I am a writer; not a great writer, or even a good writer, but a writer nonetheless. It took me a long time to accept the fact. When, as a late-bloomer, I first went to college at age twenty-seven after spending many years as an itinerate…err…an itinerate–well let’s just leave it at that, no sense in beating myself up in front of all these people—I discovered that I enjoyed it, things just started popping. I had always been a big fan of book-learnin’ and had always wanted to get me some, but I had always hated school—public school that is, Texas tea (that’s from The Beverley Hillbillies…see it comes from the theme song…you know: “Come listen to a story ‘bout…a…man…named…” ah never mind).

The point is: I’m a writer. I get up every morning fully intending to write one thousand words; I go to bed every night fully intending to get up the next morning fully intending to make up for not writing today by writing two thousand words. I promise myself that I will write, that I will meet my goal—I don’t always make it, in fact I make more promises than I keep. I make more promises than a drunken freshman makes to his date on prom night. That’s a lot of goddamned promises.

For example, last year around this time (December 29, 2004 to be exact) I promised myself that over the coming year I would write a book—one thousand words per day, three-hundred and sixty-five days, well that’s…umm…that’s…a lot of goddamned words that’s what that is. I said I was a writer not a number figure-outer-person. Point is, to make sure I followed through with this promise I bought a web site, and promised myself that I would go to this web site and write every day about what I had written that day. That is what us promisers call a self-keeping promise. How could I fail? In order to keep promise b, I would need to keep promise a; otherwise I wouldn’t have anything write about on the aforementioned web site (a.k.a. promise b). Genius! Brilliant! Forehead slappingly simple!

The web site sat vacant for more than a month. I wasn’t idle during all this time, heck no! I did stuff; I’m a busy man. I washed the dishes. I bought a tablet PC. I looked for a new job, got interested in lomography, moved across town, and had a tooth pulled. All of which would make great subjects for writing—for someone.

I did try and make use of the web site, after all it cost me ninety-nine bucks and that ain’t chump change, unless you’re a chump who happens to collect coins. I decided to devote it to the writing community at large, to make it a haven for communal learning and mutual edification. I promised myself that I would hunt all over the Internet, and even the hinternet (Pronunciation: ‘hin-t&r-’net, Function: noun, Etymology: German, from hinter hinder + net : a region lying beyond major web traffic centers), and in order to keep this promise I set up a new e-mail address and subscribed to millions of newsletters using this new address. I promised myself that I would check this e-mail address everyday and get the scoop on all the cool happenings in the world of grammar and writing. You see where I’m going with this?

The point of all this is: here it is December 28, 2004 and I am ready to make a new promise to myself to write a freakin’ book. But how can I get myself to keep the promise this time? When I find out, I’ll let you know—I promise.

Teenager wonders where have all the commas gone?

Now, there are probably a lot of people who wonder
what could make me so upset about the phrase "your so stupid." If you
haven’t caught the mistake by now, you may be one of those who irritate
me so. If you immediately saw the mistake, you might have been tempted
to look away in disgust.

from Lifestyle section of The Visalia Times Delta : Teenager wonders where have all the commas gone?

Some ideas, forehead-slappingly simple though they may be, are just pure gold like this one from Crawford Kilian at Writing Fiction:

I’m putting together a "bible"—a looseleaf binder with a few key items.
It includes the current chapter plus an outline, and enough blank paper
to keep me scribbling during long, peaceful evenings.

Compiling a Bible

A Way to Wiggle the Mouse.

by

L. S. Russell

Today on the CHPercolator group I read a prompt that just jarred something in my skull loose. The prompt, from Saturday, was: "his brain is on standby". That went in and this came out.

“It just is, that’s how.” Said Dar, his eyes followed his fingers, as they blurred over the control board. “His brain isn’t exactly shutdown…more like on standby.”

Omer, paced the floor in what he hoped would be seen as a pensive, but still very powerful, pose; his hands clasped behind his back, lab coat hanging open, eyeglasses perched on top of his head. From time to time he would stuff one hand in his pants pocket, and park the other palm on his cheek. All poses chosen and refined to strike just the right chord within the sub-conscious mind of anyone looking at him. “What the fuck does that mean Dar?” he said.

“I can’t talk to you when you’re prancing around like that.”

Omer stopped, spun on his heels—another practiced maneuver—and stared, with one eyebrow crawling up his forehead, at Dar. “This isn’t prancing. I don’t prance.” He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a never lit pipe that he used when he wanted to seem intelligent.

“Well,” said Dar. “Whatever. And don’t use that language. You know I don’t like that language. As soon as we finish this, I intend to prove that persistent use of vulgarities lowers the I.Q.”

Omer was busy trying the pipe in different positions, he finally settled on holding the bowl in his right hand because he could use it to point emphatically, or tuck it in the corner of his mouth to bring a point to a close. He tried this new move a few times while Dar had his back turned. Hammer home the point, jab-jab; close the argument, grit your teeth, grin, clinch. Omer liked this new move. “Please accept my apology. But you must understand that I am confused. Will-you-elucidate?” He jabbed each word of the question home, tucked the pipe in the corner of his mouth, and folded his arms across his chest. He realized, too late, that in order for the move to have full effect he needed to be sitting down so that he could lean back in his chair to signify expectant openness. He dashed over to a lab table and perched himself on a stool; it was a little too high, next time he would be sure to have a shorter chair near by before executing this move.

Dar sighed and flipped a switch on the panel over his head. “It’s like a computer with a screen saver. The computer is still on, even doing work, but it isn’t paying you any attention—not until you press a key or wiggle the mouse.” Dar almost exactly mirrored Omer, who sat behind him with his chin in his hand.

“So,” he said with the pipe bouncing between his clinched teeth. “His brain is on pause.”

“No.”

“Agh! This is frustrating. I despise those vile devices. I am afraid that we aren’t speaking the same language.” Said Omer.

“Listen, it’s simple. His brain is on and functioning. He is thinking very hard about something.” Said Dar. He flipped a few switches and the display on the wall in front of him changed to show a scan of Paulo’s brain. It was mottled with bright orange spots, flecked with red and pink. “Now, this is Paulo’s brain activity at this very moment. See how all the activity is locused at the center? Far away from the centers for speech and sight.” He flipped another switch and a side-by-side display of two very different scans popped up. “This is Paulo a few weeks ago; a perfectly normal scan–activity where you would expect to see it in the waking brain of a healthy male. He’s using his brain in a way it was not designed to be used.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know, the screen saver is preventing me from seeing what is going on. The fact that his brain is in standby mode is preventing me from answering that question.”

“Well then,” said Omer. “We should find a way to wiggle the moose don’t you think?”

“The mouse.” Said Dar. “We have to wiggle the mouse.”

 

Our brains are always working no matter what activities we are doing.

Ideas and thoughts are fleeting and unless you catch them immediately, they
will be lost. There’s no way to predict when a great idea is likely to pop
into your mind so you must be prepared at all times to record them. Once you
have established the habit of idea recording you will be surprised at how
many good ideas you actually think of each day.

Books on writing refer to “your journal” or “your notebook”. It is essential
you start using a system to record your ideas, thoughts and observations.
These notes will be your primary source book in your creative and humourous
adventures.

If you want to write fiction, non-fiction, comedy or anything else for that
matter, keeping a journal is a good idea. Ideas (and humour) area all around
you, and ideas can appear (and disappear) very quickly. Be receptive to the
world around you. There are times when you may hear a snatch of conversation,
or see a funny sign. Unless you capture that thought immediately, it will
be gone in a matter of minutes.

It is important to be always ready for idea recording. The mind never stops
chattering with all sorts of thoughts bubbling and percolating up from the
subconscious mind into your conscious mind. Ideas and memories collide against
each other in the subconscious melting pot and it is necessary to be ready
at all times to capture those combinations that jump out. They just have to
be captured. Imagine your ideas are butterflies flying out into the open.
You need a net to capture the butterflies and not let them get away.

Idea Recording

http://www.avoision.com/experiments/pi10k/pi10k.html

http://www.free-fonts.com/

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on
computers that run Windows XP. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington
State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free
replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating
systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+
extensions.
Paint.NET

If you’re like me, and since I am the only person reading this you are me, you take a buttload of notes on everything from the albino rhino to the zebulon the zymurgist zebra. Where do you put most of your notes? Me? I use notepad or some other utility. But recently, I have gotten interested in the "getting things done" craze. My interpretation of gtd requires that I make lists, and keep all my documentation (e.g. PIM, todo’s, etc.) in one spot.

I chose to use a USB keydrive to store all my document. I started out just using Word or Excel to track things, but imagine my surprise when I discovered that not all computers into which I might plug my USB device will have Microsloth Office installed. What then?

Well the best thing to do would be to find a piece of software that I could carry with me, something that was small and would perform many functions at once, something that would run off a USB drive with little or no intrusion on the host machine. This turned out to be easier than I had, at first, thought.

NoteWiki
NoteWiki is a tiny (44kb) program that has big plans; it is the little ant that moved the rubber-tree plant. I took NoteWiki for a week long test drive and I never took it off my USB device. If you have used web based wikis then you will have no trouble using NoteWiki, and the slight effort of learning wiki words is repaid by the fact that NoteWiki has millions…no, billions…of uses. I even burned it to a CD for use as a documentation system.

Notebook
A signifigantly (2045kb) larger, though no less useful wiki-like application, Notebook fills the bill even better than NoteWiki becase it is much more configurable. Even though Notebook took several seconds to startup it is well worth the wait. If you can spare the space on your USB drive, then Notebook is the way to go.

I cannot overstate the value of this exercise, which took only 10
minutes. It gave me a view over the horizon before I began drafting the
story. It provided the language I needed to share my hopes with other
writers, editors, and readers. It could be tested, expanded, revised —
and it was — during the drafting process.

Poynter Online