Stick your word in the search field and Wordnik will go to work for you.

It'll give you the definision of a word from several different online dictionaries and encyclopedias and other collections of lexcical¹ information.

Hyponyms? Hypernyms? Wha??

Some of these things I did't know what they were, but now that I know about them, hell yes I want them in my fricking dictionary! Why weren't they there before?

Synonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms, rhymes. Words that are found in similar contexts. Examples of the word in use. All very useful to have available when doing some serious word work.

And a great resource, the Reverse Dictionary which I used to look up what the study of insects in order to distiguish between Entymology and Etymology, the study of the history of words. Two words I confuse often.

This is now the place that I go to find my words. Incredible free resource.

Wordnik via some link blog that I can't remember now.

1. A word that I had to look up to make sure it actually existed and meant what I thought it meant. ↩

First of all, writing is the wrong word for it.

To me, writing is a generic term, an all-encompassing term for putting ideas on a page and making them work nicely together to tell an engaging story. I believe that there are at least three other stages of writing that come before and after the drafting stage. And to me, it simply makes sense to me to divide these things up. My mind is like a martini glass, very shallow. Start dumping too many ideas in there at once, and they start splashing around, sloshing up and over the rim, dampening onlookers and passersby.

So when you hear about writers setting a word count for the day, I say what they’re really talking about is the drafting stage of writing. I consider drafting to be the part that consists of barfing words my keyboard. The end goal of this stage is to produce a draft, a rendition of the story being written that ranges in quality from shitty to outrageously feculent.

But I’ve found out in the last year of drafting my first novel1 is that the act of drafting is about two things:

1. Getting there

2. Staying there

Start with Getting There

Getting there is about the habit. Making the proverbial writing desk the only place to be at a certain time of day. And making it an action that does not require input from the brain at all. If the brain was consulted in this matter, it would recognize just how hard the work actually is and then resist, throwing up reasons not to be at the desk, reasons to be just about anywhere else. So it’s the body’s job. The body has to get itself there.

Find your special time

My special time of day comes at 5:45am. And holy shit, is it not ideal. 80 or 85% of the time, if you broke into my house and snuck into the basement, you would see me stagger in and sit down at 5:55 in the morning. But, thing is, it’s the only time that I can consistently (like 80% of the time) carve out quiet time to put two thoughts together. So I make it work.

The problem with getting there is that it’s never the easiest thing to do. My personal list of distractions is full of stuff that would be more fun to do than get up at 5:45 in the morning. Sleeping chief among them.

It will never be “fun”

They say that if forced to think about what to do from minute to minute, the first tendency for a human being (and maybe the second and fifth and twelfth) is to do the easiest, tastiest, and most immediately gratifying thing on the list and then spend the rest of the day on the couch groaning and rubbing his or her belly. Or his or her other parts.

It may be best to realize now that there’s always going to be something else that at any given moment sounds better or easier than sitting in front a half-done, terribly written, soul-drain of a manuscript.

So the big take-away here is that it is never going to be fun to sit down and write. Never. Ever. Never-ever.

Well, okay. It might be fun the first couple of times, when things flow and the mind hasn’t had time to realize just what unnatural acts are being performed with it. But that period ends quickly. And soon, it will begin to hurt.

Gotta want it

It is very important that it’s been determined that writing is what you really really want to be doing. Sometimes it’s hard to make that determination.

It helps to have a life that’s full to the gills and rife with things pulling at your attention. It clearly delineates what merits attention, and it becomes quite clear what things precious time is spent doing.

I’ve carved an awful lot of fat out of my life since having kids. And I’ve never been more prolific. And that goes for more than just writing. I get more shit done now, when I have very little free time than ever before. The benefits of focus.

I’ve already said it, but here it is again: There will always be something more fun to do than sit down in a bad chair and attempt to wring brilliant ideas out of an unwilling brain.

But all is not lost. For the brain is stupid. And gullible. And easily tricked by things like puppies, high-fructose corn syrup, and porn.

Mine especially.

But yours especially.

It’s about reducing friction, she said.

For a writer (or any maker of things), friction, or resistance as it’s sometimes called, is one of the fundamental interactions of nature, akin to electromagnetism and gravitation.

This friction is the force that drives the irrational desire to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation instead of doing something that would instill, I don’t know, a sense of pride or self-worth. Like writing a novel.

And while friction is forever like the tides, it is possible to lube up and fight it off for awhile. It can be overcome. With the proper amount of scientifically applied mind-fuckery.

It’s about forethought. Planning. Thinking ahead. Greasing the skids. It’s what sets us apart from the animals. Aside from thumbs. We can think ahead.

What’s the best lube?

Set an alarm. When that alarm goes off, that’s the time when all else is set aside, the computer is turned on, and writing is done.

If there is a period of time during the day in which there is a predictable lull, pull out the laptop or the notebook, or the iPad and start to work.

If there is a time of day in which time is being regularly wasted, insert pen and paper.

Do this every day. Make it a habit. Make it something that does not require thought. Remove the possibility of doing anything other than write so that it is not a job that’s up to the part of the mind that is easily distracted by a Diet Coke or babies. It’s simply something that a body does when a certain bell is rung.

And then sit down. Write.

That is the first step toward getting 1000 words in a day. Just get there.

The War of Art

I wish I were rich. I’d buy every damn one of these things.

Geeky Jerseys

He makes a few really good points about the use of violence in the stories, but beyond that, I’m not sure that it’s a trend that warrants the concern he’s voicing.

He’s worried that real adult oriented filmmaking / storytelling is moving to TV from the cinema.

I wonder why that’s a bad thing. Things change. And I’d say that a complex story with adult themes in them works better in a more spacious medium like television. More time spent with characters, more time available to explore nuance and subtleties.

Via Geek Tyrant

Danny Boyle on IMDB

Trainspotting

Slumdog Millionaire

28 Days Later

My favorite for ease of use is OmniOutliner. I can just fill up line after line in that app. But the problem occurs when it’s time to get those lines out of the app. There’s no smooth way to get them out. Not that I’ve found.

There’s the OPML export, there’s the copy and paste, there’s dragging them from the app into the window of another app, but time and time again, I run into the same problem that I can’t get the stuff out of that outline without having to go back and be on the hook for a lot of fiddly clean up of odd carriage returns and spacing, extra characters that show up in export because I forgot to turn off the checkbox feature. Things like that.

It’s possible to get the stuff out, but the cost of cleaning it up outweighs the savings in using the app over using a text file or doing it right in a word processor.

Oak Outliner is weird in that it is a web-based application1 that stores your outline in the browser’s cache. That means it stays where it is, no syncing, no saving. Lots of neat features like intuitive keyboard shorties and folding of lines.

I think it’s pretty slick, just like I think another project made by these guys, Folding Text is chock full of interesting potential. And maybe for a quick one-off brainstorming session Oak Outliner might be really handy. But I’m struggling to think of a reason why I’d use this over a text editor, or Scrivener, or a native app.

I will be keeping an eye on this though.

Oak Outliner

Folding Text

OmniOutliner

This sequence of photographs feature a family and an arrangement of food that represents what they consume in one week. I think it provides a really interesting insight into the question.

What A Week Of Groceries Looks Like Around The World

But all that goodness comes with a price. And that price is stickiness.

They get stinky after a few days of wear, especially in the warm summers we have here in Minnesota. Shocked-looks-from-guys-in-the-locker-room stinky. And that’s a problem that needs solving.

So here are some cleaning instructions that I found here, purportedly to be directly from Teva. They’re inline with other common de-stinkifying methods that you’ll find out there.

Teva Footwear Cleaning Instructions:

We foremost recommend using a mild soap and water and hand wash, please do not machine wash.

Also try scrubbing the top sole with a soft bristled brush while cleaning and gently bending the sandal from heel to toe under water pressure so that any dirt in the grooves of the top sole will wash away.

Another option for killing bacteria is to place the sandals in a sealable freezer back and freeze them overnight.

Other options:

Mix 1 cup of Listerine (or any antibacterial mouth wash) to 2 cups of water. Soak for 15 minutes and scrub with a bristled brush. Let air dry.

Put sandals in a pool with chlorine for 15–20 minutes. Scrub with a hard bristled brush. Rinse. Air dry.

Wash them in the shower with Shampoo.

Please allow your sandals to dry in an open, well ventilated area – but not directly in sunlight.

How often:

We recommend washing your sandals every two to four weeks, depending on use.

I used the soap and bristle brush method and it seems to work pretty well.

I’m curious about freezing them, just for the science experiment angle, but I’m not sure if the wife’ll like seeing my sandals next to our food.

Cleaning Teva Sandals

Teva Zilch Sandals (Amazon affiliate link)

But I’m going to share one thing that has helped me get off the starting block: Blake Snyder’s Three Act Timeline.

If I’m on the Oregon trail, this thing is the map. This is the thing that has made it possible for me to stand in my wagon and shout “Westward Ho!” just before it lurches forward and I fall back, striking my head and suffering from a brain fever for the rest of my days.

It’s the map. It’s the map for writing stories.

It might not be the map that everyone would want to use, but it’s the one that is getting me where I want to go.

It’s not going to keep me from starving. It doesn’t prevent disease. And it’s not going to protect me from flying arrows or getting scalped or snake bites or any other horrifying things that might happen to me on the Oregon Trail of Writing.

This is just a map that points me in the right direction. And following it just might get me to where I want to go.

Blake Snyder’s Three Act Timeline: Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis

Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need

Very excited, because I’ve been wanting to go paperless in my office, but my flatbed scanner broke long ago, and since then, I’ve been using an app called Scanner Pro that uses the camera to make scans of documents. It’s surprisingly usable, and great for one-off scans, but anything more than one or three pages, and you’re going crazy. So tackling the scanning of all the paper in my filing cabinet was simply not an option.

It will likely be a while before I’m able to make good on my vow to go paperless, but I’m sure excited.

I’m preparing myself, too. David Sparks’ book Paperless has been a pretty thorough guide for how to get started.

Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i Sheet-Fed Mobile Document Scanner

Paperless – David Sparks

It’s a nice, easy way for readers to give a little bit of money to a content producer that they like without it actually costing anything, other than an extra click or two.

And I’ve stuck a few in this blog from time to time as well. But the actual generation of the link back to a produce had always been just difficult enough to keep me from doing it as often as I’d like to.

But recently I discovered that TextExpander can do it for you, if you create a snippet featuring a nifty little script that a guy named Brett Kelly made. Then, just plug in your affiliate code and an abbreviation and you’re ready to roll.

And, as a bonus, you can learn a little bit about how it works in Brett’s post about it.

TextExpander

How To Use A Textexpander Snippet To Quickly Generate Amazon Affiliate Links