Powered by coffee, Hello Kitty, and Left 4 Dead. Hey again! I thought I’d give you a behind-the-scenes peek at everything that contributes to my production process, from draft to finished book/story. HARDWARE A room in my house serves as my dedicated office. Up there you see my desk: MacBook Air, laptop stand, cheap mouse, expensive keyboard that makes neat clicky sounds. And omg COFFEE, two mugs a day. Next to the desk is my laser printer, which comes in…
SIGIL is a popular tool for generating EPUB files. I’m still getting the hang of it. “Hey, I know CSS and HTML. I’ll make my own ebooks! How hard could it be?” Famous last words… :) Anyone who creates ebooks from scratch- without using a tool that promises to handle it with the push of a button, and doesn’t let you see what atrocities it’s actually committing- knows it can be a, um, trying process. Usually a multi-day slog that…
Let’s see if this little guy is up for some vacuuming… If you have a WordPress blog, or frequent the comments section of any high-traffic site, chances are you know all about comment spam. This blog doesn’t get much traffic, but boy, spammers love it. At one point, I was getting upwards of 30 spam comments daily- comments I’d clear from my WordPress dashboard and from my email several times a day. What a waste of time! But I embraced…
I miss college. In the five years I’ve been writing this novel, I’ve done everything you’re not supposed to do. I let things sit for weeks or months, until I “felt” like writing. I wrote slow, under the misguided assumption that the words had to come out perfect the first time. I edited, edited, edited well before I ever had a first draft done. Don’t feel much like writing today… I’ll polish that last chapter I wrote! Only to have…
Quick, let’s go back and save fourteen year-old me! When I was a middle-school teenager, back in the era of one computer per household, my dad got mad at me for something- I don’t recall what. Shortly thereafter, I logged into the family computer, and discovered my personal folder on the hard drive- the repository for everything I did- missing. Not in the trash, not in a different folder, just gone like it never existed. “You must’ve downloaded a virus,”…
I love watching The Joy of Painting at the end of a long day. Bob Ross is relaxing, entertaining, and has much wisdom to offer artists of all stripes. Near completion of a painting, one of his favorite bits of advice is, “Now, don’t fiddle this to death.” You risk ruining your happy little trees by endlessly tweaking and fussing over them. The same thing applies when we writers put on our editing caps. We second-guess word choice and sentence…
I’m in the throes of heavy editing at present, still trying to hammer out a process that works best for me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned thus far, it’s that even after you think you’ve gotten your prose as pretty as it can possibly be, there’s something wicked lurking in there to which you’re completely oblivious. One example is unintentional repetition of certain words and sentence structures. I didn’t know it until recently, but I abuse the hell out…