Merinda's Meanderings

Just a few days from Nanowrimo. I’m starting to get excited, though I still don’t have much of an idea of my plot besides mad scientists and cliches and vague steampunk ideas. For some reason I’ve decided to write something that’s vaguely steampunk, though I’ve got no real idea what that means. Also I took a dare from a friend to include a male ballet dancer, so that’s Victor Beauchamp, my male MC’s, day job. There will be some romance, and probably some scifi, and I’m afraid it’s just going to turn into a colossal mess, but hey, it’s nanowrimo, so who cares.

Also I got an eeePC, so I can write on the go:

That’s my eeePC (running eeexubuntu) on top of my compaq presario for a size comparison. I broke the hinges on my laptop, so it’s no longer really portable. I also got a portable DVD player case for it (it’s the same size), so I can really take it on the go.

I have resources up there in the links, don’t forget. And if anyone knows of any other resources or links, feel free to leave a comment. Let’s get ready to rumble!

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bonus: I sent a suggestion to mental floss for their “Feel Art Again” blogpost and they took it. Click to read more about one of my favorit painters: John Martin

Bit of a lazy post, but at lesat I’m posting something. My friend Sonja posted yesterday about a service called Dropbox. Check out her review and if anyone is interested I’ve got eight invites, so, drop me an email, first come first serve.

Basically it’s a service that pretty darn seamlessly shares files between computers with a minimum of hastle. And it’s free. Just drop the file in and it’s, err, magically availble at all the computers you have dropbox loaded on. Pretty darn neat.

Anyone who has known me for longer then about five minutes knows I’m a lousy housekeeper. Now you’re wondering what that has to do with writing.

I’ve been cleaning house, last week, into this, using a couple of online tools (and pandora), that would be equally useful to the writer.

To me, one of the best tools a writer can have is a simple timer. Feeling unmotivated? Set the timer for ten or fifteen minutes and just write what you can in that time. I’ve found that with writing, ten minutes is a good set for me. I don’t get much more done in fifteen. In nanowrimo we call them word wars, but really you can do them anytime. Like if your stuck on something, or just can’t seem to finish a scene, or are just looking to squeeze some writing into a busy day.

The other useful website I’ve been using is NowDoThis. It’s simple enough. Enter whatever tasks you want to get done, in the order you want to do them. The site gives them back to you, one at a time, with a shiny “Done” button when you are finished with that task. Then it gives you the next one. I’ve realized I’m a bit scatterbrained and I frequently have about five things I want to do at once, which means I’ll forget something or not finish something else. With this I can concentrate on the task at hand and pretend the next one doesn’t exist quite yet. This could be used to as well as a sort of outlining tool.

I know I ended up taking last week off. Promise this week I’ll get back on schedule!

Or as I keep wanting to call it: Google Ducks. I’m weird, I know that.(Google docs sounds a little bit like geoduck (pronounced gooeyduck))

So I’ve been collaborating. It’s actually going quite fast and I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a first draft by the end of this week/start of next. Course then the fun bit of stitching it together happens, but I think that’ll be relatively painless. Editing, however should be interesting.

But i wanted to talk to talk a bit about Google docs. I don’t think we actually set down and talked about using it, it just made the most sense. We’ve both been writing our own plot lines, and this lets us easily read over each others shoulders. Autumn hasn’t really had any problems, but I keep getting a network error where it says it can’t save. Usually i can just copy the last bit i wrote, quit and come back and its fine, then pasting in. But its still kinda a pain in the butt.

That said, Google docs is a very useful tool. We live half a country away from each other. Collaborating any other way would be a pain. Google docs is great for that. Whenever this draft is done I’ll still pull it into Open Office to do the mashing and the printing and all that. Plus it fun to actually read over someones shoulder, and a little less annoying for the person doing the typing. I think you can chat in Google docs now (at least with spreadsheets) but we just communicate via IM.

About the only other drawback to Google docs is the size limit. I know from nano experience that you can only fit about 50k words in a doc, though I think it’s based on characters not words. And I find the spell check kinda annoying. But really, thats minor. If your looking for place to collaborate, or just a way to work on your stuff from any location, Google Docs is the best way I’ve found.

I finally made my way through that last chapter. I’ve once again throughly traumatized my characters, but what else is really new? At least this chapter has done what it was designed to do and pushed both the characters and the plot a little further along.

A friend of mine pointed me at this “100 Most Important Things to Know About Your Character” questionnaire. Its maybe designed a bit for role-players, but it works just as well for writers. I set down with it last night and today and got into the head of one of my MCs and learned a lot about her. I’m going to do the same questions with my other characters too, I’m pretty sure. Even though this is a second re-write, I’m finding you can still learn things about your characters. And of course characters can still surprise. Heck with the answers to some of the questions I found myself going “well then no wonder she reacted this way to that.”

I’ll be adding this to my Tools under Links as well. There are other things there that I’ve found useful, take a look!

Sometimes as writer you just get stuck, especially on names. At least I know I do. Your characters ride through a vicious storm until they see the comforting lights of an Inn. But whats the name of it? Or the barkeep? Or whats the name of stock character #5, the one that’s been sitting by the fire all night?

That’s where Seventh Sanctum can be a huge help. And not just with names. They have generators to help with plots and characters too. In fact I just tried the Envisoner and now the wheels are turning…

Seventh Sanctum is a very useful site, that is adding new stuff all the time. It can also be an amusing distraction if you’re just bored. Who knows, you might find something that sends you in a direction you never expected!

Okay, Remember the Milk isn’t really a writing tool. But it’s one I’ve found so useful that I felt I had to mention it here. The picture is pretty much how it looks on my iGoogle page. Now you are wondering, “what is this Remember the Milk thing?”

Basically its an organizer/to do list. I’m someone who happily makes lists, then loses or forgets them. Or things don’t get done. Remember the Milk (rtm for the rest of this post), however is starting to change that. The main way is by plugins that go into my gmail and iGoogle. I leave my gmail open all the time. So whenever I click on that tab to read mail or anything, the list is there. It’s also in my iGoogle, which I use less often. In addition I have it set up so rtm emails me every day with that days list. And I can add and complete tasks from either tool.

As you might be able to see in the picture, rtm give you three priorites you can use, each with their own color. You can also set things to repeat as needed. There is also a map feature so if you know you have to go to a certain location you can add that to the task, so you aren’t looking it up at the last minute. If your task is somewhere on the internets, you can include the URL. Plus you can email tasks to rtm. You still have to go in and tweak things (least I did), but the body of the email is contained in a note on that task.

As I said, this is something I’m finding extremely useful. Also, it is free, though you can go “pro” for $25. The only real difference I see on the pro version is iPhone support, which I don’t need. Still since this is something I use every day I might very well go ahead and pay for it.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s of America has some very useful things on their website:

Manuscript Prepartion by Vonda N. McIntyre : I use this one ALL the time. For maximum usefulness you should probably print it out and keep it as a reference, but even looking at it on a computer screen is helpful. For any questions on how to format a manuscript, this is where I go.

Hunting for an Agent (With Sample Synopsis) by John E. Stith: This is a good example of a query letter and a synopsis.

There are more on the writing page, but so far these are the two I use most often.

Corollary to that, I’m going to put up links page instead of having an increasing long sidebar, and these two will be on it. Some other stuff might get moved over there too.

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In other news,I started working on my next story for First Line. I tossed out the vague idea I had and went with something based on a dream I had yesterday morning. We’ll see how it goes.