January 2007

Most interviews on blogs are done via e-mail: I would write the questions to you, the interviewee, and then you’d respond back. We’d perhaps do a little bit of editing and then the interview would appear on the appropriate blog.

These types of interviews are good and have several advantages. However, they lack the immediacy of the conversation and all that a conversation can bring in terms of subjects covered and the depth by which one can work with the subjects.

Podcasting, on the other hand, is about two or more people having that conversation, recording the conversation, and then offering it for download on your blog.

To be fair, I have not done a podcast yet. But, I’d like to just to see how it would all turn out. But, I’ve already thought about several subjects that writers could use a podcast to help amplify their message out on the web:

• Doing a “Virtual Book Tour” by having podcasts with various other writers who have blogs similar to your genre.
• Providing an updated synopsis about your current work in progress.
• Doing an interview with a subject matter expert in a particular area — like your writing area — to talk about some specifics that would be interesting to your readers.
• Expanding upon written announcements of your schedule with additional information — or commenting on your announcement after it happens, such as a physical book tour to Seattle and the experience.

Podcasts are one of those technology tools that at first blush is just interesting. But done well and with some thought on how to market your work (or you!), podcasts can be that great differentiater that people are looking for to become a fan of your work.

Scot

Part of my work is in business — and all writers know that business people measure everything and then put what they measure into a chart. Most likely in PowerPoint. We lack Presentation Zen.

While looking for some tools for visualization, I came across this interesting web page called A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. Essentially, this page has all of the different types of visualization charts out there listed into a table by color. Each color represents a type of visualization (e.g., Metaphor Visualization).

Then, putting your mouse over one of the boxes will cause the web site (not the image below) to provide a pop-up window that has an example of what is trying to be shown in the box. Here’s what it looks like:

There are some interesting ones specifically to help out writers in the visualization process:

• Timeline
• MindMap
• Story Template
• Tree
• Concept Skeleton
• Perspectives Diagram
• Cause - Effect Chains
• Concept Map

You may or may not use these charts for your writing, but I found that being able to quickly see different types of charts and a fast example of one already completed would lead me to getting the right framework around the visualization I was doing.

Scot

[tags]organization, organizing, planning, technology, technology-for-writers, ten-keyboards, writing-tools[/tags]

If you were a technology kind of guy, especially one that writes about technology for writers, you’d be looking for feature-rich programs that would help writers write. Programs that had twenty gizmos and thirty widgets and lots of drop down menus.

That would give you a lot of things to try out and then write about in a review.

But, there are a fair number of us who go the other route: simple, minimalist, and very little between what we’re thinking about and what we’re writing. Not tons of features. Not yet another whiz-bang tweak of an obscure command that might get used once every twenty books.

There are such programs out there.

Dark Room is one of them. From the web site:

Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text.

Basically, Dark Room is a clone of the original WriteRoom that is an OS X (tiger) exclusive application. It is a child of necessity, as there were no viable alternatives in Windows to produce the same behavior. Sure, you can kind of emulate the behavior by jumping through a bunch of hoops in Word/Writer, but it isn’t the same. Also, you can do something similar in emacs, but who wants to learn a bunch of obscure keyboard shortcuts?

The goal of the project is to capture the essence of WriteRoom, while keeping it simple and just as free.

Instead of lots of menus and toolbars, Dark Room has a few keyboard shortcuts that do the work for you. For example, Control+Z equals undo.

The minimalist nature of the program is shown in the screenshot on this post.

If you’re looking for something simple to write your words with on a computer, Dark Room for Windows could be your program.

Scot

[tags]blogging, finding-your-voice, technology-for-writers, ten-keyboards, writing-tools, dark-room, word-processor[/tags]

Admit it: some of us like to plan things out. Some, perhaps, a bit more than others.

If you are a fiction writer, you spend time writing about your characters, figuring out the plot line, getting into a Marshall Plan for the book. If you write non-fiction, you endlessly organize your research, your files, and track every single submission and query letter.

I represent those remarks!

For those of you who have these compulsive characteristics, here’s a neat trick for your blogging: a blogging calendar. Essentially, figure out what you are going to write about each day on your blog and what things you will update on your web site for the month.

Why do this? Well, it is the ultimate planning tool. It allows you to have a roadmap for the month. You can research your posts knowing when they will come up for writing. You won’t have writers block…because you already have your topic and perhaps a few key points about what you will be writing about.

Personally, I don’t have a formal calendar. What I do have is a listing of subjects to write about that I store on Notes area in Outlook. I then pick and choose the topics to write about when I do write for the blog.

But, a calendar is a cool tool if you like to plan.

Scot

[tags]blogging, creativity, discipline, organization, planning, technology-for-writers, ten-keyboards, writing-tools[/tags]