Another Sunday morning at my coffee shop Anthem, I have come to love this place. I brought my wife by last weekend and I could tell she was a little taken back by the fact everyone knew me by name. We were standing in line and one of the baristas walked up to my wife and I and asked what we wanted, I started to tell her and she said "Oh no, Rob, we have your order in already, what does she want?"
Ok! The place has grown on me. It's my new hangout, Del can start her gloating now. I denied it long enough.
You know, even I don’t really use Word for my authoring anymore, I do for my editing. Here is an interesting article about how maybe it’s time for Word to die:
I did think about using Word’s ability to make a web page when I was working with Del on “From Beer to Apocalypse” but in the end I didn’t like how code heavy the website looked for just simple text. I wanted something that was cleaner, or at least not so script heavy. In the end I turned to Word Press and I’ve been rather happy with how it’s worked. It’s given me the features I wanted and it’s been easy to use.
For my writing I have turned to Scrivener because it’s tools are better tailored to writing and I’ve now been successful in making one full manuscript and the re-write of another.
Del texted me just the other day saying she was starting to use the PC version of Scrivener, she seems rather pleased.
Topic 3:
Today I started to think, maybe I'm trying too hard to be a recognized author? Am I missing the point to what this is all about? Is it really that I need to sell a million books or is it that I should be writing a million stories? Trying to cater to the published market and make a story that is selling because that's all that they will buy, or is it....That I need to just make the stories that I know I can make, more to the point, am I making the stories that are FUN for me to write?
There is also this other nagging thing that I'm not sure about. How we should write our stories, how we should format, AND how we publish. The rules and expectations are ridiculous and the feedback I always get is "One toe out of line and I don't want to talk with you." Is this really how it should be? Is this really how we fuel creativity? No, it’s not, and the heart of writing and story telling has taken a back seat to the game of trying to make money.
I'd love for someone to pay me to do this all day every day, but there is the reality that only a few get that privilege and the rest of us keep our day jobs, in fact, after Norwescon I found the reality is most authors do have a day job that pays for their wordy obsession.
Independent publishing has help to bring back some of the creativity, but there is a difference between people that are taking their craft seriously and those that are just tossing out crap. You can't cut corners, you have to put in the time to release a real product. There is a difference between creativity and lazy.
Ok down off my soapbox.
I'm going to be going to Westercon, another chance at some awesome workshops in and get more feedback on Corporate Policy I've submitted the first 8000 words and a 1000 word synopsis to the Fairwood writers group.
I'm really looking forward to it, I'm hoping this one can live up to the last con, I really did learn some things and I want to expand on that. Once this summer of cons is over I'm going to look at some classes, I found some that I liked but they were online classes and not what I'm after. I want face time with other writers.
That's all for this week, I'm still trying to work on the idea of shorter posts more often. Feedback please!? :)
Robert
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