Month: September 2013

Just stupid….

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When it rains, it pours in Vancouver. Sort of like my week . Dance and coffee shop corner inundated just now.
The level of ‘just stupid’ things happening was high for the past 2-3 days, so having to wade through a foot of water here, when the rest of the city’s sewers work is not unexpected.
Writing suffers when this happens.
The live screen-savers experienced an irretrievable failure of environment – which is developer-speak for ‘the fish tank leaked’. We’re still considering whether we buy another tank or give them away. Gotta decide soon as the hurricane glass candle holder they’re in isn’t ideal. Temperature is an issue – but child came up with an excellent temporary solution. We use the magic bag (cloth filled with barley) heated 3 minutes in microwave, then wrap it around the bottom of the container. It heats up gently thus delivering that couple of degrees the fish need.
So, I guess the truth is just like the fish situation, I must seek solutions to my ‘writing time and energy’ dilemmas.

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On Writing With Tech

Clarion West got me started on a new venture. The requirement to write something every day got me to revive a novel project. Now, so far I’m 18,000 words in which is pretty amazing considering my schedule. I’m a full time tech writer for a corporation. I’m a single mum, who does all of the ‘lessons ferrying’ by bus. My child does 7.75 hours per week of dance. So, I realized that the only time I have, is while ferrying or waiting at dance.

So, I’m using new tech to get me there. For example, this post is being written in WordPress on my iPhone while on the bus en route to Lyrical dance at Westside Dance.
For actual creative writing, I’ve worked out a system with my own blended Mac / Windows world of home computing.
Thank the gods of tech that we can move things from Mac to Windows easily now.
I’ve used the iPad for a while thanks to my friend Sui-Fai who donated his old one to me. Now, I’m finding that I can incorporate it into my creative writing work if I make a concerted effort to do so.
It’s not easy, frankly, but I’m learning how to type on the auto- keyboard. It’s not as flowing for me as typing – I type on a standard keyboard very fast and can type as I think of dialogue or description. Many more spelling errors, too. Plus punctuation just seems like a big effort – but I fix it later.

I use the Pages app on the iPad. It’s fine for initial creation, but I must move everything via email as doc files. Then I open or in Word and copy and paste the new stuff into my novel- writing app.
This is because, back on the HP pavilion is my new favorite app, which organizes by chapter and has a great interface for writing larger projects.
The eureka app is Scrivener, which is a good value for 40$ or so.
It gives me an HTML smart interface that can compile to a txt output. It can also save my chapters individually to Dropbox which is a great auto-archive.

The image is an Ammonite from the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. Not quite as old as I am.

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