I was browsing Alex Satin’s blog and ran across this interesting post on word themes. I found Wordle instantly addictive and started posting up bits of my stories, like this one, to see what sort of meta-themes pop out.

Wow did that turn out to be an insightful look into the content of my stories. I hope you find it as useful for your writing! Go try out a couple paragraphs now!

This chapter in Nightshroud turned out to be entirely about names, which gives me some thoughts for my first set of revisions : (

I recently noted that I’d tested out BlogJet to some success. After using it for a few weeks, and seeing a reply from Alec Satin, who has an excellent blog on Project Management and being a generally pleasant human being, I wanted to post a couple updates.

BlogJet has worked well, though I find that I have to jump on the web and make edits occasionally after posting. It lacks a couple key elements that would make it a real times saver:

• No way to insert symbols—though this dash, which I use constantly, shows up automagically, and you can add auto-replace rules for some things.
• It occasionally inserts formatting using span tags over the entire post, overriding the blog’s default styles, which is oddly annoying and unnecessary.
• Tags don’t work. It has an option to use ‘native tags’ instead of technorati, but that never works. They always show up as links at the bottom of the post instead of actual tags in WordPress.

Blog Jet is nice in that I don’t have to visit the site, log in, and click on post. So generally, when I have an idea I want to jot down and develop later, I write it in BlogJet and save it as draft on the site.

But if I’m going to post all the way through, I don’t see a point, since I have to log into the site and edit the tags anyways : (  I’ve put in a request to BlogJet to fix this feature; hopefully they’ll have an ear for my feedback.

At the wee hour of two, on Wednesday, an unfavorable set of conditions caused a chain reaction that led to an 11pm victory dance. I want to tell you all about it because, as humans (my apologies to any popsicles reading this), you like stories; and, as a writer, I like telling them.

My writing has been in a horrible slump. My ideas slowed to a trickle and I’ve barely managed 100 words a week in my WIP’s. But invigorating the writer’s muse is like trying to subdue a gianormous Hun with a Mcdonalds drinking straw. 

Before we go on, let me start by saying this isn’t really about writing or martial arts—or huns; this is about a universal truth that applies to any art you may pursue.

At 2am, I woke with a migraine. It was my first one in several months. I gave up on sleep about 4am and started reading. I read other author’s stories and critiqued them. I read good and bad writing. I read weblogs and responded to them. I read news and tech papers and everything I could set my eyes on.

Then, when I couldn’t stay awake anymore, I slept. When I woke up again, I sat down at my computer, without any real thought of doing so, and started writing. When I stopped, it was eleven at night and I’d just finished the first serious, meaningful, good writing I’ve done in months.

And I did the victory dance.

 It wasn’t all Wednesday to be sure. I did several things that helped nudge myself back into the habit:

• I started journaling again; putting letters on paper, as amazing as it sounds, is an important step in writing
• I started talking with writers again, mostly about my lack of progress
• I started reading again; no doubt the single greatest renewal of writing energy

But these things didn’t bring the ideas or the inspiration to sit at my keyboard. It was the migraine.

Now, before you run off and try to figure out how to give yourself migraines, let me point out that they weren’t the source of my writing energy. They were just a catalyst that led to a very important event: time away.

You see, to write, you need several very important things:

• The ability to see the world around you
• The ability to capture and articulate what you see in exciting ways
• Sleep—i.e. energy to think (I’m constantly amazed at how much energy thinking consumes)
• Time away (from what? yes, that… and that too… and before you ask, yes)

There are endless books about journaling and carrying cameras everywhere you go, writers workshops, seminars, and college corses to teach the first two.

The latter two you have to give to yourself, and you have to do it over and over again.

I haven’t for months and the results are clear. And it is so easy. It is so simple. Just take some time to sleep, and take some time to escape, and your muse will come knocking before you know it.

Aye, it be talk like a pirate day again. Shiver me timbers!

Google has, perish the thought, released in yet another language, you won’t believe which one. Cast your deadlights on this mateys.

Most of you have heard of twitter by now. People either love it and get horribly addicted to it or shun it as a “social phenomenon” and avoid it entirely.

However, I’ve used it for several important tools:

• call and remind me to do something in X minutes, using timer (like stop writing and go to class)
• add things to my todo list, rtm, from my phone when I am traveling
• keeping status with developers so we know what everbody is working on all the time

And it’s the third idea that started churning the gears in my head.  The LED’s were flashing like mad, and they had the binary version of this could help your writing all over them.

We’ve used various threads on Critique Circle to track writing goals and progress. We’ve encouraged one another via mail and messages.  Which brings me to the point [finally]:

Every time an author posts their success, it inspires me to write harder.

Twitter is such a beautiful tool for this. You can set it up with launcy and do nothing more than hit alt+space and type:

wrote 500 words on LLS, yay!

And the world is instantly aware of your progress.  One textbox, one option: write what you did. And all your friends are instantly aware. It’s a radical way to encourage each other and stay up to date on great friends with busy lives.

Here’s how you do it:

• Sign up on twitter (1 form, 3 fields, 30 seconds)
• Follow your friends, like Wulf
• Post your progress and inspirations and frustrations!
• Read about all your friends and get inpired™!

For those of you who want to try out something a little better than just a web browser, you can use twitter from your phone with SMS, via IM, through launchy, or from several desktop clients.

Argh, trying this program was a test in patience.

I downloaded the ScribeFire plugin for FireFox and tried it out. Everything about it is wrong, imo. Which is surprising considering the large following it has. I suppose of the free alternatives its, well, really the only one besides BlogDesk that looked up to par.

But ScribeFire proved buggy, hard to use, hard to understand, and poorly designed. And while it had keyboard shortcuts, they weren’t documented and I didn’t intend to spend hours figuring them out to forget them later.

Their search feature fails if I put an = sign into the search (such as searhing the html for class="bold") So I ended up moving this post over to BlogDesk to finish writing it, which went buggy.

So now I’m back to BlogJet, who will be getting my $29.95 for a licence and a bit of peace of mind.

I tried out BlogDesk today. I tried to use it to write a review of ScribeFire (coming next). It didn’t go so well.

The interface is decent, not great but not horrible. Keyboard shortcuts and decent formatting. Most of the standard blogging features. No search and replace; typical.

However, after a while the program “glitched” and I was unable to edit the content of a post anymore.

The focus, even when I clicked on my text, seemed to go somewhere random, like the category list. So BlogDesk gets the thumbs down.

I tested out BlogJet ($29.95/free trial) for posting to my blog from a desktop editor. Very sharp and polished so far. When I opened it, it suggested I send this post, though it had some really silly text for the content.

It did, however, have this spiffy quote:

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” – Albert Einstein

I’ll also be trying out BlogDesk over the next few days, which is freeware. But I have a suspicion it won’t live up to BlogJet’s polished UI and nice set of hotkeys…

I downloaded Google Chrome today and tried it out.  All I can say is wwwOwww. Fast. Fast. Fast.  

Everything about it was fluid and quick, down to the scrollbars, which move like liquid lightning.

And easy to use.  Simple and clean; exactly what a browser should be. And it’s compatible with every page I tried, including standard js libraries and advanced banking apps.

The only things missing, imo are:

• DOM inspector — found the dom inspector; it works like safari, have to highlight something on page and right click to ‘inspect’ it
• Keyboard shortcut for bookmarks — for mouse haters like me, this is a necessity. It’s way to slow to go clicky through menus when you view a couple hundred web pages a day (that translates to over an hour of clicking). I can type alt+b,c,d,1 lightning fast to open a login to my favorite app
• Greasemonkey — greasemonkey is essential for serious web users, it allows me to tweak nearly any page to my needs

If you’ve been thinking about trying Chrome, or updating your browser, head on over for a quick and painless install. Find out what fast web pages look like.

Yes, yes, I see it : )

I’ll have it up and running shortly. The main issue is, I’m deliberating whether I should take the time to make it a wordpress plugin. Here’s the basic idea:

1. You post to a special page, adding comments to specify progress on your stories
2. Alternately, use twitter posts to update progress on your stories
3. The goals box shows updated chart
4. Clicking on the goals box takes you to a full screen view of the chart, including the comments and posts about that goal

The question is whether other writers would find that useful.