The Writer’s Technology Companion

Life.
It has a way of sneaking up on you, doesn’t it?
I’m going to take a short break from The Writer’s Technology Companion. Not more than a week or so, just long enough to rethink some things.
I have enough posts to keep this site on auto-pilot for a while, but I’m starting to think […]

I recently published an academic book (Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA, since you asked) and one of the tasks I was responsible for was creating an index for my book. Yes, I could have asked them to send it out to a professional indexer, […]

You know your word count. But how do you know if your words count?
Words Count is an online readability analyzer, offering you more information about your prose than you could possibly imagine. Cut and paste in any sample of text (up to 20 pages) and Words Count will give you back the percentage of your […]

I’ve written about a lot of tools for writers, some that I love and use regularly and some that I just find interesting and want to share with others who might get some use out of them. I’ll keep doing that, of course, but I’m always looking out for tools I either haven’t heard of […]

So far in this series, I’ve talked about plugins that would be useful for just about any Wordpress site. Today, I want to talk about a few plugins that are designed specifically for the needs of writers. The first three deal with formatting, allowing you to easily produce article series (like this one), a table […]

OK, they haven’t been called “Palm Pilots” for years, but I find it helpful to distinguish between the electronic device and the inside of the hand, so I say “Palm Pilot”. So sue me. Meanwhile, let’s talk about writing on your Palm brand personal digital assistant device thingy, ok?
I’m a longtime Palm user. I got […]

Protagonize is a collaborative fiction-writing community that allows writers to author stories separately or together, build new branches off of other writer’s stories, and rate each other’s work. The twist is, the stories are interactive, like the Choose Your Own Adventure Stories of yore. The folks at Protagonize call them “addventure” stories, with each author […]

I surf the web a lot. Well, not “surf” – I have the web come to me in my trusty RSS reader, courtesy of Google. The point is, I see a lot of stuff out there on the Internet that might interest you. Here’s some of what I’ve come across lately:

25+ Pieces of Writing Software […]

What does a writer need to write? What kind of writing spaces do authors create? The UK’s Guardian takes a look inside more than 50 authors’ offices in a series called Writer’s Rooms. Each author describes their space — complete with little quirks and hangups — accompanied by a picture. Some are clean, some not. Some are minimalist, some […]

When I write articles, I use a process I call “Outline Expand Expand Done” — I write an outline, expand it a bit, expand it some more (paying attention to how pieces fit together), and repeat until I’m done.
I’ll use a word processor — usually Buzzword — for shorter (