Tag: Tech

April 14, 2018

Got this blog Google verified tonight. Not that hard to do. Working on writing a lot lately even though the day job is being stubbornly time consuming. I don’t mind 40 hours a week, but 60 recalls the bad old days of film & TV…

Accomplishments this week

  • Finished first draft of a new story and sent it to my beta reader.
  • Found out about another Polar Borealis upcoming poem publication.
  • Got a very nice rejection from Strange Horizons.
  • Sent out my On Spec and Tesseracts 22 submissions. These are important Canadian publications to be in and I hope I make it in!
  • Sent out another short story that is a hard one to get published. Unlike a lot of authors, I find my comic stories easier to sell than the more tragic ones.
  • Getting my own garden plot and going to first meeting about it.
  • Planted some more early flowers on balcony. I have a few 2 leaf plants now from last week’s early attempt. The petunias didn’t come up but the mixed hardy wildflowers had a few sprout!
  • Hyacinths almost done but were great! Street is full of cherry blossoms!
  • Enjoyed an hour at Southlands Nursery and bought way too much for a balcony and a small garden plot.
  • Emailed Garden Manager to see if I can have another plot.

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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