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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Yes, I may be a little biased in my opinion, and I am open to being proved wrong, but I really do think that KDP Select is becoming less about selling ebooks, and more about taking money from self published authors’ already lean pockets.

“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.

My usual kit. 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.

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.

“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.