Words Words Words

A new project for the summer

Andrea Harris — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:58:04 +0000

I’ve gone and set myself up the bomb at Camp Nanowrimo. I’m going to try to participate in both the June and the August events. I’ll put the profile link up later, and will probably also adjust the site layout to reflect the new project. Yeah, life, what’s that.

Changes coming soon — again

Andrea Harris — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:52:57 +0000

I’ll be changing this site around to reflect the fact that I have more than one story I’m working on. I hope to get this site set up to where it will be my main fiction site. Of course, I don’t think I’ve had any visitors so far — not that there’s a whole lot of public content that would interest anyone. Anyway, some brief ideas on what I’d like to do: set up different sections for each story, set it up so there is a featured “theme” for each one (right now the theme is the default Twenty-Eleven modified by images that reminded me of scenes in the story I wrote for Nanowrimo), and… that’s it for now.

And wouldn’t you know

Andrea Harris — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:56:14 +0000

…I write about 2,000 words of the new story and then decide to make a major change. Actually, it will turn out to not be much of a change to the events, just to one of the main characters. And … Continue reading →

New story, new cloud location

Andrea Harris — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:39:30 +0000

I’m trying out Pangurpad once more, since I still have that Nanowrimo membership that lets me do one free document. We’ll see how it goes. On a side note: man I hate cramps.

Admin check in

Andrea Harris — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:48:19 +0000

Just updated the blog software via Softaculous and the Akismet plugin the usual way. Nothing much going on in the land of writing. I basically took December off. I meant to start this year by working on the Nanowrimo draft, but can’t get into it quite. Another expensive car breakdown and money woes are also eating into my thinking processes. I hope this isn’t the way the whole year is going to go! Frown.

Christmas Eve writing activities

Andrea Harris — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 03:05:06 +0000

I’ve been looking over some stories I started a few years ago (around 2000-2002) then filed away somewhere and forgot. I actually can’t find the cd that I think I have the files stored on, though I do have printed out hard copies of the efforts (a couple of chapters in one case, four with some handwritten bits of a fifth in the second), but I actually found them stored away on the Internet Wayback Machine. See, I used to have them stored on my server space, and I still might have them somewhere, I just don’t feel like looking around. Anyway, now that Yarny has offered unlimited stories in their free service I went ahead and uploaded them there. I’ve been reading them over and trying to figure out where I want to go on from where I left off; unlike the Nanowrimo novel, I didn’t have outlines, just a vague sort of idea of plot, but I had the characters pretty well mapped out. Anyway, I’ll be working on those. I’m thinking of making them both novelettes, not full novels, and once they get polished I want to get them published for Kindle etc. and maybe I’ll do a double-edition paper book via Createspace. *plans*

The Kindle readover: thoughts and some plans

Andrea Harris — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 03:14:55 +0000

Okay, a couple of days ago I finished reading over the first draft that I had uploaded to the Kindle. Some things I noticed right off the bat: I’m going to have to make sure my paragraphs are indented on the first line, and also, a lot of my paragraphs are way too big. The Kindle’s about the size of a paperback page (a cheap paperback, not one of the bigger fancy paperbacks), and big paragraphs can take up more than one page which means one entire page of word-block, which looks rather overwhelming.

Okay, that’s all for formatting now. It actually read pretty good — the dialogue, such as there is, isn’t too amateurish, though I need to get rid of some anachronisms; my setting is a civilization some fifty-thousand years in the future or more so contemporary speech patterns just don’t belong. At least I didn’t have anyone say “okay” or “OK.” I do think that my heroine thinking of someone as “weird” was said in too American-girl a fashion. These people aren’t on Earth, there ain’t no Americans in it.

Names are going to be changed — I basically just came up with some quick names to get through Nanowrimo, but I have decided I don’t like most of them, except for the first names of the hero and heroine. Place names especially are going to get the old “find/replace all” treatment. I also have to get the thing into Scrivener but I want to finish the tutorial first. Wordpad and Yarny were great for the first draft, but now I am going to be working on the second, and I want to break it up in some way.

I also printed the thing out for the purpose of hand-editing, but wouldn’t you know, the dang printer started to run out of ink halfway through. It’s still readable for editing, I think (the document proved to be 92 pages single-spaced with an extra line between paragraphs, and only the first 33 pages — the printer prints documents last page first — are affected by the lack of ink). I hate wasting paper. Paper is so wasteful — another reason to publish electronically with only print-on-demand books for those who want a paper copy, but that’s a different post.

Cleaning up

Andrea Harris — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:25:54 +0000

I went ahead and removed some themes I wasn’t using. Now there are just the two default WordPress themes to choose from. I’m using Twenty-Eleven right now.

Porting the draft to Kindle experiment

Andrea Harris — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:59:34 +0000

I tried something with my Kindle: you can use a special email to send things to your Kindle web space, and later have it copied over to your Kindle, either via usb or wifi. And if it’s not in a native Kindle format (like it’s .rtf or Word .doc) you put “convert” in the subject line of the email and it will convert your file to the Kindle format. I tried this with the draft of the novel and it worked! It looks pretty good for something that is single-spaced (and turns out to have really long paragraphs in some places; I may have to edit those shorter). So I have hopes for the e-Book version of the thing once it’s done.

Goodies

Andrea Harris — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:00:42 +0000

I went and took advantage of the winner’s prize coupon for Scrivener that got me the program at half price. Twenty bucks is not bad for something that apparently lots of writers praise. I haven’t done more than look at the tutorial, though. I’ve got to go to work.

I’m also probably going to get Calibre, which is a program for e-books (downloading, storing, converting, and so on). It was recommended on the Nanowrimo forums for converting files to Kindle and other epub formats. I also tried the trick of emailing my draft to my Kindle via my Kindle email thing, only I’ll have to upload it to the Kindle next time I’m near a wireless connection. It’s been soppy and rainy today so I didn’t go to the coffee shop. (And it’s going to snow tonight, when I’m on my way home. Oh, joy.)