NaNoWriMo Day Five

Posted on 2 Comments

So here we are at the start of Day Five of the month long novel writing project. This is the first of my promised updates on how things are going. I dived headlong into NaNoWriMo at midnight on November 1st. I wrote a quick burst of 750 words and then went to bed. Why did I do this? Because the promo email from the good folks at NaNoWriMo suggested I do so. Apparently I am a sucker for not-so-subliminal suggestions. God alone knows how long it’s been since I tried writing fiction in the wee small hours. Must have been Read more…

NaNoWriMo, Baby!

Posted on 4 Comments

We interupt our regularly scheduled lack of programming on this blog to let you know that it’s almost time for National Novel Writing Month. This year I’ve decided to give it a go. I’ll try and give regular updates on my progress. I know what you’re thinking. This should be a walk in the park for you, Bill. You’re a professional novelist with all the time in the world on your hands. If you can’t do a 50000 word rough draft in a month you should be ashamed of yourself. Normally I would kinda sorta agree with you. Fortunately for Read more…

Writing A Novel With Ulysses III

Posted on 8 Comments

Ulysses III looks so simple but it’s enormously powerful. The program’s documentation does it no favours. It does not explain half what the this radical and innovative piece of software is capable of. It leaves you to flounder with its most powerful features. Fortunately David Hewson has come along to give us a helping hand. Writing A Novel With Ulysses III is a short ebook about writing long works of fiction using the program. It is clear, clever and concise. It doesn’t claim to be a comprehensive guide to Ulysses III. It still taught me a few things that I Read more…

Improving Writing Workflows

Posted on 2 Comments

I changed my workflow a lot this year. The most important alteration was that I started using markdown as much as possible. I’ve talked about the advantages before so I won’t go into them again here. I’ll just say that I love the way I can work anywhere on anything when I am using it. I am using Scrivener less. I know, I know– me saying that is one of the signs of the End Times. In the past I used Scrivener for pretty much everything I could. But all is flux as Heraclitus once said. My workflow is now Read more…

D&D Fifth Edition

Posted on 7 Comments

Yesterday was the official release date of the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. It won’t hit my FLGS for some time yet so I haven’t got my hands on a copy. I did celebrate the release by picking up the Starter Set and downloading a copy of the rules from the D&D website. My recent D&D related experience has been with Pathfinder and the retro-clones of the Old School Renaissance. I was not a big fan of the fourth edition. It pretty much killed my interest in D&D. It wasn’t that the fourth edition was badly done. It had Read more…

Checklists, Waypoints and Revisions

Posted on 4 Comments

Back in the mid–90s, long before 9–11, I was a guest on the flight deck of an SAS Boeing 737 flying between Stockholm and Copenhagen. For a man scared of flying this was a revelation. Everything seemed so peaceful and safe. The most reassuring thing about it was how routine everything seemed. One of the things that made it so was that one of the pilots, the captain, I think, sat there with a clipboard. He ticked stuff off on a checklist as the co-pilot performed various functions. It was clear that these guys had a system that made the Read more…