to me that it is in the very nature […]

In my series on Word 2007, I discussed how to use Word’s Master Documents feature. In a nutshell, Master Documents allows you to put a long document like a book together from chapters or parts created as separate documents. Creating a Master Document isn’t all that hard, but it’s a little fiddly  –  you have to get […]

Hot on the heels of my post on Windows Live Writer comes the public beta release of version 3 (I’ve been using a technical preview, which lacks some of the features that are supposed to be in WLW3, like the ability to align text left, right, or center). You can download it at the Windows […]

I blog. A lot. I write for this site, of course, but I also write thrice-weekly posts at the personal productivity site Lifehack, occasional posts at the anthropology blog Savage Minds, posts for my personal site at dwax.org, and the odd post for sites like ProBlogger and the design blog Smashing Magazine. (And there’s the […]

Last month, I completed a project I’ve been working on for quite a while, a book of advice for college students called Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College. The book grew out of some of the frustrations I’ve had as a university instructor over the last five years, and […]

This week, we’ve talked about how to create copies of your work so that the actual loss of a file or even a computer doesn’t derail your whole career. But what about other acts of stupidity, like accidentally deleting a big section of text from your work in progress without noticing it? What if you […]

A good backup system creates multiple copies of everything to prepare for whatever circumstances may arise while remaining convenient (which means you’ll actually use your system). Here is a good, solid, and fairly easy backup system to make sure you have a reasonably recent copy of all your work whenever you need it.

In addition to local, immediately available backups, you also want to keep a backup somewhere off-site, in case of fire, flooding, earthquake, or other traumatic events that could destroy your home. One option is to store a set of backup CDs or DVDs at a friend or family member’s house, in a safe deposit box, […]