Today I created a new page subbed from the Literature page, entitled Writing Tools. This page is a database of free writing tools, and is meant to assist beginner and veteran alike.
The first offering is Storyline version 1.0, a spreadsheet developed by yours truly. For some time time now I had been working on a spreadsheet that allows a writer to plan a novel and track their progress. What began as a simple exercise in creating a progress tracker has metamorphosed into something much larger and what stands today I have dubbed Storyline. It arrives in time for NaNoWriMo.
Storyline is the product of frustration and annoyance at other free spreadsheets. It is also the product of software trials of free and cost-based writing programs. Not satisfied with what was on the market, I asked other writers and aspiring authors what information they believed to be most useful. More worksheets were added until I decided to release the sheet into the wild, under the guise of Storyline.
As this product is in development, I am inviting feedback from testers so that the spreadsheet can be further improved. Storyline is currently available in 3 formats -Open Office (.ods), Star Office (.sdc) & Excel (.xls)- but I am willing to convert to other formats based on the need. So, send me your feedback and suggestions, so that future spreadsheets, so that we can provide high-quality tools for writers.
Stay tuned for further updates...
We live half an hour away and fuel is getting expensive so I decided to go into hGympie last Friday (10/17/2008) with my hubby on one of his work days in preparation for afternoon shopping. It was an earlier start than usual, but as soon as we parted company I went off in search of the Gympie Art Gallery, a place that I'd been wanting to visit for some time. Lo and behold, it was on the corner of Nash Street and Monkland Street, with a mass of brochures in a glass display outside of the modified Queenslander. One of the papers said that the opening times were 10:00am - 4:00pm Tuesdays to Saturdays, and given that it was just on 8:00am, I knew that I'd have to kill a few hours.
I walked a block and a half to Goldfields Shopping Centre, the oldest mall in Gympie, scoped the place for interesting shops, and settled on a meal of Fish, Chips and Salad for breakfast before heading to the Angus & Robertson (A&R) bookshop to find some new books. Its a small shop but I managed to sardine between the shelves containing the speculative fiction and biographies. I saw lots of great books, unfortunately the ones in series were several books in, and I hate being late to the story.
Not long after my discovery of Simon Haynes' Hal Spacejock: Just Desserts, I heard an interesting discussion between a customer in her eighties and the sixty-something female store attendant. The older woman was giving the attendant recommendations for good vampire novels. It was surreal but made me consider the various horror novels that I'd read over the years. Truth is, I haven't really read a lot of horror. I had this realization that my reading has been fairly restrictive. Anyhoo, after a brief conversation with the female attendant, I purchasedthe Live Without a Net anthology edited by Lou Anders, and Cleopatra 7.2 by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough.
I walked around after that and when I felt that I'd wasted enough time walked over to the gallery. The door was closed so I sat on the bench and read some more of The Other Hand by Chris Cleave. Soon enough an older guy was buzzed in so I was buzzed in as well. It didn't seem like much downstairs, but there were some neat paintings of animals, including a sloth. I started talking to a couple of the volunteers, both more than double my age, but each had the zeal that being a part of the creative process offers. They were both artists who'd been Friends of the Gallery (FOG) for over a decade.
The conversation went on more than an hour before I realized people were going upstairs for the main collection of installations. I liked what I saw downstairs, but it was nothing on the stuff upstairs. The paintings were so amazing, and being there, in front of each piece gave me food for thought. I nearly suffered from creativity overload. All of the work there was amazing, but the one piece that stood out was a painting of two rabbits leeping into the air, perhaps fighting. The green/blue background and white fluff outlines of light coming through the fur energized the work. I can still picture it days later, it was that cool.
After chatting with the two volunteers I've decided to join the FOG group for $10/year. I lvoed being there, but the prospect of being a part of an art group each Tuesday for $2/meeting seems like a great way to feed those artistic urges. Not just that, but I have met many of the members and I suspect that I'd fit in. These artists support each other and learn from each other. Now I need to work on my discipline.
I am 2200 words in with lots more to go. The plotline is solid and my narration is as strong as ever, if not better. The storyline is plausible, I think, so I believe this one is shaping up to be the best story that I have ever written. I would not say that its saying much, because my writing is still quite rough, so I'll need to do some edits after I'm done. So, its still on track, even if I am still working on the first draft.
That being said, my eyes are beginning to droop and my stomach is growling at me, so I don't know how long I will last. The sounds of my hubby playing the game Spore are distracting me a bit as well. It is such a cute game, but I think that I would be as distracted by Spore, as I was with World of Warcraft. For the entire time of playing World of Warcraft (9 months), I did not write at all. It took up so much of my time that my creativity near evaporated for lack of exercise. Its so easy to lose touch of the things that matter...
But for now I need to focus on finishing a work of fiction regardless of the length. I can't be focused on a novel when I haven't even finished a short because that is just plain daft. I now have an internal mantra: Get 'er done! Yeah, I know its an odd one, but I think its appropriate.
I don't think that I will finish the story before submissions close, but I will end up with a neat story. It is now somewhere in the area of 1800 words, and that is just the beginning. After I finish up, I will get it critiqued and rewrite it. If I still like the story, then I'll post it on the Writing Samples blog of this website. If I get good feedback then I will podcast it. I'll keep you updated on the progress.
I have been in a bit of a slump the last few days, but yesterday I pulled my finger out and got the trigger for the flash challenge at Liberty Hall Writers. One of the problems that I had going in, was all of the ideas floated around in my brain beforehand. These managed to interfere with the end product, leading to a DQ in a big way. Not sure what a DQ is? It quite simply means that I went over the allotted 90 minutes, and as a result my work is removed from the voting. That's okay though, because I think it pointed out that the idea that I chose to use didn't flow as well as it should.
Solution: I'll submit another story instead, the second of the two that I was tossing up between when I first saw the trigger, one about a singer/songwriter who sees the dead when she sings.
An odd thing happened earlier, a couple of the images being used on the links page suddenly decided to swap, and one disappeared completely. It took me ages to realized, but thankfully I noticed it in time and corrected the problem, for the time being at least. Apparently, Weebly was just upgraded, so this is probably what caused the problem. Hopefully there won't be any other problems to worry about during the overhaul. I guess that the next few days will reveal all.
A recent problem with sleep deprivation has made it difficult for me to get my head together. Thankfully, it was raining all through last night, so I ended up getting the first 8-hour sleep in more than a fortnight. Hopefully, I will manage to get another night of uninterrupted rest tonight, but I won't hold my breath.
The past week, I've been hard at work getting this website the way that I want it. I realize that it is going to take quite some time, but I think that it will be worth it if only to put my face out there. Consolidation of the blogs has begun and that is good news for yours truly. At some stage I hope to start a blog of my own works-in-progress, but I'm not going to promise anything until I have material to post.
The site views are on an upward trend, though I wouldn't say that there are leagues visiting this website. Its nice to know that people are seeing what I have to offer, even if it is in a state of flux at present. I will have to check the crawl stats from google at some stage, as well as some other sources that I have monitoring this website. As I'm running on a $0 budget, all of these services are free, and this means that the information is limited. If any of my readers have some suggestions then I'd love to hear from you.
Within the next eight hours the new flash challenge will be online at Liberty Hall Writers. I am looking forward to it and think that I might go for third person perspective this time around. The last few times I've been involved, I've written in first person, and suspect that my writing might be getting a bit predictable. So, I'm going to try to mix it up a little, so as to avoid falling into a habit. I guess that we'll have to wait and see. The link will be added to Links section shortly.
Last night I managed to write the necessary crits for Liberty Hall just before going to bed. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and noted that there was a lot of useful suggestions written for my own submission. It never ceases to amaze me just how other perceive my work. Each person on the website focuses on specific aspects of a given piece of writing, and these differences enable a writer to get the most out of a writing group.
I am currently roleplaying at a friend's place with my husband and a few other close friends. Today my husband is GM'ing his homebrew D&D 3.5 game. He has another game, a homebrew Storyteller game, that he sometimes GM's, but the D&D game has been running the longest. I am playing a Warrior woman by the name of Cory. Her personality is somewhat different from what I usually play, and I can see using her in a story or two sometime from now.
After weeks of waiting on paperwork and for our finances to be finalized, we now have a brand-spanking new white 2008 Suzuki Jimny JX. Its a cute compact 4WD, is a two-door, and comes with roof racks as per a dealer with the car lot in town. Soon after we took it off of the lot we went shopping and noted other Jimny's at Station Square, the biggest of two shopping centers in Maryborough. That's cool though, because this car will be our own.
Meanwhile, the Skyline GTS-T is sitting in the shed while it waits for the money to roll in for upgrades. The major cosmetic surgery will include replaced panels on the chassis and a paint job. The upgrades will include new transmission, suspension, engine (likely a Rotary), and most of the interior replaced. No longer will our Bandit be neglected, because now we have something to ride in while we wait for the Skyline has work done on it.
I have finally decided to settle on a web host after seeing a member of Wonderlands, a talented artist/author/publisher named Liam Sharp, use it for his online portfolio. The host is easy to use, the pages are easy to modify and the place has built-in blogging capabilities. Within a few minutes of joining I'd picked the perfect page design and was organizing my priorities for the website. The next day I was hard at work adding to the pages that I'd organized, and today, after lots of editing I decided to say, "Time to publish the damned website!"
I deleted my training blog at Blogger but will likely keep some of the other blogs long after I transfer material to this website, such as the Keiko on Creativity and Review Central Companion blogs. Everything writing, world and podcast-related stuff, will be housed via this blog, thus reducing all of the work needed to maintain so many blogs. Let's just face it, I am not the most disciplined blogger on the planet, so it is common sense to consolidate everything.
In other news, I signed up for NaNoWriMo yesterday and also purchased a copy of the Liquid Story Binder XE from Black Obelisk Software. I'd heard glowing reviews of the software and it arrives just in time for NaNoWriMo. I tried it out last night and I have to say that this program absolutely rocks. It is easy-to-use, with lots of area to customize your project, refine and define your ideas. It will definitely work for what I need it for, because it organizes all of your thoughts in the one place, with plenty of other features to boot, such as progress tracking, record-your-story, journalling and visual aids. Simply put, the program is well-worth the money.
In other big news, the weather is beginning to heat up, so in the sweltering heat of yesterday I witnessed the first snake sighting of the Spring season, a Red-belly Black Snake at the back door. Usually I would freak out over a snake being so close, but he was the prettiest viper that I've ever had the pleasure of being near. I'm wasn't so stupid as to get too close to him, but as I watched him slither away from a distance, I realised just how passive these vipers are. The mother-in-law assures me that they are passive, but they don't take kindly to being stepped on. Needless to say, the hubby and I will need to replace the dangerous mesh from the front screen door, so that we can avoid an invasion from snakes and the rodents that they hunt.
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