The Writer's Technology Companion

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): [Read the rest of this entry…]

I’m on a quest for the perfect deadline reminder application.What I want is a simple online app that I can enter the due dates of my various writing assignments and projects into, and that will send me an email listing the upcoming deadlines. I already keep to-do list items and project planning stuff in other applications; my needs here are for a simple email that will just tell me what’s due, and when.

As it happens, it’s not a very lengthy quest, since as far as I can tell, there’s only one candidate: the aptly named Deadline. Deadline is a simple, free application that only does deadlines; you enter the task and the date it’s due, and Deadline sends you a reminder on that day and another as many minutes, hours, or days before as you select in your settings. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Image via Wikipedia

While researching an article about iPhones, I was contacted by Cheryl Kaye Tardif, best-selling author of numerous novels such as Whale Song. Tardif has embarked on a new project: writing a complete novel on her iPhone – the first major mainstream author to do so.

I kind of stumbled onto this by accident. One night while watching TV I was inspired by an idea for a new novel; I’m a bestselling suspense author with 3 published novels.

This new novel idea hit hard and fast and I didn’t want to lose one thought, so I reached for my iPhone 3G, which at the time I’d had for a week or so. Opening the Notes application for the first time, I started typing in my ideas. This led to opening a new file in Notes and actually writing the first paragraph or two of the novel.

Then I discovered I could email my Notes to myself. I did this and later that evening after the TV show I was watching was over, I rushed upstairs and opened the email on my PC. Copy and paste brought it into an MS Word doc, and ta-da! I’d officially started a new novel.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Image by ilmungo via Flickr

One of the profound ironies about writing a site about being a productive, efficient writer is that the better I am at what I write about, the less time I have to write about it. The last couple of months I’ve been getting more work than ever, even while I struggled to deal with a difficult semester (my day job is teaching anthropology and gender studies to college students) and an even more difficult break-up and move.

My guest writers helped a lot – Aaron Peters, Kelly Kilpatrick, and Stephanie Stiavetti stepped in to take some of the load off as I got moved and then buried under end-of-the-semester grading, and I’m immensely grateful to them all. It’s been fun having guest writers on the site, and I’m definitely up for more. [Read the rest of this entry…]

As a writer, I find this hilarious. As a professor, I find it so utterly depressing that it comes around the other side to funny again. Enjoy!

via videosift.com

Open courseware can be a great way to learn new skills and information from some of the best colleges and universities in the US for free — all you need to do is search for the courses you want and commit to improving yourself with some of the best resources currently available.

What is Open Courseware?

The term open courseware refers to the free and open availability of college courses from major universities around the United States. Started in 2002 at MIT, the aim of the open courseware initiative is to bring a body of high-quality collegiate material and make it available, for use and/or adaptation, to the general public. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Image via Wikipedia

Congratulations to everyone who participated in National Novel Writing Month! With the end of November, you are either looking with glee at a 50000-word (or more) manuscript or sadly facing the fact that you just couldn’t make it to 50000.

Either way, you accomplished something meaningful — either you finished (or at least made a good start on) a major writing project, or you didn’t make it and learned some pretty important things about yourself as a writer and about how to manage your time, enthusiasm, and creativity to make it for the long haul. I admire the people who took the challenge, regardless of your final word count.

I hope the posts here have helped you in your efforts, especially the interviews with NaNoWriMo participants. I am grateful to everyone who answered the call — I really appreciate you taking the time to share your advice with your fellow WTC readers. My thanks to:

• Trisha Bartle
• Carolyn Dekat
• Sonja Faust
• Catherine Hicks
• Amanda Kendle
• Betty Punkert
• Whitney Rhodes
• Jon Strother

Let’s do it again next year, and more besides! In the meantime, keep writing. Have a happy holiday season and into the New Year.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Betty Punkert is the Municipal Liaison for NaNoWriMo in Winnipeg, Canada, and has won the NaNoWriMo challenge 5 times before this year (and looks set to get her sixth win this year). Although she hasn’t published any fiction yet, she sees NaNoWriMo as an opportunity to incubate ideas, and feels ready to start pulling some of her NaNoWriMo novels together for publication. With five years of experience behind her, she has a wealth of advice for struggling NaNoWriMo-ers.Find her on the site as “bpunkert”.

Why do you do NaNoWriMo? What benefits have you gotten from your participation?

It started out as a lark. Now I do it in part because it’s the only time of the year I have a consistent fictional writing practice and in part because of the joy I get in helping others rediscover their creative voice.

The realization that if it isn’t perfect out of the gate, that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid story or I’m a terrible writer and I should give up. It only means that I’m a human being. I’m also discovering that I’m becoming a better writer by tackling it over and over again without being attached to ‘making a living’ at it.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

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.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Amanda Kendle is an Australian travel writer who dreams of becoming a published fiction writer. Perhaps that’s why she called her blog and exercise in creative procrastination Becoming a Fiction Writer – but then, who ever knows about such things. When she’s not writing travel articles and posts for publication or teaching English to foreigners or writing more fiction or blogging at Becoming a Fiction Writer, she’s hard at work re-writing her NaNoWriMo novel from 2007, her only NaNoWriMo so far and her first NaNoWriMo “win”. Find her on the NaNoWriMo site as “amandakendle” and say “hi!”

Why do you do NaNoWriMo? What benefits have you gotten from your participation?

I  signed up for NaNoWriMo to because I’m the eternal procrastinator but I tend to respond well to watching pretty graphs grow and feeling that other people could be watching me. Although I didn’t participate in the forums a lot last year, I read what a lot of other people were talking about and felt like I was part of something much bigger than just me and my computer in a small room in Perth.
The biggest benefit was learning that I *can* write a lot, when I have to. Since then I’ve been able to push myself a bit more because I know that back in November I wrote 50,000 words in less than a month.

How did you keep yourself inspired and motivated during NaNoWriMo?

A month is a short enough time (for me) that I could keep myself motivated mostly by wanting to be able to see the bars on my daily word count graph get higher. Obviously this wouldn’t work long term, but for a month it’s possible, and that kept me motivated. Also, I told quite a few people that I was taking part (and blogged about) so I didn’t want to have to admit defeat.

As for being inspired, that was surprisingly easy but if I got a bit uninspired I would browse the forums and see what kinds of titles other people had for their novels and how many words they’d written.

What sort of planning, if any, are you doing this year before you start writing?

I’m doing much more planning this year. Last year I didn’t plan at all, really, and while I still managed to get plenty written, the rewriting is an ongoing nightmare and I’ve had to throw a lot out. So this year I am getting much more detailed with chapter outlines etc — but only for the first 3/4 of the novel, the ending is still a mystery to me. That’s largely because I can’t quite figure out what the characters will really do, and because I think that’s a good way to write — let them decide for me. I think if I knew the entire story first I might not be interested enough to write it.

What are some of the tools you use to keep yourself organized and on-track during NaNoWriMo? How do you use them?

Nothing too fancy, but the graph included in your NaNoWriMo profile page was a godsend. Loved it. I did also (geekily) use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of how many words I needed to finish each day to stay on target (depending on how many I’d already written — this number often varied).

How do you manage your time during NaNoWriMo to make time for writing?

Badly. And I became a social hermit, spending several weekends locked in front of the computer.

What advice do you have for other writers doing NaNoWriMo for the first time?

Try to plan a structure for your novel even if you feel resistant to this idea.
Write extra (more than the daily target) for the first week or two so that the second week or two are easier.

Always stop writing in the middle of something you’re enjoying so it’s easy to start again.

Don’t worry if some of what you write is drivel, it is quantity not quality at this point.