Category — Writing

[Ed. Note - Sorry for not posting in forever. Clients get priority over blogging, obviously. I'm not going to fight being busy with projects, though!]

Speaking of writers learning about graphic design, here’s a nice resource for learning about typography – “Type 101″ on Fonts.com

I admit that I know enough about typography to be dangerous. However, as I get into it, I find it more and more fascinating. In the competitive world of freelance writing and design, it’s a valuable skill to acquire. As I discovered with search engine optimization, the more I learned, the more I realized I didn’t know. It’s humbling, but constantly learning new things is what makes writing fun.

Most of the time when you submit work for publication in some market, they don’t care one wit about what you think the font should be. They have their own standards, and you should follow them, of course. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an instance where they didn’t require submissions to be in a generic font like Courier or Times New Roman. I know the former seems antiquated, but it’s the default for many story manuscript submissions.

If you are writing a brochure, web site, or something similar for a client, your suggestions often will be somewhere between useful and essential. If you do any amount of this kind of work, start learning.

Make sure you look under “About Fonts” and “Useful Links” (in the top menu bar at Fonts.com). You’ll find much more information worth reading. I don’t know a thing about the quality of their products and services, but I found the information they provide very helpful. So check it out!

In the midst of the chaos of juggling a million things in the last week, I’ve had one important revelation. My organization system (or general lack thereof) is severely affecting the time I have to meet my writing goals and my personal and work commitments. I meet my deadlines, of course, but I’ve found that’s come at the expense of sleep, personal downtime, and, particularly, my non-work writing.

So I decided to punt everything that wasn’t essential in the last week and focus on developing a better system. The problem was that so much was essential last week that this was really hard, but I finally ‘got it’ that one of the best times to buckle down and get organized is in the middle of a lot of chaos.

Despite some significant deadlines, an emergency trip to the dentist, and a sick kid, I actually got all this other stuff done.

• I deleted over 10,000 e-mail messages. No kidding.
• While I was at it, I got my Inbox down to ZERO. Admittedly, some of that ended up in an Action Items folder of messages I still need to respond to, but my Inbox was no longer a dumping ground for piles of mismatched pieces of information.
• My Inbox has stayed at zero because I’ve been processing that e-mail regularly. Setting my ‘automatically check e-mail’ interval to one hour instead of five minutes has done wonders. It no longer interrupts me and I can process it more efficiently when it comes in.
• I dumped everything I had in my brain for projects, action items, future tasks, anything I’d like to do but haven’t started on, calls I need to make, plans for world peace, and anything else that popped into my head down on to paper. Man, that felt good.
• I stashed little notebooks and notepads all over the house, in my pack, in the car, and anywhere else I might be. A notepad and a writing instrument are never more than 10 feet from me. Whenever I think of it, whatever ‘it’ is, I write it down. If I’m driving, I record it on a pocket recorder. It sounds obsessive, but my mind is so much more relaxed knowing I don’t have to remember something important until I find a place to get it down on.
• I took that entire brain dump and organized it into categories of projects, where ‘projects’ could be work-related, personal, or anything in between.
• I organized a big chunk of my project folders on my hard drive into groupings that made better sense.
• I made a calendar entry to remind myself to review those project and home lists regularly.

The end result? I’ve been frighteningly efficient the last couple of days. My mind feels a lot more relaxed. I had a really good Monday. You can’t beat that.

I even made some progress on a novel I’ve been working on. I got with it enough to do some research that’s been blocking me there for a long time.

If you’ve read time management books, you may already know the method I’m playing around with. Getting Things Done (GTD) is a method developed by David Allen that is by far the best approach I’ve come across. I’ve had to tweak it some to meet my style, but so far, it’s been a real load off my mind to follow it.

To borrow some more David Allen, the process of dumping the contents of your brain on to paper serves to offload your “psychic RAM”. Again, it felt great because instead of having to lug all that around in my head, it was down somewhere where I could locate it later.

This strikes me as an approach that fits naturally with how writers work. We carry around a ridiculous amount of stuff in our heads from bits of dialogue to plot ideas to nice phrases to solutions to sticky problems that have been plaguing us for weeks. Getting it down is a huge relief.

Working out the discrete steps required to keep a project moving along has been extremely helpful as well. Instead of “Create this web site” – which you can’t do without performing dozens of steps – I started figuring out very specifically what those steps were, especially those I need to do next. Instead of seeing a project with a hundred steps and a fuzzy sense of where to go next, I had the next actions right there ready to be tackled.

I don’t know what would happen if you locked David Allen and Anne Lamott in a room together, but GTD seems a lot like Bird by Bird to me. You write about only that little slice of the world that you can see through your one-inch picture frame; you complete that one small task on a big project. That’s how you complete a novel, a web site, or whatever else you’re working on.

Related Sites: 43 Folders | Lifehacker

I have no clue where this came from other than I saw it in a church newsletter. Apparently it was either written by A. Nonymous or Source Unknown.

Regardless, I got a big kick out of it. This’ll hit very close to home for technical writers, especially.

A priest and a pastor from the local parishes were standing by the side of the road holding up a sign that read, “The End is Near! Turn yourself around now before it’s too late!” They held up the sign to each passing car.

“Leave us alone you religious nuts!” yelled the first driver as he sped by. From around the curve they heard screeching tires and a big splash.

“Do you think,” said one clergy to the other, “we should just put up a sign that says ‘Bridge Out’ instead?”

I’ve felt pretty stuck the last few days. It’s been a big week of transitions with my wife’s work, our son’s preschool and therapies, and several changes in our normal routine. It’s disorienting, and all this and my normal work schedule has left me feeling low on creative energy.

We’re programmed to react to these perceived shortfalls in accomplishments in a given week by working harder to catch up. I clued in enough today to try something a little different. I took a few minutes and browsed through my writing-oriented bookmarks in my browser to see if I could find something to wake up my creative spirit.

The Poetry Foundation’s web site is the Grand Central Station of poetry. Poetry helps me relax and regroup. I love the immediacy of it. I love discovering new poets. I love reading something that makes me say “Yes!” I love reading poetry from writers who speak their own unfiltered truth.

The Poetry Foundation is to me about discovery. The ‘Poetry Tool’ (approximately the middle of the page) lets you look for poems for specific reasons or for no reason at all. It’s a perfect way to re-center yourself after a rough week.

Don’t forget to check out their wealth of articles, audio resources, and podcasts. Just remember to come up for air and do some writing of your own, too!

March 4th is National Grammar Day! It’s so great that it even has its own web site. Not surprisingly, it’s NationalGrammarDay.com. I just discovered this site and haven’t had a chance to look at it much, but it’s chock-full of grammar goodness and Internet resources. Go check it out.

It wouldn’t be National Grammar Day without a little wisdom from Grammar Girl. Go read her Top Ten Grammar Myths transcript in honor of this day.

Shameless self-promotion – you can also read my Guide to Improving Your Writing and Grammar on my main site!

Celebrate with Grammatical Turkey Chili or a Grammartini! Just don’t take a red pen to the grocery store and edit their signs. You may get arrested.

Theodor Seuss Geisel – better known to the world as Dr. Seuss – was born March 2, 1904. To say that Geisel has had a powerful influence on generations of children – many of us now adults – is a vast understatement.

For me, and I imagine for many parents, it’s wonderful to be able to read to my son the same Dr. Seuss books I loved as a child. He loves them so much that I have a handful of them memorized so I can tell him those stories when we don’t have the books with us. Having his lyric words in my head whenever I need them has been a gift to me, too. I catch myself reciting them even without my son around and feel better for it.

Of my 34 years on this earth, I’ve spent about 21 of them in school of some sort. My favorite teacher was my high school English instructor, Dr. Jon Miller. At our Christmas semi-formal dances he read the Grinch. I first heard him read it 18 years ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. Imagine all these high school kids in ties, slacks, and dresses sitting around in a big circle for storytime.

He does a reading of the Grinch for the alumni every holiday, and we’ve taken our son the past two years to hear him. That’s been real gift to us. I hope when he retires, probably sometime in the next few years, that he realizes what a profound effect he’s had on now two generations of people.

If you’ve read out the Dr. Seuss collection at your library or bookstore and are looking for some books from another author to try out, your first stop should be Sandra Boynton. Her books are absolutely brilliant. Don’t just take my word for it. My son is serious about having Dr. Seuss and Sandra Boynton books with us everywhere we go. That should tell you something right there. His favorite right now is Barnyard Dance. If you have kids, run don’t walk and go get some of her books.

Happy Birthday to the Gutenberg Bible! On this date in 1455, what in my mind is the greatest invention in human history was first put into action with the mass printing of the Gutenberg Bible in Mainz, Germany.

Just think about how the written word affects every facet of our lives. As words became available to the masses and one’s message became so easily distributable, the ability to influence society increased exponentially. Every social revolution and cultural transformation that followed owes their success to Gutenberg.

The influence of the written word has taken another quantum leap forward with the Internet and blogs. Everyone has a voice now, everyone can be heard by millions, and it’s nearly impossible to silence anyone. It’s not without its problems, but it’s also proven to be the world’s greatest leveler.

As writers, may we be good stewards of all the tools we’ve been given.

This isn’t explicitly about writing, but I think this is a fascinating site. Obsolete Skills is compiling a wiki-style, master list of skills that used to be important in our society but no longer are.

A ’skill’ can be actual job skills (programming in BASIC), everyday actions people no longer perform (dialing a rotary phone), or skills that just aren’t useful anymore (like doing hexadecimal conversions in your head – which was questionably useful to begin with). Sadly, at one point I did all three of these. One caveat – some things in the list really are still used and remain useful – like understanding the Dewey Decimal System – so clearly this is a work in progress.

If you need a bit of writing inspiration, go there, pick a random ‘obsolete skill’, and write about a character who has that skill. Great cure for writer’s block!

Somewhere in your 30s, you become both tragically unhip and oblivious to the jargon that builds up in professions not your own. As a writer, though, if we are to communicate well with our readers, we have to try our best to keep up with how the world talks to each other. Whether it’s a marketing letter, a technical document, or two characters in dialogue, you need to know the language appropriate to your audience and your writing.

Here are a few sites I’ve used to do help me with this.

• Acronym Finder – It’s pretty much what it says it is.
• Abbreviations.com – This site is a nice compliment to Acronym Finder!
• The Free Dictionary – They cover jargon galore with their Medical Dictionary, Legal Dictionary, and Financial Dictionary.
• Urban Dictionary – Here’s a resource of slang for the woefully unhip. [salty language alert for those of you who care]
• Text Message Shorthand @ Netlingo – Personally, ‘IM speak’ drives me bat-crazy, but you may need to translate it…
• The Phrontistery – This site celebrates the incredible depth and breadth of the English language with whole lists of obscure words. Word-ophiles will love it. Go for the words but stay for the Compendium of Lost Words, lists of words that fell out of use long ago but ones you may need if you’re writing something like historical fiction.

Enjoy!

While just getting something published – even in a non-paying market – can be fun and rewarding, neither you nor I are going to turn down some cold, hard cash for our writing.

While something like Writer’s Market is an invaluable resource for breaking into paying markets, it’s also intimidating. There are plenty of smaller, friendlier-feeling, new-writer-welcoming markets out there far too numerous to make it into Writer’s Market. Keeping up with these opportunities requires a personal touch and a passion for helping all writers succeed.

That’s where C. Hope Clark’s FundsforWriters.com comes in. Every two weeks, Hope sends out a newsletter that lists grant opportunities and well-paying markets and contests only. At a ridiculously cheap $12/year, you can’t beat it.

I heard her in an interview a while back and love her spirit and commitment to her work and to writers everywhere. She has a ton of material on her site, so go have a look.