Ryne Douglas Pearson's Blog, page 21

A wonderful conversation with the gifted, plain-spoken writer.

My Hearty Pasta Salad*



2 lbs corkscrew pasta

2 lbs dry salami (chopped into smallish chunks)

2 lbs Provolone cheese (chopped into smallish chunks)

1 can pitted whole black olives

1 jar whole Peperoncinis

1 red onion cut into thin slices and chopped

1 cup shredded Parmesan cheese

1 bunch cherry tomatoes

3 small jars marinated artichoke hearts



Dump cooked pasta in bowl. Dump salami, Provolone, onion, and tomatoes into bowl. Dump olives, Peperoncinis, and artichoke hearts into strainer and quickly dump into bowl so that some of the artichoke marinade becomes your pasta salad dressing.



Eat.



You may substitute possum for salami if that floats your boat.



*This post courtesy of me being hungry.

'What software do you use to write?'

I get asked that. And there way be obvious answers, with 99% of the world using Word to sling, well, words. But there's often more to writing than that.

I do use Word. Increasingly. It has styles and formatting that makes the conversion to digital file formats, such as .prc and .epub, almost seamless. But I do not like Word. I have written all my novels on something else.

WordPerfect. Yes, old school. Why? Two words--REVEAL CODES. WordPerfect's ability to let you see all the clunky code behind your writing can clear up errors in one step that take two or three to fix in Word, if you can find them at all.

So that's for novels. For screenplays there really is one overwhelming choice--Final Draft. Now, I absolutely hate how they broke the ability to use centrally networked files on multiple machines between versions 7 and 8, but it is the industry standard. And, it does what it's supposed to, quite easily.

So, there's the writing software. All done.

Nope. What happens after you write? Do you just let that fragile file containing your masterpiece sit on your hard drive? Not me.

For automated backup to external drives, over network and directly connected to my main office machine, I use a program called Vice Versa Pro. It might be version 2, or 3, I'm not sure. All I know is that, after setting up a profile to tell it what's important to me and where I want it backed up, it runs in the background and detects changes to any of these files. Every few minutes it backs them up. I don't even have to think about it. Which I love.

I also use a proprietary piece of software unavailable to the public that backs up the same files to an offsite location. Multiple locations, actually. It also e-mails copies of my 'prime project of the moment' to me each night, so there is always a copy somewhere accessible. Unless Godzilla takes down the grid.

My mother died this past summer. She was 88 and in failing health, and had been in a nursing home for the previous year and a half. That's not where this story begins, or ends. It's just a signpost for context.

This weekend while going through some old boxes in the garage I came upon some 'memorabilia'. Yes, a dreaded 'crap box'. This one, as it turned out, contained articles and clippings that had mentioned me and my writing over the past 18 years. Various copies of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, NY Times, and so on. But among this collection of rarefied 'journalistic' air there was something else.

Copies of two articles from the Morris Sun, a small newspaper located where my mother grew up in Morris, Minnesota. The first one, from 1992, said that a former resident's son had sold his first novel. The next, from a few years later, recounted that a former resident's son had sold film rights to his fourth novel. Each article mentioned that the novelist's mother had written to tell her hometown paper about these successes. She was proud of me, and wanted to share what I had accomplished with the people 'back home'.

My mother was already in the nursing home when Knowing, based on my original script, was released. Her health was too fragile for her to go see it, but on the wall in her room at the nursing home she had attached the full page advertisement for the movie, and would tell everyone to look and see her son's name on it.

I know my good fortune brought her joy. Remembering that brings me joy.

No movie today, just a book. And not a novel. It's Maps In A Mirror by Orson Scott Card, a collection of short stories dating back to the 70's. That's when I first discovered OSC's short fiction in Omni Magazine (RIP). My particular favorites are A Thousand Deaths and Unaccompanied Sonata. And, there's a Kindle edition available at Amazon...yea eBooks.




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Good old school advice about, you know, actually writing.

Great quote about the first six weeks of writing a novel.

Yes, I'm addicted to these writer videos. I hope you are as well.

From The Atlantic:

It was high time to play around. We writers always have lots of pieces in the can -- stories killed for no good reason, pieces we wrote for the hell of it over a crazed weekend. In my case, I realized I had the makings of a short book about the brain. I write a column about neuroscience for  Discover , and earlier this year I also wrote a piece for  Playboy  on some wild-eyed notions of how you'll be able to upload your brain into a computer in the not-too-distant future. Fortunately, both  Discover  and  Playboy carry on the noble tradition of returning the rights to articles to their authors, rather than treating them as work for hire. I could bring together some of these pieces as an eBook and see if it would become something that people might actually want to buy.

Read the FULL ARTICLE.