Where I've Been and Tools of the Trade

 I bet you thought I'd forgotten the blog again today. Or blown it off. It's been an intense two weeks. Let me show you what I've been up to (via some pixelated, crappy cell phone photos.)

I've been on the road for the past two weeks to Austin, Texas and back again to chase the eclipse. It was epic. The trip back was fraught with seriously rough weather, slow slogs in the freeways in rain so heavy you couldn't see, and constant emergency alerts firing on the cell phones for flood alerts and tornado warnings (three were verified on the ground.) We got to see an amazing celestial event and lived to tell the tale. 

As to what I use to write: Almost exclusively MS Word - it's familiar, it's versatile, and it's so easily converted to different file types. In the cracks of the caveat I supplied, I turn to simple little low-feature drafting tools from time to time like Omm Writer, Dark Room, or 4theWords. Those are for the days I want no distractions - they're about shutting out the rest of the computer screen and silencing notifications. They're for fast drafting when you don't want to let editor mind engage. There's rudimentary spell checking if there's anything at all.

They all import plain text into Word in a hyper-ugly font but that's fine because there's zilch formatting and Word happily goes about putting squiggly red and blue lines under everything I've mistyped or misspelled or grammatically hacked up. I like to think of Word as the program for the professional author and the other programs for the little kid artist who's trying out bits of story.

Back to the eclipse: We joined a Sky and Telescope Magazine group in the Austin area that had arranged hotel, meals, and the viewing location (private! with security!) We were in the company of 230 astronomy geeks, scientists, astrophysicists, and on eclipse day, one astronaut. We were surrounded by telescopes and massive cameras. All we had were viewing glasses and our cell phones (also with filters applied to them). We really lucked out with the weather.

If you're interested in catching your own eclipse experience, the next one is in Spain (through Sky and Telescope) in 2026. After that, Egypt in 2027, then Australia in 2028. Totality for this eclipse lasted just over 4 minutes. It was the shortest 4 minutes of my life.

Websites as Crutches

For the most part, I aspire to keep away from distractions. However, I find that good ambient sound works well for creating a cone of privacy around me while I'm writing. Especially when there are noise cancelling headphones involved. Therefore, I usually have YouTube up in the background. I'll run 3+ hour dark scifi, dystopian, or horror ambient tracks. I have specific needs for those - they need to run long and not allow ads. They can't have a ton of melodic line. These things are more a vibe than they are music, and they're just enough to keep my critical brain busy and out of the way of drafting while they also provide cover for the other noises of the household.

I'm a big fan of Wordhippo.com for word finding. My rule for this is that I must open and close the browser window for every single look up. It's an attempt to keep me from sheering off of making words with rando look ups. Some days, I don't open the site at all. Other days, I may need a little mental jog or two. Those days, I need to find just the right word before I can unclench and move on.

My final favorite website while writing is a website for writing. Consider this my ongoing plug for 4theWords.com. Timed writing, gamified, stripped down to a basic text editor so I can't get too precious about how stuff looks while trying to get x amount of words before time runs out. It's a great place to fast draft and a great place to write about writing. It's a perfect venue for doing a bunch of the prework of writing - compiling research / noodling how that research impacts plot and characters, getting characters hashed out, getting GMCs worked through, etc. I'm on the site every single day.

Once I have a draft, no matter how skeletal and bloody, I shift out of websites into Word. Edits and rewrites happen with fewer website interruptions. By the time I'm in edits, I pretty much know where we're going and how we're going to get there. I no longer need to anesthetize the critical portions of my brain like I do with drafting.  Until that point, though, websites are my crutches, and I lean on 'em.

What We Use to Write

Everyone is going to be bored with asking this question year after year because my answers haven't changed in a very long time. 

Writing Applications:

1. Word for Windows. I started with Word way back in the stone age. It's what we're required to use in my professional life. It's where I am most comfortable. Could I learn something else? Yes. Other authors extol the virtues of Scrivner, for example. But there's significant learning curve. Why spend time on that learning curve when I could be use the time and brain space for story? Not to mention that whenever I see authors compare notes about something like Scrivner, I invariably hear that plotters love it and pantsers hate it. Add into it that in the day job, it's literally my task to learn all the technical things. I don't have to fully learn a thing. I dip my toes in just enough to understand a technology, write about it, and then walk away to go learn about the next thing. I am not all interested in forcing myself to do that super deep dive into a new writing software. Word is simple. I don't have to think about what needs to happen to create a file I can submit to an editor or to format for self publishing. I've learned enough tricks in the application that I can make it do just about anything I need it to do. The only down side is the fact that grammar and spell checker in Words are idiots. They are tweaked for business speak. Not fiction. For that reason, neither can be trusted. I fully admit to being horrified at how many actual words aren't in the spell check dictionary. I wish I'd kept one example for you but I naturally can't think of one at the moment.

4theWords: 4theWords is an online gamification of word counts. It isn't a competition - you aren't competing with anyone else or even with yourself. You fight creatures who have been infected. If you defeat them, you've helped cure them. As you 'battle' creatures by attaining a word count in a set amount of time, you win in-game cash and prizes. This really is a case of the pen being mightier than the sword. There's a narrative story arc through the game that you can follow and a million special events that take place in the game through out the year. It works because there's a vibrant community in the game and with the developers. It's a fun, supportive, no pressure way to practice. To experiment. It's private enough that you can try out anything you'd like with writing and not have to worry about it being seen. If you like what you come up with, you can publish your work to the other writers on the site. Or take your work out into the broader world. I like it just as a means of experimentation and a bit of a sandbox where I can low-stakes mess around with words and bits of story and thought.

OmmWriter: OmmWriter is a lightweight environment meant to eliminate distraction and help silence the critic. The writing screen is tiny and sits within a full screen landscape. OmmWriter blocks all other alerts and notifications that run underneath. You won't hear your email pinging into your inbox, for example. You determine your preferred landscape, your preferred color scheme, and your preferred background sounds. Some are natural, some are musical. You can decide whether you want a key stroke sound or not. If you do, you pick from a variety of sounds. This is purely a drafting tool where the point is going fast without much thought into spelling, grammar, or structure. It's about getting words down and shutting down analysis until you copy and paste the words into something more formal. Like Word. Upside: Very inexpensive. Very zen. Does reduce distraction and helps induce flow. Downside: No formatting at all. When you pull your text over to Word, you will need to format the text into something decent.

Bonus tool
Tidal: Music streaming. I do not live by words alone. Music is vital. Especially whilst living in a house of four adults, three of whom are hard of hearing. I am not being facetious. Everyone in the house but me has or needs hearing aids. It is very loud where I live. A good play list and noise canceling headphones are a necessity.

Marcella's 5 Writer's Resources

 Confession time. I haven't written anything in a year and a half. It isn't just that I haven't. I couldn't. It's like a switch flipped in my brain and NOPE is the new setting. No matter how many hours. No matter how many reworks of plot or characters. Nothing budged. Ah. I see you've noticed the past tense. It's because I fell, quite by accident, into a series of resources that are ever so slowly thawing the ice around writing. Maybe around me.

It all begins, as so many of our stories do, with January 2020 when I could see the writing on the wall and put my household on lock down a few months before official lock down started. I didn't know it at the time - what kind of damage I was taking. It was invisible. I knew that introvert me was suffering because suddenly there was no alone to be had. Not anywhere. Little did I recognize what kind of damage was being done to my mind.

My number 1 writing resource, then, is a book. 

Peak Mind by Amishi Jha - This is a nonfiction book about the science of attention. She describes how the attention systems in our brains work. Because of that, I could clearly see how and why all creative ability had been frozen. It's because my attention system has been locked on 'floodlight' - scanning for threat. Focus and concentration need a laser beam. She describes exactly how to recover. Work in progress. I can work on my book again. Finally.

Calm - Yes. It's a meditation app. It's training for focus. It's also retraining for migraine brain. But honestly, I'm here to get my writing mojo back. If several minutes a day of breathing can help my attention system relearn how to focus, count me in. Since starting the training program, I've started writing again in slow, low pressure increments every day. Building a sense of safety and success.This attaches writing to the reward system in the brain again. Blinding word counts? No. Definitely no. Those will come with time and dedicated practice.

Wordhippo - Now we're into the mundane writing resources. Wordhippo is a thesaurus that doesn't take itself too seriously. I like it because the synonyms are more on point than other resources I've used. I don't know if that's fact or perception but the pink hippo doesn't hurt anything. I find the right words more often there.

4theWords - I know I've mentioned this one before. It's a website that gamifies your word count. It works brilliantly for some people. Apparently, I'm one of them. For others, it's a complete no go. It's one of those things you have to try for yourself.

And finally, for business resources and advice, nothing beats writer organizations. Jeffe and Charissa have mentioned SFWA, I triple nominate the org. You can ask the nerdiest questions in the forums and get informed answers. It's brilliant. I'll also put in a plug for Novelists Inc. Ninc aims at indie authors and offers an incredible wealth of information up to and including drafts of rights reversion request letters.

I hope that no one other than me needs to retrain attention. It's a drag. I mean, on one hand, I finally understand what the hell happened and there's a way to fix it, but dang could I just have me back, please? If you need the resources, too, I hope they're helpful. And hey. See you in the stacks.

Not Entirely Writing Apps

Writing apps. I've pared down my list this year. Maybe it's quarantine. I don't know. But the whole financial insecurity thing has made me conscious of what I pay for these days. So a bunch of random subscription services got the axe. The one I am using, though, is 4thWords this is a website where you create a character and progress through a story line by 'defeating' monsters who require that you write a certain number of words in a certain time frame - all of them reasonable. There are special events and different rewards to chase if those things light you up. Or you can sit back and pursue a project as you see fit. You have complete control over how you approach the environment. I happen to like the structure and the defined time frames. It gives me permission to brain dump. Most of that is garbage, but every once in awhile, I glean a really great story piece out of it.

Then there's Calm. Sure it's a meditation app. I don't actually use it for that. It also has a huge selection of sleep music to select from as well as ambient soundscapes. When Dad decides he's going to watch some craptastic war movie at incredible volume, I'm gonna need something keeping my blood pressure near normal. Calm and a pair of headphones do a good job of that.

For book formatting (for ebooks) I use Jutoh. I can produce any format I want, including .mobi. It does an amazing job of sorting through your manuscript and telling you if something won't pass muster for Amazon. I guess they have this weird fetish about Em and En dashes. Don't get me started. Regardless, Jutoh builds the encoding seamlessly. I won't lie. It does have a learning curve, but it's not steep and there are great tutorial videos to step you through everything. It didn't take me but a day to figure out how to get a book formatted, built, and saved out to every single file type I needed. Because I'm a dedicated Windows gal, I can't use Vellum, which I hear is THE software to use if you can. Sadly, it's only available for Mac. And based on what it costs to get a Mac, that's never going to happen.

What else is there? I'm always open to the new and cool.
PS: I still have unreasonable love for OmmWriter. But you knew that already.

Scheduling Issues

It occurs to me that I come here to the blog and say, "I don't want to be THAT person." and then I go right on ahead and make myself THAT person.

Gonna again. My Writing Schedule:
ANY DAMNED TIME I CAN

Look. I care for aging parents, cope with chronic pain issues-though I think we finally found something that might be working, praise the gods and pass the Depakote!-but when there's both the family I was born into and the family I made when I married that need managing, writing often gets slipped into the cracks. Some days there just aren't any more energy packets to be doled out. I've still discovered ways to get the Jaws of Life into those cracks and pry them open enough for me to breathe more easily.

For example, if I say, "Hey, I have an online meeting every morning at x o'clock. I'm going into my room, shutting, and locking (because one of the damned cats figured out how to open) the door." Nobody bugs me for that hour. I can concentrate. It's not actually a lie. I DO meet people online at x hour each morning. We get into a Zoom room and we all write. It's based on the personal trainer philosophy. If you know someone is waiting on you, you're more likely to get up out of bed and go work out.

The other thing that started working for me was to fling rotting word salad at 4thewords.com before I go to bed every night. I gave myself permission to just play around in the game, learn the system and pursue some of the simpler quests. The writing was total junk. Pure mind dump stream of consciousness stuff. Until about the middle of the second week when suddenly my hero walked into the middle of my mind dump and suddenly, I was mind dumping about the WIP, the plot, the characters and what I thought needed to happen. That went on for another few days. Then suddenly, the pair of them were talking to one another and to me. The words are still ugly. I mean it's all dialogue and there aren't even any tags. I hope to all the gods I can parse it when I try to edit the MS. But in that time after everyone else in the house has settled down and the time I tip over from exhaustion, I can get 1200 words if a scene is really going. Some days it's just more rotting word salad. But it's less often. And I feel like I know more about how this book wants to flow. So I'm counting a success.

I have goals to expand writing time and to expand daily word count to at least 2k again. But for right now, I'm writing daily. Even if it's just 500 words. Something flows. And for me, it breaks the surface tension and keeps my well from stagnating. Man. I don't even want to count the mixed metaphors.

Moral of the story: Who cares what your schedule is so long as it does the job you need it to do. So long as you're happy and reasonably healthy. Some people write a book like lightening striking. It's not wrong. And then some people, like me, write a book like they're extracting the most delicate of artifacts from the depths of the earth. One itty bitty brush stroke at a time. I just start plying that brush at 8AM every morning before the cats start bouncing off the walls wanting to play.