- Jules reviews Tim Lott's Fearless and I can't help but agree with her assessment. I just finished it and was quite disappointed.
- Tom Snyder interviews Charles Manson. Wow.
- The Boston Globe article about diversity in SF has led to some interesting posts, as anticipated. Scalzi talked about the approach he takes in his own work, and Kameron Hurley responded with some thoughts on the perils of writing colorblind.
- Scrivener -- yes or no?
- A profile of Salvador Plascencia, a writer whose next work I can't wait to see. (Via TEV.)
- Maud points to Hilary Mantel's thoughts on Orpheus and Eurydice.
- Charles Simic to be named poet laureate today; this makes me very happy, despite that unfortunate piece he wrote about the South a few years ago. In addition to his poetry, obvs, I highly recommend seeking out his miscellany collections of essays and memoir. The Unemployed Fortune Teller and Orphan Factory are my faves.
- Is there anyone who isn't loving Robert Olen Butler's delicious e-mail meltdown? You know, besides Ted Turner.
- Colleen unveils the next big blogosphere event horizon, in which I'll be participating again. Fun!
I just got Scrivner (has jedediah sang to you about it? He swears by it) and am going to start a project on it today. It seems really cool. I just don't know that I would actually do anything else but use the words part.
will report back in a month or two...
Posted by: Cecil | August 02, 2007 at 10:04
Holly also raves about it. And Cassie just got a copy. I am full of want but have been vetoed on getting it in the middle of a crunchy deadline.
Posted by: Justine Larbalestier | August 02, 2007 at 10:26
Mean Scott not letting you buyse it! It could _help_ with the deadline. Or something...
Cecil -- He definitely mentioned it, but I didn't get a chance to grill him. (I think he said he might do a blog post about it on the LCRW site and I hope he does.) I've seen enough people mentioning it now that I'm v. curious, especially since it's so cheap.
Posted by: Gwenda | August 02, 2007 at 10:40
I recently bought it and I think I'm going to like it a lot. But methinks it won't help you with your crunchy deadline--it's probably better when you're beginning a manuscript.
Posted by: Sara | August 02, 2007 at 11:20
Ditto everything Gavin said over on the LCRW blog. I've been using it for most of a year now and actually converted to a Mac on the desktop at home to better sync with the work from the laptop. It's been utterly fantastic in allowing me to write in a non-linear fashion (and I've been doing a bit of that this year).
A couple other cool things:
(1) you can compose in one style, organize everything the way you want it (via the handy little sub-documents), and then auto-export in another format. I don't much care for composing in manuscript format--the little laptop screen just isn't big enough to get most of a page--and the headache of converting the doc later has always been a pain. Now it's just a style assignment on the export and I'm done.
(2) You can import web pages. If you're like me, and you spend some of the day offline, having a folder of research material (which is self-contained webpages, format and all) that I can refer to as needed has been very useful.
(3) Annotations, synopses, and notes. The latter two are pushed off to a sidebar, but are of infinite size as well. You can hide all your notes right next to where you need them, and no one will ever know. Nor will you lose them.
And the search function is fantastic. I thought I lost some notes a while back, and it turned out I had just stuffed them down in the research folder. The search tool found 'em in a second.
So, yeah, big thumbs up from me, the guy who, um, just wandered in to say so. Ah, hello!
Posted by: Mark Teppo | August 02, 2007 at 23:56
Gwenda, as you wish: http://lcrw.net/wordpress/?p=253.
Mark, sorry, should have introduced myself first, since it's my first post to the LCRW blog. I agree about the annotations and notes: very handy. Haven't exported anything yet, because, well, I haven't actually finished anything yet. But I must, in the next week or so!
Posted by: Jedediah Berry | August 03, 2007 at 00:18
Jed -- I think you've even convinced C to download it. Muchas gracias.
Posted by: Gwenda | August 03, 2007 at 08:37
Ayah, but it's mac only. BOOOOOO. They will take my thinkpad x40 away when they can pry it out of my cold dead fingers.
Posted by: Ysabeau | August 03, 2007 at 14:17
Scrivener definitely sounds interesting, but I too am disappointed that it's Mac only.
Ysabeau, you said "Ayah." Is that the "aiyahh" that is a typical Chinese exclamation?
Posted by: Ted | August 04, 2007 at 01:31