writing
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There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks (Guest Blogger
( The City & The City , an Amazon "best book" for June.) The Author of the Century , of course, needs no help from anyone (least of all a speck like me). No force on earth could undermine either the juggernaut implacability of his sales, nor the world-historic scale of his influence, nor the truly enormous weight of his achievement. The man puts the 'epic' in 'epic win'.
Z-Write is a unique word processor designed for creative writers. In the process of writing a story, writers tend to create dozens or even hundreds of pages of notes, character bios, rewrites, reminders, and bits of research info. Organizing all that material within the linear structure of a traditional word processor is awkward at best.
Z-Write: the Word Processor for Creative Writers
Lean Word Processor Specifics
My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your submission to Dan Knight . After Low End Mac published my piece about the lack of lean word processors for Mac OS X , I received several emails from readers pointing me towards existing and future products that might fulfill my needs.
Writing fiction (short stories and novels) has been a passion of mine for a long time. I wondered how possible it would be to create a word processor that works just the way I do. And so, I set out on the path that would lead to the creation of Bean. I suppose this is why painters sometimes resort to mixing their own pigments, why fiddle players resort to making their own fiddles. It's not necessary for what they do; yet, the process of creating the tools needed for a medium serves to deepen one's understanding of that medium.
Origins of Bean
Posted on July 13th, 2009 Peter Having completed the book Grails in Action with my co-author Glen Smith not so long ago, I thought it might be a good idea to post some of the things I’ve learned. Despite the title of the post, I definitely don’t profess to be an expert in this field – I’ve only co-written one book after all! The post also targets technical books, rather than books in general. Budding authors may nonetheless find some useful information here. So, you’ve decided to write a book.
How to write a book
Writing a Technical Book
There were various reasons why it took so long. Some of these are down to me, some unavoidable due to unforeseen events like the release of IronPython 2 and Silverlight, and some due to the Manning processes. Writing a book, particularly one on a hot new technology, has an inevitable tension between wanting to get the book to market as quickly (and therefore as cheaply - man hours on the editing cost bucks) and producing as high quality a book as possible. Some publishers manage to get books out very quickly, and often it shows.
from Locus Magazine, January 2009 We know that our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet, but of course writers face the same glorious problem: the delirious world of information and communication and community that lurks behind your screen, one alt-tab away from your word-processor. The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from.
Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction
Blogging Like a Hacker
Back in 2000, when I thought I was going to be a professional writer, I spent hours a day on LiveJournal doing writing practice with other aspiring poets and authors. Since then I’ve blogged at three different domains about web standards, print design, photography, Flash, illustration, information architecture, ColdFusion, package management, PHP , CSS , advertising, Ruby, Rails, and Erlang. I love writing.
Update, almost a year later: Take this with a grain of salt. I wrote it after an incredible marathon of staying up most of the night for months on end. My take on it now that I have some distance from the project is — I’d definitely work with Andy Oram and O’Reilly again, and I’d be able to make the process a lot easier for myself the second time. As you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too. Update : see the followup post for more of the story , including my editor’s responses.