Writ

Tools: Spacejock Software

THIS POST IS BEING WRITTEN in yEdit, one of Simon Haynes‘ many fine Spacejock Software products. He doesn’t know I’m writing it, and until I stumbled across his website I didn’t know he was a famous Australian science-fiction author with a taste for helping others get started in the field.

But as he offers some really neato tools for writing — yEdit, a text editor which lets you set a word-count target and track it as you type; Sonar, which manages story submissions; yTimer, like yEdit but in minutes instead of words; and the novel-assisting yWriter — as well as some sound advice (well, it helped me anyway). Check his site for additional tools and links to what looks like one hell of a terrific space-opera self-parody.

?

To ALL My Email Correspondents

HAD I KNOWN THAT DELETING email via my shell account (mutt) would also delete my GUI email (Thunderbird), I would not now be writing you. But it did, so if you’ve sent me an unanswered email in the past … year, please resend it. (The feeling is both liberating and terrifying. As experiences go, better skip this one.)

Life

Pithyism #8

THERE’S A REASON CLASSIC SONGS are classic: they sound only like themselves, and whatever comes in their wake.

Life, Writ

Reb Drunkard’s Wisdom

THE MAN WITH THE UNWASHED face was dressed in baggy street-person clothes which seemed to cushion the cold concrete beneath him.

He was laying in front of the Carl’s Jr. restaurant in San Francisco’s Justin Hermann Plaza one cool night in 1986, perhaps one of a series of nights and days spent drifting through passersby from liquor store to curb.

He wasn’t moving, at first. Then he lifted his head and looked around in bemusement, his eyes sliding over the passing faces like a mariner seeking harbor.

Read more →