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'. However--or, more accurately, because of that--every few years, certain as tides, someone will write a splenetic screed against the Professor, explaining why he's the devil/ worst things to happen to fantasy/voice of reaction/zomg most boring writer EVER /etc. The Oedipal Resentment motivating many of these attacks may be trivially obvious, especially in those from within fantastic fiction, but it doesn't follow that the substance of all the criticism is baseless. The Pragmatic Life.
Z-Write: the Word Processor for Creative Writers. Z-Write Now for Mac OS X!
Description Z-Write is a unique word processor designed 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.
Initially I wanted to be a good sport and write this follow up with the only OS X word processor (well, word processing module) in existence, AppleWorks 6, but then I discovered a very big bug. In spite of the move to Mach, BSD, and OpenStep, this very old Macintosh bug still wasn't squashed: the letters had variable spaces between them - a very unpleasant sight (see AppleWorks 6 sample below and note how characters run into each other). There isn't any way to avoid this bug when using Mac OS 9. Origins of Bean. Origins of Bean In case you're curious, this is how Bean: a Free Word Processor for OS X came about. 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. There are many people who use Text Edit and wish it had a live word count and adjustable margins. How to write a book. Writing a Technical Book. We finally started writing in the backend of December 2006.
The book was complete, including index, front matter and all the edits, in January 2009. It was in the shops for people to buy in early April 2009. That's a long time. Perhaps the main reason it took so long is that I was working full time throughout, with a 2 hour commute in each direction. Design Observer. Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction. 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. 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. I get a kick out of sharing my thoughts with others. The act of transforming ideas into words is an amazingly efficient way to solidify and refine your thoughts about a given topic.
Cthulhu Mythos Fiction Contest. It is currently Thu Apr 17, 2014 12:43 pm View unanswered posts • View active topics Helluland The Vikings have just begun settling the new world and have set their sights on Helluland.
“The Land of Flat Stone” Can the ancient Eskimo inhabitants stop the Viking invasion or will the Vikings fulfill their prophecy and cover the flat rocks of Helluland in blood and steel.Choose your side. Protect your people and intermingle with ancient Inuit creatures as Baffin Island is torn asunder by Viking steel and myth.Choose your side. What is it like to write a technical book? 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.