Joining Stephanie Siavetti as my guest while I straighten out my move and get the site prepared for NaNoWriMo (I’ve got about 10 or so interviews with former NaNoWriMo participants to post already, and more coming!) is Aaron Peters. Aaron is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction and a free-software enthusiast. He has worked […]
Image by ecstaticist via Flickr The hardest part of any project for me is getting my notes and captured thoughts into some sort of usable format. That’s one of the reasons why I like conputerized note-taking systems like Evernote so much – it organizes for me by creating notebooks and allowing me to tag each entry. But Evernote […]
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 […]
Of all the things that writers have to do, the task that seems the most burdensome is the step that’s most crucial to getting our work into print: submitting it. Sending out submissions isn’t just a bookkeeping nightmare – you have to remember where you sent it and when and how long to wait before following up […]
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 […]
Although I’m a fan of all-in-one writing programs like yWriter4 and Liquid Story Binder XE, I like the decidedly low-tech Work In Progress Notebook from romance novelist Jeannie Ruesch quite a bit, indeed. Available as either a wire-bound notebook ($14.50 US) or a downloadable Word file you can print and bind yourself ($6.95 US), the […]
One of the most important things writers (or anyone) can do is set clear, explicit goals about what they want to accomplish. Most of us have a bunch of vague goals, like the “one day novel” (as in, “one day, I’m going to write a novel). We want to “someday” do x, y, and z – get […]
