NotesSince writing also makes you take those ideas out of your head and put them into real words, it also challenges you to think about how you can communicate those ideas to others in a way that makes sense. You'll have to turn your abstract ideas into something that's concrete and understandable by others, and it'll challenge you to grow and develop the language and communications skills required to get those ideas across. Even if you deal in facts and figures, creative writing can help you learn to communicate complex ideas more effectively.FeedUnfurl
NotesOh, I am so so tempted to commit to this for "Tinkering with Activity Streams", even though it's already over a day into November
"PragProWriMo is all about helping you write that technical book youâd really like to write but for some reason havenât been able to get started.
Weâll provide supporting materials and encouragement and all you have to do is to write 60 pages toward that book during the month of November."Unfurl
NotesOver the past three months or so, I wrote an ebook on Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master Tips. I wanted to do nearly all of it myself, save artwork and editing, so I ended up doing the writing, conversion, publishing, financial transactions, and marketing all myself. The following are my experiences and instructions on writing and publishing your very own beloved ebook. Let's dig right in. Unfurl
NotesNobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, itâs just not that good. Itâs trying to be good, it has potential, but itâs not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesnât have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone Iâve ever met. Itâs gonna take awhile. Itâs normal to take awhile. Youâve just gotta fight your way through.Unfurl
Notes"Identify a character in your idea.<br />
<br />
1) What does that character WANT?<br />
<br />
2) What does that character need to do to GET what they want?<br />
<br />
3) What are they prepared to DO to get what they want?"Unfurl
Notes"Ren'Py is a free and cross-platform visual novel engine that helps you use words, pictures, and sounds to tell stories with the computer. Its easy and efficient script language makes it possible for non-programmers to make visual novels, while its Python support allows for complex simulation games."FeedUnfurl
Notes"The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. Preparing printable text using a word processor effectively forces you to conflate two tasks that are conceptually distinct and that, to ensure that people's time is used most effectively and that the final communication is most effective, ought also to be kept practically distinct. The two tasks are The composition of the text itself. TThe typesetting of the document. "Unfurl
Notes"many choices
At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page. A smaller number of pages tell a conclusion to the story and represent an endpoint with no further jumps. We can subdivide these ânarrativeâ and âendingsâ groups further based on the number of choices offered or the goodness of the ending. To visualize this, imagine color-coding every page in the book and then laying the pages out next to each other"Unfurl
Notes"Your writing, notes, and to-do lists online. SimpleText.ws stores your text and keeps it synced between your work, home, and devices like the iPhone. Unlike manual syncing, SimpleText.ws merges your changes so you'll never lose data."Unfurl
Notes"I recently published a novel, and now itâs time to get back to work. If youâre anything like me, figuring out what to write next can be a real hassle. A flashy and experimental brain-bender, or a pointillist examination of the dissolution of a typical American family? ÂGeneration-spanning door-stopper or claustrophobic psychological sketch? Buncha novellas with a minor character in common? To make things easier, I modified my dartboard a few years ago. Now, when Iâm overwhelmed by the untold stories out there, I head down to the basement, throw a dart and see where it lands. Try it for yourself!"Unfurl
NotesDamn - I had this idea for use on my own work, if I ever got around to self-publishing. "Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. "Unfurl
Notes"A key step in literate programming, in our view at least, is publishing. It means tidying up and properly explaining code, and is a process much like writing up roughly-correct ideas for journal publication. The main aim of the Inform project since autumn 2007 has been to publish the whole work. Each web, as it is published, becomes open-source under the Artistic License 2.0, and eventually the whole work will be complete. We believe it will then be the largest literate program ever published."Unfurl
Notes"Hi, Ellisâ
Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and Iâve been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books."Unfurl
Notes"my point here is to discuss whether WordPress can be extended to accommodate most conventions found in scholarly publishing and where it is lacking, to identify the development work required to meet the needs of most academic who wish to write on and publish to the web"Unfurl
Notes"You should be reading Anil Dash. First, the man still blogs. He has for ten years, and some of his best stuff is happening right now, when you and I have kind of punted on the actual work of reading, synthesizing and writing something durable. Twittering this, tumbling, favoriting. Bah. Dashâs rip roaring run reminds me that what matters are bold, thorough ruminations chocka with links and living at my domain. The rest is a temporary party. A funferall not building to much."Unfurl
Notes"Based on the amount of time we put into the book this works out at something slightly below slave labour rates. Never write a technical book for the money. No really. Spend your evenings in McDonalds if you need extra cash."Unfurl
Notes"This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. We dip into the cauldron of story, whistle up a hearty spoonful and splosh it in front of you to devour to your heart's content. "Unfurl
Notes"In fact, I claim that if you don't take those rules to heart in your own source code then you are either unprofessional, lazy, not a team-player, or all of the above. If you as a software developer take pride in your professionalism and quality of your work then you have to consider that it is not only the achieved functionality for which you are being paid: The code you produce in almost all cases becomes property of your employer, and thus, the code itself also a product (and actually the most important product) you deliver. And how useful that code if for the team who has to work with it is what really determines its value."Unfurl
Notes"In 1999, when I left a staff job at a newspaper to start my own copywriting business, I never even thought about writing for the web. A decade later, most of my work consists of web projects. It struck me recently that this medium has led me to develop a different way of writingâtighter, simpler, more transparent. The results, I believe, are greater clarity and persuasiveness, and a speedier, more user-friendly read."Unfurl
Notes"I am not in a business with a 4-6 year document retention cycle. I am in a business where I hope that what I wrote ten years ago will still be accessible a century hence. Microsoft's policy was deliberately destroying my life's work."FeedUnfurl
Notes"I think I've managed to balance things out through a few simple techniques that I've been refining for years. I still sometimes feel frazzled and info-whelmed, but that's rare. Most of the time, I'm on top of my workload and my muse"Unfurl
Notes"ficlets is no more. AOL decided to kill the product, but thankfully, since all the content on the site was licensed under Creative Commons, I decided that there's no reason to let the content die. So, consider this the ficlets memorial. I will keep this site up as long as I'm able (it's extremely simple and not costing me anything)."Unfurl
Notes"AOL is shutting down Ficlets on January 15, and in their infinite corporate wisdom and understanding of how communities on the Internet work, they're not providing any easy way to archive the stories you've written there beyond advising that you try "copying the text and pasting it into a plain text or Word document." Right. That's going to be really fun and easy for people who have written dozens of Ficlets. [::facepalm::]"Unfurl
Notes"Consider Coover Links â links in which the start of a sentence lies in one side of the link while the end of the sentence lies at the other. Coover links are named for Robert Coover, the author of a short hypertext âHeart Suitâ (McSweeneyâs 16, 2005) written entirely in this fashion."FeedUnfurl
Notes"I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there's anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I'd be delighted to hear from you. To me, it's not Englishâit's a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases ("with that vote of the American people") be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons."Unfurl
Notes"WisCon encourages discussion and debate of ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class. WisCon welcomes writers, editors and artists whose work explores these themes as well as their many fans"FeedUnfurl
Notes"If you have happened by 826michigan lately, you may have noticed that we have had people working on our robot store seven days a week, all hours of the day and night."FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes"I'll organize my comments under three categories: unpredictable time commitments, external market pressures, and staff responses. I've run these comments by Baron."Unfurl
Harness the Mental, Creative, and Emotional Benefits of Regular Writing
Goodreads | Quote by Ira Glass: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I w..."
A Writing Revolution § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
ongoing · Less Like Oration
Charlie's Diary: Preventing the New Dark Ages: Start Here
Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction
Schneier on Security: The Future of Ephemeral Conversation
Epeus' epigone: Not consumers or users, but amateurs
Mark Bernstein: Coover Links
Kung Fu Monkey: THIS is Why I'm Not Answering Your Goddam Phone Calls
WisCon - The World's Leading Feminist Science Fiction Convention
826michigan