Tag: writing

I stopped at the penthouse window to watch the lava. It came down the mountain like God pouring molasses from the sky. A fast moving flow had erased the road. It had been there when I started up the stairs. The hotel was cut off from the highway. I stuffed a watch into my front pocket. “Time to roll,” I said to the empty room.

The lava came with the dawn. The tourists and businessmen left with the first alarm. They flooded the street in pajamas and robes. Without time to pack, the riches of a small city were left laying for someone to pick up. Today, that someone was me.

Ebook publishing seems to be my theme of the week. It’s something I didn’t know much about. I’ve managed to learn quite a bit this week. The most important thing I learned is about workflow.

There are lots of ways to make an ePub file. Amazon KDP will take just about any file and convert it to their .mobi format. Smashwords has a converter (“Meatgrinder”)that take a Word (.doc) file and do the conversion to ePub. These are convenient because they’re an all-in-one solution. But for the most part require a lot of work on the input file to avoid the garbage—in-garbage-out problem.

Writing a sample chapter for a possible programming book was quite eye-opening. I’ve never done any serious non-fiction writing other than a magazine article. Writing a programming book is considered non-fiction just as a humor book is.

I find the classification funny. “Fiction” is defined as everything not-made-up. It can be anything from a story about a crime in your town to space battles. Non-fiction is everything else.

In the sample chapter I realized there was as much fiction as truth. I was making up a story about the code I was writing. I could take the story in direction and provide the code to go along with it. I’m not trying to solve an “out in the world” problem. I’m just telling a story, illustrated with code. If someone learns from it, even better.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

The sample chapter upped the numbers quite a bit. I also slacked off on blogging because of it. I happy to see the WPH going up.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday. The numbers are current through Sunday night. I also only average over six days. This allows me one day of no writing that doesn’t impact the weekly totals.

There’s a slight uptick in total words. This actually surprised me. I had called this a worthless week in a previous post. But looking at the numbers now, I was wrong. Having my average WPH go up by 128 was nice to see. I think this is because I’m doing more planning beforehand.

From Amazon’s point of view, I could see this as a “why wouldn’t we” situation. They can squeeze both ends of the pipeline (customers and authors) now that the ebook gold rush is mostly over.

“I’m sorry sir. The medbay is out of bodies.”

I looked at the corpseman. He was about my son’s age, but breathing. “How long until the next batch of clones come online?”

“Soon. The vats are scheduled to pop tonight. We can start reanimating once the memories are trimmed.” He turned and walked towards the lift, not waiting to be dismissed. The damned Personnel Restoration unit didn’t respect the chain of command. I wanted my troops alive again, my son included. So I let them be arrogant as they wanted.

Most of my writing is done electronically. I have a combination of laptops, keyboards, and even keyboard computers. Even while those are my main source of input, they’re not always the first thing I turn to.

When I need to get something down now I reach for old-fashioned pen and paper. There’s no boot up/wake from sleep time, and it doesn’t require a password start using.1 It’s also non-modal. Meaning I can switch between words to pictures at will. This free-form creativeness can lead to the unexpected.

It’s time for my weekly word count check-in. At the end of every week, I post a screen shot from my writing results spreadsheet. This shows the current week and the three before. My week starts on Monday, the numbers are current through Sunday night.

Overall, I’m seeing a downward trend, and need to reverse it. I spent some of my writing time reading this week. I finished two novels, and started picking apart the writing style for future reference. I was happy with two personal history pieces I did (here and here). It was tough writing. I had to dig through old emotions to get the posts done.

“Look lady—“

I was furious, “Don’t look lady me! You’ve had my car all day you can’t say what’s making that damn noise?”

The mechanic took a breath, “I’m saying I can’t duplicate it. I can’t fix something I can’t find.”

I looked at him. He had a rag in his right hand and a flashlight in the left. His name patch said “Walt.” He eyed me carefully. I had the feeling he was trying to get me to leave. It was almost closing time, everyone in the building wanted to be somewhere else. Including myself. “Seriously? You just don’t want start on at this hour.”