Category: blog

One thing that’s oddly caught my attention is watercolor painting. In the past I’ve dismissed it as childish.1 But as I’ve been rediscovering my artistic side, I’ve been captivated by the simplicity and beauty2 of watercolors. The thing that really sold me on the idea of picking up a brush was the existence of small, portable watercolor kits. With just two items, the watercolors and a sketchbook, I can paint most anywhere.

One nice feature of Manga Studio 51 is being able to have your screen reflect actual real-world measurements. This is handy for checking margins and other things like output sizes. So let’s find out how. Note: If you like Manga Studio, you might also like my brushs and color palettes that bring Copic-style markers into your favorite drawing app. Find your screen specs For Apple laptops and displays, it’s on their support page.

Welp. It’s time to update this. One of the reasons I haven’t been posting regularly is that I’ve been working on stuff that I can’t post here. If I were to publish a story on these fine digital pages, it would be considered “previously published” and only qualify for a reprint rate. That would bring the value down to 1-2¢ per word. Not that short fiction pays all that great to begin with.

Out of all the different forms of writing, the one that I’ve never explored was screenwriting. I’m not sure why. I think it has to do with it being a “foreign country” as compared to prose. At first glance the format seems intimidating. The strange margins and overall unfamiliar use of capitalization and line breaks disoriented me. I first started deciphering this when I created “Fake Fountain” for Ulysses. I’m not sure what my inspiration was.

After a recent feature request I decided to look into adding category support for my Ulysses-Post-to-WP script. In the end it was actually easy. It involved changing one variable from post-tag to category. The hard part was finding out that was the needed change. The documentation isn’t very clear, and I had to pull a post out via XML-RPC to see the format. The testing and writing up the changes took more time than the actual change.

There’s an old tech-support joke about important data. Tech: Does this drive have important data on it? Customer: Thanks for asking, it does indeed. Tech: Good. I’ll erase it now. Customer: Nooo! I’ll loose everything! Tech: If it’s that important, you’ll have a backup. Customer: What’s a backup? In short, if it’s on a computer and it’s important, there should always be a backup. We’ve gotten better about this. Dropbox was the first service to really break through the noise about backups.

This has been one of those periods where I haven’t been focusing on the blog. I’ve set a goal for myself to have my Ruby book out by June 1st. Along the way, I’ve managed to start adapting a short story into a comic and also started the preliminary work on a novel. So I’ve been neglecting posting regularly. But even with the other projects, there’s still some gaps in my schedule.

I think the most important but often overlooked aspect of the adoption of Markdown is how plain text has made a comeback. There are many Markdown variation and flavors. Most are still used for Markdown’s original purpose—turning text into HTML. But one project has built on the idea of markdown and is using plain text to fill a different need. The Fountain project has created a plain text format that is designed for print (or PDF).

Regardless of the system, I’m a big fan of getting things done. That’s in the lower case context of completing things. I’m still waiting on my library to get me David Allen’s book, but I’ve read enough to be familiar with the system. I’m more interested the parts of the book that don’t get covered much in blog posts. Especially how he approaches the daily/weekly review process. But as for the actual GTD todo list—with next actions, etc.

This finally became available at the library. It’s been on my to read list for while now.      [caption width=“640” align=“aligncenter”] Writing advuce to King, from his first editor.[/caption]