Berni Johnson

This entry is just to prove my ownership of this blog to Technorati (a search engine for blogs) by posting the following code:
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I promise I’ll post a real blog entry soon. Cheers!

I think most people are against piracy, but not for fighting it with vague legislation that leaves so much room for abuse and makes unforeseen negative consequences for the Internet and its users likely. Many sites are blacked out today in protest. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the wherewithal/brain cells to figure out how to black out my entire blog last night. So instead, here are some places you can go to sign petitions, write Congress, or get information on the subject.

This site has info about the strike itself:
http://sopastrike.com/

This site has info on contacting your Senator (including an online form and a link regarding organized meet-ups for visiting Senators in person):
http://americancensorship.org/

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is always a good source of info on censorship and related issues:
https://www.eff.org/

Here’s a petition sponsored by Reddit, Scribd, and Craigslist:
http://act.boldprogr … /survey_sopa_reddit/

Google’s own PIPA/SOPA opposition page, with a petition and links to more info and a community of other opponents:
https://www.google.c … /landing/takeaction/

Fight for the Future’s site has an informative video, and a form for writing your Congress members:
http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

A Google search for SOPA and/or PIPA would probably bring up lots of others, as well. Three of the above links I got from Boing Boing’s current blackout page. Hope this is informative. Now I’m off to sign petitions.

Here are some writing tools I’ve found useful over the past few years (or in a couple of cases, the past few weeks). I’m sure there are some I’m forgetting, and lots of great things I haven’t come across yet, but maybe these will be of help to my fellow authors.

Books:

Book in a Month by Victoria Lynn Schmidt
I really love this book. Being both a procrastinator and a bit of a flake, I often jot down story ideas and let them sit gathering dust for months, years, or forever. I distract myself with TV, e-mail, day-job work I’ve taken home, housework (well, once in a blue moon), random Internet surfing disguised as research. Anything but writing, really. And when I do write, I often derail myself and end up with a beginning, and maybe a middle, but no end. When I read Book in a Month (BIAM), I managed to pound out a novella rough draft in 45 days. The book really helped me organize both my thoughts and my time (with the help of worksheets and daily assignments). One tip that was a revelation to me was the idea of writing “as if” (if you decide to make a change to plot, character, etc., just make a note of where you are, keep writing as if you’ve already made the change in previous sections, and revise after you get to the end). I’ve often fallen into the trap of revising and revising and revising what I’ve already written (thus the end-less stories), and this idea really helped me avoid that and finish the story. BIAM is geared toward fiction (and the three act structure), so it might not be useful if you are penning a self-help book (except maybe as a good example of one), but if you are a fiction writer with time management issues, check it out. There is also a Yahoo Group associated with the book of which I am still a member. Now I just need a revision-in-a-month book.

Manuscript Makeover by Elizabeth Lyon
Speaking of revision, this is another useful book full of very detailed information on how to revise your manuscript (also geared toward fiction). It covers grammar, style, common newbie mistakes, choosing tense and point of view, and many other things I can’t remember right now. I’m not quite finished with this one, but I really love it so far. Every time I pick it up and read another section, it gives me ideas for improving my current novel. It also contains lots of example text from published works (so it’s not just the author talking theory without really explaining), and there’s a checklist at the end of each chapter that you can revisit. And it, too, is a good read.

Apps and Software:

Write Chain - iPhone, by Jamie Grove
This very simple but motivational (and free) app helps you track your daily word count and create “chains” of consecutive days that you’ve written. You initially set two parameters: 1) how many words you intend to write each day and 2) how many days without writing will break the chain. After your preferences are set, you just open the app daily (hopefully) and enter how many words you wrote during your most recent session. A link in the chain is created for each day you reach your goal. It also keeps a running total of words written (from the beginning of time, or rather first app use). You can visit the Sessions page to see all of your writing sessions with word count, date, and running total, and you can add notes to each session if you like. There’s really nothing else to it, but it’s a nice little app that helps you keep yourself accountable. Currently it is only available for the iPhone (works on the iPad, too, but Android users are out of luck for now).

Writing Prompts - iPhone/iPad/Android, by 21X20 Media, Inc. and writing.com
If you are suffering from writer’s block, or just looking for inspiration, this next app might be for you. I have to admit that I haven’t written a story based on any of the prompts yet, but I do open this app fairly often and flip through various randomly generated scenes, words, and lines for fun. Usually this yields an idea or two that I file away for later. There are several types of prompt to choose from. One called Sketches gives you a color, a genre, a type of writing, and some pictures/symbols. A section called Texts gives you a line, story idea, or a directive. One called Words displays a multi-colored word cloud that allows you to move and re-size the words. Another called Scenes lists a place, a character, an object, and a fourth item that changes between smell, mood, weather, or time/date (it’s kind of amusing when you get a character like like “IT guy” and a time/date sometime around the Middle Ages, although I guess that would work for a time travel story). And there’s also a new News feature that gives you a current headline from the Google News feed. The various prompts remind me of some of the exercises I’ve seen in writing books over the years, only this is more interactive and I’m less likely to stick it on a shelf and forget about it (if apps are analogous to books, that is). You can save favorites, add a snapshot to your camera roll, and post prompts to FaceBook. I use the iPhone version, but you can get it for Android, too. For iPhone, it’s $1.99 for the basic version, $0.99 for some extra downloadable packs of prompts, and $4.99 for a version called A+ Writing Prompts that apparently includes all the packs. Try it if you have a couple of bucks to spare.

List Master - iPhone/iPad/Android, by List Logic Software
This one is not just for writing. It’s for crazy OCD list makers everywhere (is it weird that I’m a disorganized person who loves to make lists? I really should get those two parts of my psyche together for a little chat one day). Before I found List Master, I used the built in Notes app to jot down writing ideas (well, after I first got an iPhone and nearly abandoned my old method of writing in notebooks or on scraps of paper scattered about the house). Some I put in their own memos and others I added to a running list of writing ideas that got very long and unwieldy very fast. With List Master, I can create handy lists of any sort, with various numbers of columns for whatever type of data I want to save (short text, multi-line text, dates, pictures, etc.), in nice color-coded folders. I have a writing ideas list with category and idea columns; a grocery list with item, quantity, price and store; a list of movies friends have recommended I see; and a list dedicated to new ideas that pop into my head for my unfinished novel, among several others. Every now and then I e-mail the lists to myself (especially the writing ideas one) for backup, because I have lost iPhone data before (syncing is great and all, but glitches happen). The e-mails arrive in a nice format, and I shunt them over to a special folder for safekeeping. Definitely recommended for those who prefer organized lists over random note text, or for the habitually disorganized like me.

Dragon Dictation - iPhone, by Nuance Communications
Holy mother of god, I’ve gotten so much more done since using both the Dragon app and the built-in e-mail voice dictation feature in my newest phone. It may not be fair to lump these together, but I’ve been trying them out alternately with similar results, and you can get the app even if you don’t have the newest phone with the built-in feature. In both cases, I just hit the record button, talk, re-write the results a bit with the keyboard to fix screwy punctuation and misrendered/misheard words, and e-mail the final product to myself. Dragon also allows you to send to Twitter, FaceBook, and SMS. There is one major caveat. If you are using the app and close it, you lose everything you’ve recorded in that session. There is no save. Only send. But it’s great for short notes. I managed to outline a fairly long post by copying and pasting about twelve mostly dictated e-mails I sent to myself in a fit of just-before-bed inspiration. Another caveat is that you really do have to revise before you send unless you don’t care about punctuation, things like their/there confusion, or words that it misses or misinterprets. When I talk fast, which I often do, it is more likely to wildly misinterpret me and end up with gibberish. But when I talk slowly and clearly, it gets most of it right (so this new habit might be good for my diction). Dragon Dictation (and again, the built in iPhone speech recognition) is a handy little 21st century tool. The technology has been around since the 20th century, but someone has finally implemented in a usable way. You can also buy software from Nuance for your Mac or PC, but it is pretty expensive and seems to get very mixed reviews. It might be worth it, depending upon your needs. I’m sure the pay versions have a “save” feature. But the phone version is free.

Scrivener - Mac/PC
I have had PCs in the past, and I’m a Unix enthusiast, but most of my home computers lately have been Macs, and as such I’m always on the lookout for good Mac productivity software. And games. If you know of any good games that will run on my Mac besides World of Goo, Sims 3, and Sims Medieval, let me know. :) But back to productivity software. Scrivener is a good word processor/organization program with lots of cool features. I tend to use text editors, mainly because I’m lazy and they are easy (open, write, save). But every now and then I go back to Scrivener and remember how useful it is, especially for the cost (and I have the old version - the new release looks even more impressive). It includes templates for different manuscript types including novel, short story, comic script, and screenplay. It helps you organize your work into sections, has handy note card and outline features, and will ultimately spit out your finished product in the right format for submission. It’s free to try for a full month (at least as of this writing), and if you like it you can buy it for a modest sum, at least compared to other writing programs ($40 for PC and $45 for Mac currently). And I remember the trial not being consecutive days, but days you actually use it (which was great, as I often download things and forget about them for a month while playing Sims games).

OmmWriter - Mac/PC/iPad
I just tried out the Mac version of OmmWriter for the first time recently, and it’s pretty cool. It’s a word processor that is designed to limit the distractions of your computer by taking up the full screen, having an aesthetically pleasing and relaxing display with no visible tools unless you mouse away from the writing area, and playing soothing new-agey music (unless that would distract you, in which case you can turn it off). The free version displays an artistically rendered snowy landscape with three choices of music. The normal top-of-screen menu is also obscured unless you mouse over it, so you are really seeing nothing but the application, and it really did keep me from checking e-mail every few minutes. It’s shareware/donationware, and you can order additional themes. So try it for free and see if it’s for you. [Note: While the basic Mac/PC versions are free, the iPad version costs a few dollars and has some negative reviews, so read them carefully.]

Focus Writer - Mac/PC/various flavors of Linux
The discovery of OmmWriter caused me to look for other distraction inhibiting word processors. With Focus Writer, you can see the upper menu at all times, but the application takes up the rest of the screen. It’s not as pretty as OmmWriter, but It does have one super handy feature: it lets you set an alarm. Nice if you want to write for a certain amount of time each day. You can set a duration or an actual time of day, and when the time comes, a little window pops up in the lower right corner of the screen (no audible alarm, unfortunately, but given that the whole screen is fairly plain, you do notice it). You can create some basic themes with different colors and font sizes, or you can stick to the default black text on a stark gray screen. This one is all function and worth a try for free.

FlatPress - web server software
FlatPress is a free open source PHP-based blogging engine that doesn’t require MySQL or any other database management system to run. Instead, it is based on flat files that you FTP to your web server (thus the name). It takes a little bit of technical know-how to install and run, and I had to do some behind the scenes research and tweaking to get everything to work in all browsers (there was an issue with a backslash being added to some of the page links), but with some simple instructions from their wiki and a few searches through their forums, I had it up and running within a few hours. I might try WordPress or Movable Type at a later date to see what handy functions they bring to the table, but for now FlatPress is meeting my needs, is fairly easy to customize (for a techie), and has a community of users who write useful plug-ins and provide support. If you don’t want to deal with the technical ins and outs of running your own blog, but just want to do some quick setup and then concentrate on writing, you can get accounts on hosted blog sites like Word Press, Blogger, or Type Pad, as well.

Google Docs - online
This one almost goes without saying, but I’ve found it incredibly useful as a sort of version control and backup for manuscripts (by saving copies with date extensions). It’s also great for working when I’m away from my main computer (ah, working in the cloud). I just didn’t feel I could leave it off the list since I use it for writing first and foremost.

Devices:

used Alphasmart 3000
OR
new Neo2
The Alphasmart is another distraction free writing tool, but in the form of a physical device. After hearing so many raves online, I had to try it for myself, and I couldn’t be happier. This is a no-nonsense word processor that consists of nothing but a standard-sized keyboard and a little window that displays a few lines of text. You can type and save text into eight different files (selected by hitting a keyboard button), and each file holds about 12.5 pages (so in total you can keep around 100 pages of text at a given time). There is a simple spell-check feature, a search feature, and a calculator applet, but nothing more. This thing really is just for writing. It runs on AA batteries and they last a long time. But be warned, if the batteries die (or, as I’ve heard tell, you drop or jostle it too much and the batteries slip out of place), you do lose your work, so you must save the moment you get back to your computer to be on the safe side. You save by hooking your Alphasmart up to your computer via the USB connector that comes with it, opening your favorite word processor, and hitting the Send button. It will literally type out the text right in front of you letter by letter. Then you have to save the resulting document. And one more warning: if you do anything else on your computer while it’s sending, it will likely corrupt or skip over the text that is being typed at that moment, so it is advisable to let it finish before moving on to another task. Issues aside, this is a light weight, highly portable, and very one-track device that is great for people who have the urge to mouse away from their word processors and play Angry Birds. The Alphasmart, (along with its newer incarnation, the Neo), was mainly designed and marketed for mass purchase by schools, but you can buy the new Neo directly from the site ($169 as of this writing) or you can do what I did and purchase the previous version, the Alphasmart 3000, used online (I got mine for $25 plus shipping off eBay). The cheaper approach is a good way to see if you will like and use such a pared down gadget without breaking the bank.

Treadmill (or any other exercise equipment, including your own muscles) -
Okay, this one is a stretch, but I thought I’d throw in some preachy advice. As a writer, programmer, and Netflix addict, I sit all day every day, and I’ve gotten pretty doughy over the years as a result. I’ve been trying to go for a daily walk, and I’ve only come close to this since getting a treadmill (it’s just too dark, cold, and scary outside once I’ve gotten home from work). I already feel so much better than I did the year before I started this regimen (energy levels up, sleep issues down). And a healthy body makes for a healthy brain, so if at all possible, get moving for half an hour a day. If you can’t afford equipment or don’t like walking, pick whatever activity you enjoy. I used to be a big Dance Dance Revolution enthusiast. I did karate, Pilates, and yoga at various times in my past. And as a teen (when I was the most fit I have ever been, or will probably ever be), I did calisthenics in my room with no equipment, and kept charts of exercises and repetitions in a spiral bound notebook. And speaking of paper, that brings me to…

Old School Tools:

Field Notes
I mostly use the phone these days, but I still carry a little notebook in my purse for writing or note-taking emergencies. And these are my faves (although I still also like the ones that look like tiny composition books). Field Notes memo pads are very thin (48 pages) and fit most purses or back pockets. Unless you prefer larger quantities of paper, these are near perfect for portability and function. You can get them in three-packs of plain, ruled, graphed, or mixed for around $10. The company has other products, but look for the three-pack of memo books if you want to try them out.

That’s the end of the list for now. I might add a tools section to the site in the near future that includes these and any other items I think might help with productivity. Feel free to let me know of anything you use that others might want to try out. And happy writing!

I resolve to write as much as possible from now on, starting with this blog. I don’t want to call it a New Year’s resolution because, just as rules are meant to be broken, New Year’s resolutions are destined to be abandoned at the first stumbling block. And I don’t want to set myself up for failure as I have done so many times before with goal specificity or loftiness. So rather than say I’m going to lose 50 pounds this year, and end up feeling awful about my failure on 12/31/2012, I’ll say I’m going to make an effort to be healthier and shed weight at a reasonable pace. And rather than pledge to “become a writer” (which in reality I have been for a while to some extent - look, I’m doing it now!), or vow to get my first novel completed/submitted/published this year, or say I’m going to write daily (a promise doomed to failure – I know myself too well and I need breaks), I’m going to resolve to write as much as I can, and bring all my projects to completion and through a few drafts, starting now.

But, as with the weight loss, I’ll do so at a steady pace. It’s an open-ended resolution, with no scary strict goals or timeframes. Not frightening yourself into inaction is the first step to actually doing things (if not doing something can be called a step). Making writing a habit, and one not fraught with anxiety, is my new aim. That is not to say that more specific or lofty goals are bad. Deadlines and ambitious targets can be motivational. But they can also be fear-provoking hindrances to starting anything. A blank page is an intimidating thing, and a stopwatch counting down right next to it can’t help. It’s better to break things down into small palatable tasks, like writing a few pages every time you sit down, rather than writing an entire novel’s worth of pages by some precise date.

Speaking of fear, it comes in many other forms and is a common deflator: fear of failure, fear of not being good enough, fear of not having anything to say that anyone else will want to read. Those are things that have kept me from writing (or at least finishing/submitting/publishing) both fiction and a blog for years and years and years. I should have been a blogging pioneer. I’m a computer programmer (day job) and a writer (intermittently, anyway, but since childhood) who has been on the Internet since the mid 1990s. I’ve always wanted to put myself, my work, my ideas out there, and I’ve started the process several times, but every time I’ve backed down. So many promising starts, ended by lack of self-confidence, anxiety, or fear (all related, really). Frank Herbert was right. “Fear is the mind-killer.” You can learn a lot from literature. Go read Dune if you haven’t already. It also has nifty advice on how not to get eaten by a sand worm.

Good old procrastination has also played a role in my inaction, sometimes born of fear, sometimes laziness or inertia (bodies at rest tend to stay at rest, on the couch, in front of the TV, preferably with chips), and sometimes perfectionism. In the past, I have always felt that my work had to be perfect before I let others see it. But I wish that idea had never infected me. Because perfection is a lie. It doesn’t exist. And thinking you have to attain it is another major de-motivator. There is no perfect writing. Writing is art, and art is subjective. Sure, there is writing that includes imperfections, and lots of writing that many people find bad. I’m bound to write things that embarrass me later, and even throw in some lovely typos and misspellings. And you should work to improve things like continuity, grammar, and flow. But no one is born a writer, and you have to start somewhere, likely with not-so-great prose.

Even if you are a good or great writer, there will always be someone who doesn’t like your work. So who cares? Just put stuff out anyway. Writing doesn’t guarantee success, but not writing does guarantee failure. And the same goes for all of us. If your ambition is accounting, or medicine, or tasty cupcake making, by all means, get working on that instead (the rest of us may need your help, or a nice icing-topped treat, someday). If being a writer is your dream, it will be far more satisfying to have a body of work, even one that starts off with flaws, than no work at all. And it will be even better to have one that shows improvement over time.

So with a goal of building up my body of finished work, and actually throwing it out there in some form or another, I’m going avoid creating artificial temporal pressures and just do it. The same doesn’t apply to actual assignment deadlines, of course. Our obligations, and other people’s time constraints, need to be honored. But I’m hoping that near-daily leisurely writing will make starting and completing assignments less difficult, too. Hopefully this resolution, and this blog, will be both motivational and therapeutic. And if my endeavors motivate anyone else, so much the better. I’m planning to keep a running word count for 2012 on the sidebar, so if competition is your motivator, feel free to race me.

Here’s wishing everyone a happy and productive 2012, whatever your goals.