December 17th, 2014 Update

I’m still working on the story (I’ll think of a code-name soon enough), but for now I took a break to work on another story I’ve had planned. I don’t plan on making a habit of starting new projects when I get a little tired of one, but I feel confident I can handle writing two stories at once. The only thing that is a bit rough at first is switching from third to first-person (and vice versa), but I think with practice I’ll find the transitions get smoother.

I did catch myself in a bit of an oddity tonight, however. I needed to explain how someone died, and my first action for that was to immediately begin looking up deadly diseases. Then I realized that I had used that far too often anyway, and it would simply be easier to say the person died in a plane crash.

Still, I don’t know why diseases seem to have been my standby. It’s not like I have a lot of personal experience with them.

That’s all for tonight.

Bradley

December 15th, 2014 Update

I might get this one in early enough that the date will match the headline.

Work is still progressing. My main distractions are other novels, to be honest! But that’s not a bad thing, it helps me see other writing styles.

I won’t pretend someone wrote in and asked me (because no one has read this blog as of yet), but I thought I’d share a bit of what I write on and how I do it. This mainly comes up because of discussions I’ve been involved in recently regarding the Hemingwrite and other devices.

Initially, I started on a 17″ PowerBook G4, which I’d picked up used for cheap. When that died, I switched to a 12″ PowerBook G4 (which is a great size to carry around). But the low resolution screen proved to be an issue, so I bided my time and snapped up an original, early-2008 MacBook Air.

It met my needs: thin and light, higher resolution screen (1280×800 vs the 1024×768 of the 12″ G4), and a keyboard I could work with. I had to do a good deal of deep cleaning on it, as well as some repairs, and I replaced the battery, formatted the hard drive, and installed OS X Lion (the final version for that machine). I was into it for $300 at that point.

It’s worked out quite well for what I need. I’m not someone who feels the need to lock out all distractions, but the MBA is slow enough (for those not familiar with computing, the MBA as introduced was a much different machine compared with the MBA of today) that I really don’t want to do anything on it besides write. Research is done on my iPad, which I keep next to me.

Once I was able to free up the MBA exclusively for writing, I decided to go ahead and apply a decal I’d had for a few months.

I’m happy with it overall.

As for how; I used Pages ’08 initially (picked up some cheap NIB copies of iWork ’08) but switched to Office 2011 when I subscribed to Office 365. Most publishing platforms (and the Copyright Office) prefer .docx files, and Pages ’08 was a bit too old for my needs.

I usually have at least two windows open. One with the project, and one with spare notes and sections I’ve excised from the project, usually sections that weren’t working out or that I’ll recycle later. My current project, I’ve got the plot laid out in that second window in a fair amount of detail.

I’ve toyed with Scrivener, I just haven’t taken the time to really learn it and make a fair judgment on it.

Bradley

December 5th, 2014 update

So, some progress:

I’m taking a break from any editing. Right now the stories are too fresh to me, and I want to let them sit for a little while before I return to fix them up. That doesn’t mean I’m abandoning them, I just don’t want to burn myself out on those stories.

I am working on the new story, however. I’ve done development a little different this time. The story’s been laid out, largely, for one. I’ve also developed an idea for most of the main characters. It took a little time, but I’m looking forward to adapting that into a fuller story.

I’ll get an excerpt up some time.

That’s all for now.