ROBUST discussion

I think I told you that I had a couple of articles published in a British magazine recently, based on blog posts I'd written about editing and marketing ebooks? I just wrote to them to pitch two more articles ideas and the editor wrote straight back and says he wants both. But he wants the one about writer software/apps by next week, if at all possible! I really would like to do it to that deadline, but I haven't even started researching it yet. Do any of you have any good/bad writer software/apps you think I could review easily? I've got Word/Scrivener/MyNovel/Pages/CloudOn and some other apps that can be used for inspiration/planning etc. But I need more, preferably ones I can download for free or at least try for free. Good or bad.

Thanks!

Five programmes are already a lot to review in one piece, Katie. I would suggest you review the Big Three, Word, Pages and Scrivener, and just note the other two by exception. In the time available, you'd be smart to stick to what you already know, rather than scramble madly through applications that are new to you.

He doesn't really want in-depth reviews, Andre, more brief overviews of how useful they might be to a writer - good and bad points etc.

I use LibreOffice. It's free and painless. From the same people who did OpenOffice before they sold it to another company.

http://www.libreoffice.org/

What I like is in the options, I can select to save it in just about every cool format out there, and export directly into a PDF. I use this program to make my paperback interior PDF files, and they come out splendid with no tweaking necessary.

Thanks, Daniel, I'll check it out.

Sounds like Libre is something to look into Daniel. Thanks.

Go for it Katie!

(Though weren't you supposed to be on holiday this week?)

Sharon wrote: "Sounds like Libre is something to look into Daniel. Thanks.

Go for it Katie!

(Though weren't you supposed to be on holiday this week?)"

Holiday? Oh, yes, I was, wasn't I? Oops.

I've used openoffice since it was staroffice 3 or whatever. It's much like early versions of office really, at least for the wordpro.

OpenOffice 3.2 is exactly the same as LibreOffice 3.3+ as the OpenOffice suite was sold to Sun Microsystems. They continued the same program under a different name, as they sold the brand only.

If you install them both, you can't tell them apart side by side when they're running. Kinda funny that way,

Amos! Nice to see you. How are you feeling?

Had a few crappy days recently. Flying to Brisbane for some more tests soon, mostly to look at my brain. lol. See how the circulation is going. I do have a better pulse in my left leg now which is promising.

Amos wrote: "Had a few crappy days recently. Flying to Brisbane for some more tests soon, mostly to look at my brain. lol. See how the circulation is going. I do have a better pulse in my left leg now which is ..."

The report on my MRI: "An unremarkable brain."

Man, that deflated my ego.

Patricia wrote: "...The report on my MRI: "An unremarkable brain"..."

We ROBUSTERS have irrefutable proof you do not have an unremarkable brain, Patricia.

Amos, my thoughts are with you. Hope you are feeling better soon!

BTW, Katie, how are the articles going?

One has gone and been accepted, the other is still in my head! :)

Excellent!

Katie wrote: "One has gone and been accepted, the other is still in my head! :)"

When you send your head to the magazine, be sure to pack it in plenty of dry ice...

Andre Jute wrote: "Katie wrote: "One has gone and been accepted, the other is still in my head! :)"

When you send your head to the magazine, be sure to pack it in plenty of dry ice..."

Dry ice isn't that great. It doesn't penetrate very deep into layered tissue. Liquid Nitrogen, on the other hand, is the best in the Universe for that stuff.

I once tried to invent a way of copying the electron patterns inside the human brain into an ingram-memory based system. Using something akin to MRI, but instead of magnetism, the medium was positive ions suspended in an Argon gas canister that would hold the matrix, making a deeper 3D image of the memory patterns and not the organic tissue. Sorta like making a xerox of a person's education and skill set.

I'm not sure where things went wrong. My niece made a great test subject. I actually got a viable pattern. But I had to toss out the idea because balloons filled with Helium tends to gravitate towards her head, ruining birthday parties for years and years. When it happens, her expression is weird too, but I digress, apologies...

I guess I'm trying to say that I wish it worked out. Katie could have xeroxed her mental ingrams and sent that instead. No ice or cold storage of any type needed. ^_^

There's a whole sci-fi novel in this thread already...

This place is weird!

;)

Katie, I think it has something to do with the participants.

Nah, it's the air. I know, because on my native planet we breathe helium and wouldn't dream of mixing it with as much unstable, flammible, corrosive oxygen as you earthling breathe without even thinking how it clogs your arteries and oxidizes your lungs, a process akin to rusting of metal. Ugh.

Andre Jute wrote: "Nah, it's the air. I know, because on my native planet we breathe helium and wouldn't dream of mixing it with as much unstable, flammible, corrosive oxygen as you earthling breathe without even thi..."

So THAT'S why everything you say is so high pitched. I shoulda figured it out sooner. ^_^

I used to be a Helium junkie at parties, made everyone laugh. Just... whatever you do... never try blowing out the candles with a lungful of helium. While it didn't actually hurt me (I kept most of my hair), the cake was a freaky mess. It ended up with some priest yelling verses at me while pointing his finger a few days later, trying to exorcise me.

Very embarrasing.

(I am -not- going back to hell, either! I hate that place!)

Daniel, your whole life is an action/adventure novel.

Action is for sure! I don't even want to know what Daniel knows about lethal bombs...

Katie wrote: "This place is weird!

;)"

No doubt about that!

Oh boy - what AM I doing here?

So when do your articles come out, Katie?

The one I just had accepted is in the December issue which comes out at the beginning of November (that makes sense, doesn't it?) I haven't asked yet, when they want the other one.

The article was published today, even though it's still October and it's the December issue! It won't reach Australia until at least January, but a friend in Scotland scanned it and sent it to me. I'm glad to see the editor had done a bit of extra research and found out prices for all of them...it was very hard to research costs from Australia for a British audience.

Congrats Katie!

Congratulations, Katie!

Dust off the white gloves, whoever has them...

Dakota refuses to take them off.

It might be prudent to purchase a few pair - there could be a few from here who are riding the convertible in the ticker tape parade...

I suppose we can't pass them around forever. Katie should get the tara too.

(Ahem, Dakota, hand it over. Don't pout, I'm sure you'll get it back before long.)

Maybe Dakota's wearing them at the office to impress the engineers.

Oh, that aught to impress engineers for certain!

I won Dakota's contest. She was supposed to wear it for a week.

Wish I had a picture! Kench!

Actually, I think I'll let Dakota keep them. The kids at school would just think Mrs Stewart was plain weird turning up in white gloves and a tiara.

Seriously: What's not weird about wanting to be a writer?

Having just driven myself silly trying to get my quota of words for the first day of NaNoWriMo after a c***py day at work (now at 2017 words), I have to agree with you Andre. It is the weirdest ambition there is!

Kench, Andre!

Katie, yesterday Amazon.uk sent me an email with recommendations for books I might like. Andre's Iditarod was listed first.

Today, Amazon.com sent me one with Treespeaker at the top, and your other two next! PM me with your email addy and I will forward. (Not techy enough to post a snapshot on here).

Not only that, but the subject line for Andre's was IDITAROD... in all caps.

Today it was Treespeaker, in lower case.

I'd be excited, Sharon, except that I got the same recommendations myself - they recommended three of my own books to me! Still, it is nice to know that it went to someone else, too!

Ha ha, I wondered about that! Also thought it strange that they sent the notice to someone who already owns the books. Still, nice to get noticed, however it transpires. Yep, writing is a weird occupation...

Good luck with your NaNoWriMo. Always thought it might be a good excercise in writing.

I kind of owe NaNoWriMo.

I'd been writing on and off for years. I took a few creative writing courses back in HS and in college.

I never could do much, though because I was convinced you had to sit there and carefully craft everything right then and there. The net result was that I was generally paralyzed and didn't write much of anything.

I did NaNoWriMo years back and it finally freed me. I internalized the idea of just writing and not getting so hung up that I wasn't penning gold on the first pass. It also taught me I could produce a full-length work with a coherent plot.

Before NaNo, the only thing I managed to get out were pretty small short stories.

Now, I never did anyhting with those NaNoWriMo novels, but they were great practice.

It is possible to write and polish x number of words a day as a finished product and eventually produce a novel. Journalists have much practice at this method. But the complete novel always, to my mind at least, reads jerkily, like a compilation of daily pieces written by a novelist. Arthur Haley, a bestseller a few decades ago, used this method to create fat thrillers.

But basically there are only two methods of writing a novel, John Braine's and mine. It just appears that in WRITING A THRILLER I give you lots of choices. But it's the small techniques (yeah, I know, until you internalize them, they can loom like large obstacles( in which I offer a choice. In the end my method and John Braine's is the same, to get the novel down whole and as fast as you can, and then to work it over obsessively.

Such a large proportion of what is published in indieville is crap because people who want to call themselves "authors" publish first drafts without the diligence of the second stage, which takes much more time and effort and skill. Old fashioned publishers and editors had barriers precisely for pretenders to fall at when they didn't grasp this necessity.

Any moron can write a first draft of some me-too story. Writing an original novel takes imagination for the first draft, and craft, skill, talent (usually expressed as discrimination and sensitivity) and perseverance to turn that first draft into a novel.

Yep!

But if NaNo will get rump to chair and fingers to keyboard - it's a good thing.

Swallow the Moon is a NaNo book. It took me a month to write it and a year to polish it.

That's a good ratio, Kat.

BTW, what does NaNoWriMo stand for? It sounds like it should produce inordinate amounts of doggerel...

NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, though why it's National when it's international, I don't know.

I definitely won't be publishing the bilge I'm producing for this, but it will give me something to work with; in contrast to the one I've just finished which I've prodded at for years. It has been a really hard book to finish and I still need to rewrite vast chunks of it.

Mark of the Dragon Queen only took me three months to write and maybe six months to rewrite, but it has been my best seller.