DIY Tricks for Writers

My blog post, 5 Pet Tricks with Spreadsheets, suggests some tricks for project tracking for tech-comms professionals. For balance, here are some pet tricks for fiction writers:

“Author as Publisher” Task Lists

Author as Publisher: Planning Tasks [MS Word]
Author as Publisher: Market Planning Tasks [MS Word]

Book Scheme in a Spreadsheet
dramatic arc

Whether part of an initial plan or in the middle of an attempt to untangle spaghetti 2/3s through the draft, you can use a spreadsheet to map the plot points, action, character development, time scale, and so on.

Here’s an example of how I analyzed plot and pacing problems during an early draft of Artemis in the Desert (if you haven’t read the book, this example doesn’t contain spoilers). The top row maps chapters against traditional beat sheet goals for plot and pacing. Continue reading →

You Get What You Measure: Fiction Edition

In grade school, I was the youngest and smallest in the class and always chosen last for any team sports. The boys groaned when the even-odd count resulted in me on their team.
You Get What You Measure, Fiction Writers!On the other hand, for the 7,583 times we were forced to play prison ball in the guise of physical education, I was the last person standing on my team more than fifty percent of the time. I was nimble, so the bell rang before anyone managed to cream me with the ball.

How did I achieve this? The boys’ goal was to win the game by smashing the ball into people as hard as they could. Most often they picked off the girls first, but forgot about me till the end. My goal? Never touch the ball and never let it touch me. I had no other concept of “winning.”

When I worked as a technical writer on product software, we had specific measures for productivity and quality, plus an external schedule, milestones, and job-related incentives for innovation and creativity. It’s a world in which it’s relatively easy to track success as a writer.

Now that I work full-time as a fiction writer and publisher of non-fiction, I need different markers for success in my writing. For me, daily word count is not an adequate measure of productivity.  However, I was also formerly a manager known for creative definition of realistic measures for productivity and success. So I’ve been thinking about how to understand my own productivity as a fiction writer without focusing only on word count and number of publications per quarter. I’m sharing some of those ideas here for other fiction writers, especially those who don’t write fiction full time as their principal income.

Continue reading →

Preplanning? Si! Procrastinating? No!

My post for tech-communications professionals is up today at Steyer Associates web site: Procrastinating … or Preplanning?

I propose in that piece that for professional communicators, most “procrastination” is your brain begging for more preplanning time… though that begs the question:

How is “preplanning” different from regular old planning?

If You Want to WriteIt’s a question of being ready to commit.
I’ve long posited that for any tech-writing project, there’s probably 25 solutions, and you want to concentrate only on the best 3 — then pick one and commit to action.

However, that’s not always so straightforward, whether for tech-writing, fiction, or other projects. Brenda Ueland, in If You Want to Write, presents critical ideas in her chapter, “The Imagination Works Slowly and Quietly.”

Following the “slow imagination” concept, preplanning is: Continue reading →

Back to the 1992 Future

I wrote the Windows 3.1 Resource Kit using my own WYSIWYG Word template, being the first to deliver Msft Press a camera-ready manuscript using only Msft tools. Then I became one of the first adopters of the infamous Msft MAE templates. Until I began creating Web pages—and even after—I did most of my writing in ready-for-print Word files.

Continue reading →

Your connection Don McQuinn has end

LinkedIn keeps giving me a heart attack.
I use my cellphone to wake myself up in the morning. And to enrich time while waiting in line, waiting for a friend, etc. Also, as part of my goal to write 3000 words (that matter) every day, I turn off wireless on my PC to block the Internet. Then I use my cellphone to sneak an illicit peek at email.
In these usage cases, LinkedIn keeps presenting dire messages in my cell-delivered email:

| Your connection [name_here] has end |

What?! It’s over between us? My dear [connection] has broken the link?
Or worse? My connection’s pull-by shelf date has expired? Continue reading →

Life as an Indie Publisher: Go-Live Task List

I pushed a new Jugum Press title live last week. Today I described the related tasks over lunch with my former Web-master, with whom I collaborated to publish several thousand major content pieces during our work life. She had a look of horror.

Here’s my hideous-tedious task list as Jugum Press managing editor to bring one title live in two formats.
QA for Indie Publishers

Continue reading →

Learning Not-So-New Technologies

I’m working on new tasks related to electronic publishing. If you follow any discussions on line, experienced users complain about the tools; new users blame themselves for their own confusion — just like the PC world.

The tools are new incarnations to support project and publication tasks that I’ve been doing for several decades. Here’s what I’ve learned about the new tools and processes I’m mastering:

Lots of important websites suck.
Lots of websites with wizard-like processes also blow.

Continue reading →