Finished reading Marseguro!

Well, I just finished reading Marseguro, by Edward Willett. Thanks, Edward, for sending me a copy!

What this means now is two things:

1. I get to move on to the sequel Terra Insegura.
2. I owe Edward a book review for Marseguro. It was a super read! (That wasn’t the review, by the way.) It’s coming soon, hopefully next week. As I’ve already suggested, I plan on posting two reviews for every book I read, one from the reader’s viewpoint and one from the writer’s.

TTFN & keep cranking!

Need motivation? Challenge yourself!

There’s a book inside you. You know it. You can see it when you close your eyes. The characters are familiar friends. The world they live in is old and well-visualized. There is only one thing keeping you from bringing it outside: You.

What is your roadblock? Often times it’s only the perception of a roadblock that keeps you from starting or completing your project. If your complaint is “there isn’t enough time,” “my family keeps me busy,” or “I can’t see past a certain point in the story, I’m blocked,” then rest assured that those are the worst excuses ever devised; they are not even clever enough for a writer to have come up with. But, if you find yourself buying into these anti-productivity slogans, then perhaps what you need is a little self-competition.

Competition can be very good for a writer. Think about it: if you are getting paid to write an article for a magazine, your competitor is either another writer or your deadline. Nothing changes when you are writing for your own pleasure, or if you are banging away at your first novel in the hopes of getting it published. It’s just that your competition is ’softer’ in a way. Your competition is YOU.

You’re not just one runner in a marathon. You are two runners: the pace runner and the runner trying to keep pace. If your pace runner isn’t doing his job, there is no goal to shoot for. You can just stop whenever you want and chat with an onlooker. On the other hand, if your pacer (that part of you egging you on) is ahead of you shouting encouragement and taunts, well, there is nothing you can’t accomplish. Are you a worthy competitor?

If you need to set a pace that will stretch your abilities, consider one of several ’self-competitions’ that will challenge you by challenging yourself.

• NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month is the grand master of writing self-contests. The idea is to write a 50,000 rough draft of a novel from whole cloth in the month of November. Creator Chris Baty has built quite a website that administrates the contest, where you can log in your progress through the week and talk in forums with others who have accepted the same challenge. I completed NaNoWriMo in 2007 with a manuscript that was around 50,010 words. Yay me! What a rush that was. Now, to edit it into something that doesn’t resemble sad mush. I’ll be posting about this later. I have ideas!
• JulNoWriMo: Not to be outdone by November, July has its own contest. Though newer and not as fancy, its participants are on the rise. Too bad we just missed it! Keep it in mind for 2010.
• 10K Day: Milli Thornton at the Fear of Writing hosted the first 10K Day in June, and it was such a hit that she decided to make it a regular thing, and even to add a second day (a Saturday) to the monthly challenge. Check out her site, which has just moved over to WordPress and so has a little construction dust right now.  This is a good site for a little jolt of inspiration to get you back to writing.
• The 500 Words-a-Day Challenge: Debbie Ohi at Inkygirl has put out a daily challenge of writing 500 words a day or 1000 words a day. If these word counts seem small then keep in mind that a single Lego seems small, but with enough of them you can build a rocket ship or landspeeder or castle. Or TARDIS! It certainly helps that Debbie offers cool Yay Me! badges. That’s reward enough.

There are other self-challenge sites out there which you’ll find with a quick browse. Some of them require an entry fee. All of them challenge you to challenge yourself.

Let me know: which challenges have you accepted? And whether you completed the challenge or not, how did it help you with your writing? Feel free to post your answer in the comments below.

A little change in schedule…

…or rather, a little owning up and making it official! All my millions of followers here at Cranking Plot have no doubt noticed but been too kind to make a fuss about it. But, I have not been posting as regularly as I have wanted. Or, more to the point, I haven’t been posting as regularly as I said I would. The current rigors of getting the house ready for baby have left me with little or no time of my own where I can write blog posts. I even have to whittle little bits of time out for writing fiction.

This both bothers me and it doesn’t. Obviously my wife and I are approaching a paradigm-shifting life event that will mean a lot of work in the near future. We are in awe of our coming responsibilities and eagerly awaiting the baby’s birth. So, it feels right to focus on all the preparation. But I realize that any writing carreer I am to have has hit a slow period that will continue until we get over the learning curve that is fast approaching.

This manifests itself in a slow blog. Please be patient with me. I will get back into a more productive routine relatively soon. In the past I said I would post 3 times a week: Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. At this time I will only commit to once a week, most likely on Fridays. If I don’t keep up with that you have permission to hurt my feelings.

So, I’ll keep cranking family AND cranking plot. You keep cranking, too.

More permission to write horribly

Just a quick jot to link to this awesome article about fear in writing: I’ve done it, probably you’ve done it. Stared at the screen or page wondering what is going to go there. It’s your internal editor heading you off at the pass, saying “You don’t have anything brilliant to write. Just don’t bother!”

Well, we have to fight that feeling. For every excuse, there is an equal and opposite excuse-killer. Our job is finding it.

Michelle Russell at Copyblogger lists 5 reasons why we should throw caution to the wind and write the Most Horrible Blog Post (or story, for that matter) Ever:

1. It’ll Give You Courage
2. You’ll Fail Faster
3. Happy Accidents Happen
4. Nobody Likes Perfect People
5. People Need You

Go check Michelle’s article out. Now I have to go write badly horribly. Keep cranking!

ihatefastfood

Well, if you’ll look over to the blogroll on the right side, you’ll see I’ve started a new blog called ihatefastfood. In case the name is a little vague, I suggest you go over there and read up. It’s a “tumblelog” (if I have the right word) and I am purposely keeping each post short, kinda like Twitter, though Tumblr allows for pics and stuff.

Share and enjoy!

Life will never calm down!

This article from Steven Harper Piziks speaks volumes to me:

Any number of people have told me that they intend to start writing that book just as soon as life calms down and they get some time, or that they just need to get past this divorce/new job/old job/kid problem/insert-disaster-here.

This is not the way life works, though.  There’s ALWAYS a divorce/new job/old job/kid problem/insert-disaster-here to deal with.  This is the difference between writers and people who want to write.

The truth is life will never calm down. Constant movement is such a part of life, even though we all have a picture in our head of relaxing days of quiet creativity. Those were yesteryear. Those were our childhood impressions of life. Unless you are the Big Guns of Writing, that picture is not yours. This is not bad, this is not depressing…in itself. Our attitude is all important here. The real writers write in spite of their hectic schedules. They find the times that are available and write then.

I’ve been absent from the blog of late. It’s a new blog, and I think I’m going through that crisis point in every blogger’s career where some of the new blog momentum has waned and it becomes actual work. I promise I will work a little harder not to let the rest of life crowd out writing. There has to be a way to balance it all. Thanks, Steve, for a great article!

Reading update: Marseguro

Just a brief note. With all that is going on in life right now, I’m glad to say I get some time to read! Right now, I’m about 1/3 of the way through Marseguro by Edward Willett and am enjoying it very much. I promised Edward a review when I finish. Hello, Edward, if you’re getting this! The review is on its way! Just like I did with Foundation, I will post a reader’s review, to be followed by a writer’s review. (Well, I have yet to post Foundation’s writer’s review yet. That’s coming soon I hope.) Thanks again for sending me a copy.

Retro-review (a Reader’s viewpoint): Foundation

Isaac Asimov is simply the greatest SF writer I’ve read. How’s that a way to start a book review?

Foundation is the epic story of the fall of a galactic empire. Hari Seldon is the architect of psychotherapy, a branch of science that can plot the behavior of large groups of people. Using this unique talent, Seldon is able to forsee the collapse of the galactic empire, and correctly plot the path mankind must take to escape a fall into a thousand year era of barbarism. To that end, Seldon establishes a Foundation to preserve a kernel of the knowledge and culture that once was. The path that the Foundation must follow (as mapped out by Seldon) is a series of crisis points and decisions, all of which lead the galaxy toward the establishment of a new Empire within a few hundred years instead of a thousand.

The Foundation is established on a small, resource-starved planet called Terminus. There they begin to compile the ambitious Encyclopedia Galactica. Their work is interrupted when the political turmoil of the surrounding planetary systems try to involve them. Quick thinking on the part of Salvor Hardin, the first mayor of Terminus, saves the Foundation from extinction and establishes a foothold of power using the one resource that they alone understand in this decadent time period: atomic power!

From that time on, the Foundation grows in power and influence using the atom, becoming almost an empire in itself. To read Foundation is to get a small glimpse into civilization; it’s a micro anthropology lesson. From primitive beginnings, to theocracy, to expansionism, and  coming full circle to bloated bureaucracy. Mr. Asimov successfully convinces us that his story is part of a larger universe. This is why I loved reading Foundation and its three sequels Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation. Oh, there are many, many more books from his Foundation universe. For the full list, check out the Wikipedia article.

Foundation began as a series of short stories published in Astounding Magazine between 1942 and 1950. Unfortunately, the short story origin of the book is the only flaw to be found; the story has a slightly disjointed feel about it. Do I care? NO. From one viewpoint, it’s that sense of discontinuity that creates the ‘bigness’ of the story, the feeling that it takes place in a very large and fragile galactic Empire.

As soon as I can, I’ll post a review of Foundation from a writer’s viewpoint. TTFN!

My new favorite text editor

JDarkRoom is one of several minimalist text editors. I’ll list others below. What I like about JDarkRoom is portability. It’s a simple Java (.jar) application, making it usable by both the XP I use at work and my Linux laptop at home. Talk about the best of both worlds! It is also portable in the sense that it resides on my USB drive and I can take it anywhere.

Now, why use a minimalist text editor instead of fancier apps like MS Word and OpenOffice? I’m not dissing them; they have their place, and their place is to make the words look pretty when I need to send them off to an editor hungry to publish my work. At all other times I don’t need so many bells and whistles, and I don’t want such a bloated program hogging my wimpy computer resources. Hello, JDarkRoom! Just a simple screen that seems to cut you off from the rest of the computer — and that dreaded attention sink, the Internets — so all you have to do is write. That’s nice.

JDarkRoom has just enough configurability to make it interesting. I love the word count function. By pressing F6 I can bring up menus that configure the look and feel such as background color, font color, and line width. You will have to try it out to grok it.

Below are some (but not all) of the minimalist word processors out there.

* JDarkRoom — the happy subject of this post. Go check it out!
* Q10 — this is a nice application. It has a lot of the functionality I want — such as USB portability — and in some cases is better than JDarkRoom. For instance, it boasts live text statistics that update as you type. However, it suffers from a serious, severe flaw that disqualifies it for me: there is no Linux version, nor will there ever be. A brief Google informs me that it won’t run under Wine. Sorry, Q10, I want a one-app solution!
* Writer — This is interesting. It seems to be like JDarkRoom, but is entirely online. You can save your work there, or save it to a local disk.

For a longer list of good apps, including some for the Mac, see this article.

Progress Report

Wow, it’s been a whirlwind week! We are basically opening up our house like an orange and turning it inside out. Paint and furniture everywhere but where they belong. The good news is that we got a room painted and are looking forward to more improvements. I hope the baby is happy when he comes…

Oh, wait, I’m supposed to be posting a writing progress report? Oh, yeah. I haven’t posted one of those in a long time.

Well, I’m happy to say that I did get some writing done, about 1200 words. I did it in two sessions of 20 minutes apiece. Sometimes I tend to blow off writing because…well, I don’t know. I just know that this time I just sat my butt down in the chair (a common tip in the writing world), set an alarm for 20 minutes and just wrote the whole time without stopping. Setting the alarm really helped me to focus on writing. So I plan to do it this way from now on.

As for next week, I’m sure I can find another 2 days with an extra 20 minutes in them. And that’s the essence of writing, isn’t it?

Have a great week & keep cranking!