The Organisator

I’ve blogged before about writing softwares and whether they are useful/necessary. I think my verdict earlier was ‘no’, but now that I’m 25 000 words in, and my hard drive is littered with Word documents called things like ‘The bit where mc gets homesick’ and ‘scene describing the town’, I wonder if there might be a use for some kind of organising program. 

One that’s been recommended to me is yWriter, but unfortunately it doesn’t work on macs.

I like its simple approach: ‘yWriter is a word processor which breaks your novel into chapters and scenes. It will not write your novel for you, suggest plot ideas or perform creative tasks of any kind. It does help you keep track of your work, leaving your mind free to create.’

No frills. However, so far I can achieve the same effect by using the document Navigation pane in Word, as long as I label all my scenes with ‘headings’. I’d like to do a comparison with yWriter, to see if it’s more effective than Word alone, but will have to wait until it becomes available on Mac I suppose.

In the meantime, my favourite tip for making software work for you is using the Autocorrect function to enter characters’ names. I can’t remember where I picked it up, but it’s pretty handy when one of your major characters is called ‘Aunt Honoria’. Just open the Autocorrect options menu in Tools, and add an autocorrection: Replace ‘aun’ with ‘Aunt Honoria’. Easy! And it saves me 10 keystrokes every time Aunt Honoria pops up in a scene. I can't imagine how I got by without it.

Are there other shortcuts you use? What else am I missing out on?

Working from home

It's everyone's dream, right? Be your own boss, work when you feel like it, play whatever music you like as loud as you like..

When my old work asked me if I'd like to do some editing work for them and I didn't have to come in - I could Work From Home - of course I jumped at the chance. I could save money and psycological damage by avoiding the commute to work, and I had visions of sitting in a cosy cafe hunched over my laptop.

Alas, I don't think I'm cut out for working from home.
At home, there is no-one there to look at me disapprovingly if I turn up at my desk well after 9am. There's no-one to raise an eyebrow after I leave for my tenth cup of tea and perusal of the fridge. And there's no-one to tut-tut if I spend two hours on lunch, or get distracted by email, by (ahem) blogger, or even, perversly, if I start doing my homework instead (when homework becomes a procrastination tool, I know I'm in trouble).

In short, I am the least self-disciplined of people and I make a terrible boss.
On the up side, I've made quite some headway with my novel...



Any tips for working from home would be most welcome.

Tomorrow, when I start my essay

Yesterday, I went and saw the new film version of Tomorrow, When the War Began. Yes, I have an essay on symbolism in Robert Drewe's The Drowner due in two days, but TWTWB is an Australian YA classic, and I wanted to see how they'd gone making a film of it.

It was ok I suppose. They've axed a couple of sub plots, and Ellie was too pretty and didn't look tough enough, but overall it stayed true to the book. The funny thing is, in one scene, one of the girls is reading a copy of My Brilliant Career. Ellie, the heroine, comes over and asks her how the book is, and the other girl replies, 'It's not bad--better than the film.'
'Yeah, books always are,' says Ellie.


A nice ironic touch there? I guess the producers knew what they were risking, taking on a favourite of Australian teens since 1993, so they got that in early, but it sounds self-defensive to me. If your audience really is sitting there thinking, 'this isn't as good as the book,' why underline it for them? Why not just get on with the movie. 
A bit strange, but I still enjoyed the movie, even if, um, it wasn't as good as the book.

Be nasty

Some Sunday morning reading in The Age from John Birmingham on a universal truth: good drama requires a writer to be a bit nasty to their characters.

It's something I struggle with, because I'm one of those people who just wants everyone to get along! I don't like it when my characters are mean to each other, but who wants to read 50 000 words or more of people being nice? Bor-ring.

So I work really hard at remembering to make my antagonist as vicious as a tiger snake. Whenever I write a scene with him in it, I think 'tiger snake'. Aggressive, kind of handsome, and poisonous.

Does that sound crazy, or do other people work this way?!

Ten words we all should hear more often:

'Could you do me a favour?...Do you eat chocolate?'

Do I.

The call to action came during my weekly volunteer shift at the Friends of the Earth cafe/bookshop.

One of the advantages of working with predominantly vegan people is that when the contents of the chocolate jars need to be tasted to determine which is chocolate-coated ginger, and which licorice (the labels were mixed up), the only person up to the challenge is yours truly.

'Mmm, yep that's licorice... no hang on, let me taste another one...'

I've found my calling.

Eluding the procrastinet

Oh the wonders of enforced unpluggedness (there are four syllables in that). In the library at TAFE today the internet was down for some time. Right from the moment I arrived, in fact, with all my plans for the next hour or two centring around:

1.       Check email.

So there I was, stymied before I even got the wheels off the ground. Procrastination nipped in the bud, cut off at the knees. Pre-emptively struck against.

Normally I use the more useless distractions of the internet to entice myself into doing work. The prospect of a hilarious email about cats who wear sunhats, or the upcoming federal election (always good for a laugh), at least gets me seated at the computer, and then I have a vague hope that I might accidentally type out an assignment while I’m there.

No internet? I stared at my computer screen and thought dully, ‘But what do I do?’

Reluctantly I concluded that I was going to have to do some work. Writing, to be precise, because the only homework I ever have that doesn’t rely on documents in my email or dropbox is Write Some of Your Novel.

And oh dear it was productive. Without facebook to check every time I finished a paragraph, or got stuck over an adjective, I simply kept going. I almost got in this ‘zone’ I keep hearing about.

But then, alas, the IT department waved their wand and the dub-dub-dub opened its vistas once again. Without a backward glance at my novel I fired up the hotmail, read the paper and then moseyed on to blogger…

But I did make a mental note to cut the cord more often while I'm working.

Word of the week: hiatus

Hiatus, from the Latin hiare, 'to gape'. Definition in the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary: 'a break or gap, esp. in a series, account, or chain of proof.'

A break in a series of blog posts, for example. Yes, there has been a bit of a hiatus, not just because I went on holidays, but also because the holiday had an extended effect. And writing is like most things - the longer you put it off, the harder it is to start again.

However, I thought this was an auspicious time to kick it off again, because something very lucky happened to me yesterday. I mean incredibly, what-are-the-chances lucky.

I came in to uni only to discover that my printing account had been deleted. After some conversation with the IT people, I learned that they had 'changed the system over' or something, which was all fine, except three people happened to lose their printing accounts. Three people in the entire uni, and one was me.

'What are the odds eh?' said the kind lady who helped me get my account back. 'You could have won the lottery with luck like that, but you got this instead.'

Yes, thank you. Remind me not to go out in thunderstorms.