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Happy Birthday!

This is one of the rules I knew, but thought I made up just for myself because you so rarely see it used any more. What I started doing was ending the first paragraph and then having some kind of action at the top of the next paragraph before the character started speaking again. Still works.

Love this illustration!

The punctuation mark that seems to be following everyone home right now is the apostrophe…or at least it’s the one that keeps popping out at me.

That’s funny - I think the last time I saw that I thought it was a typo, that they missed the end quotes. I tend to be pretty good with random grammar rules too. I imagine that would be a bit more embarrassing, if you tried to tell them they made a typo when they fixed your typo instead. So see, it could have been worse.

What a treat! A truly cute idea.

Interesting. They are for eating write.

Yum! And lover-ly…I cannot help wondering what the sharpener is made of…or is it real to make our own delicious chocolate shavings?

Cool! Thanks for the link. I’ll point those who make the its/it’s mistake towards it! That one just about drives me round the bend and is so easy to avoid if given even a moment’s thought.

The apostrophe crisis has gotten so bad that I even catch myself putting them in wrong places. The good news, though, is that I manage to correct them before I go too far…

I was helping with a booth at a Fall Festival last night and couldn’t help but notice that one of the signs directing people to other booths had an apostrophe in ‘booths.’ I ended up putting a white label over the apostrophe…

Ah, I never grow tired of this comic. I was out with a friend one day last week and a cafe had a sign that said “The kitchen close’s at 2PM”. I can’t believe that people still make mistakes like that. My friends are used to me getting enraged at misplaced apostrophes these days though

I have drawings (not the caliber of yours) which I thought of turning into greeting cards. But, I’d like to skip the middle man and just offer them from my site. I don’t think there really is an advantage to using another site to sell from. As long as you (or I in my case) can get software to display and sell them. Or maybe I just really don’t like the percent they want to take.

I’ve heard others using their spam folder for such things. Problem is, I write about such a specific area of Kentucky, that I have to use “place appropriate names”. There’s no getting around it.

Dear Melody, if you do, I will so buy it.

Aside from that, I know an affiliate marketer who harvests his favorite subject lines from spam, so he can study them in an effort to boost his PPC clickthroughs.

Debbie,

Thanks for the link! I’m so honored to be mentioned on your blog.

WordVixen, my boyfriend is sitting behind me right now begging me to write about Helga and Nikka, the love starved survivors of a stock market crash who live in the ruins of a castle and want to send John the Smart American all of their money by priority wire. Now the question is, will Helga be faithful to Nikka or will she fall into a unmentionable, long distance affair with John?

Stay tuned….

Hi Inkygirl,
Your most recent Scrabble-related cartoon showed up on our Scrabble discussion group. I’ve been playing tournament Scrabble for almost 30 years and you hit it right on the obsession!
Thanks for the chuckle.
Here’s an idea for another cartoon: it is entitled “Scrabble player’s nightmare” and you’re looking over the shoulder of a player whose rack has seven Q’s on it.
Good luck with your card biz
thanks,
Bob Schoenman

I love Scrivener!

Very cool drawing! Big Scrivener fan here too.

The Elder and Chief Scribe, of The Ancient and Noble Order,of Hirsuteum Posterius Wedercusi, would rather be found wandering naked along Broadway, in a state of bewiderment and befuddldom, rather than give up his copy of Scrivener.

I was chatting about Scrivener yesterday with a fellow blogger. I absolutely love Scrivener. I haven’t used any other word processing program since I discovered it. I’ve been using it for at least five months.
I also love the name.

I love the look of Scrivener, but I use a PC. Do you know of a PC-friendly equivalent to Scrivener?

Thanks for the link. Great cartoon , too.

The question mark is known as an “erotreme”… at least it was among typesetters, as in, “Hand me an erotreme.”

:applause: :applause:

Amen to this! People seem to forget anything related to etiquette the moment their browser or email program opens.

ESPECIALLY when mailing multiple people; I almost always use BCC. I feel wrong sharing someone’s email address with other people (even if I know they know each other in some medium or another - I have no way of knowing they’ve shared that personal contact info). That’s akin to giving out someone’s phone number without asking permission.

The only time I use CC: is at work, when I want the TO: recipient to know that someone else is in on the information.

I’m bad. I did the “To:” thing last week. In my defence I hadn’t quite realised how the program I was using would respond to the list I’d set up, but as soon as I’d hit “send”, I realised what I’d done.

Why don’t I ever realise *before* I hit “send”?

Does my guilt help to absolve me?

Hoorah!!! Well said.

I’d add: Think about what you put in an email - once you’ve hit send you cant control where it will be forwarded to.

Even within a business framework, I would suggest watching who you cc to. I call it ccitis - a new business disease! It’s the wish to cc an email to a vast list of people who are only tangentially interested, if that, in what the email is about. The excuse is always “just for your information” or “just to make you aware of it”. What it actually does is to erode your confidence in any emails from the sender, such that when they finally send you a cc on one that actually is relevant to you, you tend to ignore it. I have an personal rule that I’ll never cc to more than four people unless the circumstances absolutely demand it. The more you target, the more attention your target pays you…or something like that!

My pet peeve is that most of us should realize email is not as reliable as the phone, and in sticky situations (when possible) talk, don’t type.

If it’s really important, time sensitive or might cause a misunderstanding, think about picking up the phone and calling.

And one other “rule” I follow. Never email something you are not willing to say in person.

Great article! When sending to more than ONE person I will usually put my own email in the To and BCC everyone else. As others have mentioned … it is not right to give out others email address without their permission.

I recently received a similar mailing — one I had no interest in — which was sent to a long list of people all in the “to” line. One of the reasons I stopped participating in discussion groups that don’t offer a digest option is I was tired of getting nine thousand emails from people saying “LOL” and “me, too” even though they were fully aware that their messages went to everyone on the friggen list. It’s seriously annoying when someone does it as spam, and that’s what I’d consider that sort of thing. In summary, I feel your pain. Good rant.

Thanks for this post! It really irks me when people send me jokes, feel-good stories, and e-mails that say that I must forward them or something bad will happen to me. These e-mails have been forwarded so many times that hundreds of people’s e-mail addresses are listed in the “to” box. I have politely told people before that I would not like to receive these e-mails, but I still get them. If I have a funny joke or nice story, I may send it to a few friends, but I don’t feel the need to subject everyone in my contact list to it. People should think, “will this e-mail interest this person” before they send something. I agree 100% with what you said.

Oh, I have a nightmare story about this.

Every year, a freshman ends up mass-emailing the entire campus. It happens, usually with one or two reply-alls, an email from the tech department reminding us not to mass e-mail, and everyone’s happy.

Not this year. There were over 30 reply-alls in one evening, and no one ever deleted the previous messages, so the entire directory of 2500+ students, faculty, and administration was copied four or five times in an email. Our email system was pretty much unusable for the rest of the night. It was completely ridiculous.

Congratulations!

SuperNoteCard (http://www.mindola.com/) uses visual 3×5 cards to organise writing projects. It’s available for both Mac and Windows.

I love this! It feels very vibrant.

Have fun! Will miss ya!

Posted at my blog, added to my links, dropped a note with a link to misc.writing.

Useful stuff.

Thx, Debbie.

Thanks, Sal!

Not specifically writer related but here’s one from Forbes on the most overlooked tax deductions.

Somebody please tell me I can claim all those chai lattes I drink while marking student papers…

Those are waaay cool! The next time I do biz cards, I’m going with them. Thanks for posting!

I just put my order in today, woohoo!

Love the MOO Minicards! Very creative and eye-catching.

Please share your Flickr set with us when you’re done. I’m interested to see what catches _your_ attention!

I definitely will post a follow-up once my cards arrive.

Do you use a writing program that has a progress meter in it? I am a Mac user and I use Scrivener, which is a super fantastic writing program without too many whistles, just the ones you really need, including a word counter. If you have a mac, take a look. Otherwise, there’s a good Windows one called WriteItNow, which I used to use, also really good.

I love Scrivener, but I’m not doing my actual writing in it, just the outlining. I’ve heard that the program slows down when the wordcount gets high, and that concerns me a bit.

How many words are in your Scrivener doc?

There’s a Unix utility called “wc” that gives you line, word, and character counts of any plain-text document. If you’re using a Mac you have it somewhere; on a PC you have to install Cygwin.

Computing a daily word count and mailing it to you can be done in about two lines of shell script.

Oh, the heck with it:

expr `wc -w novel.txt` - `cat yesterday` | mail you@localhost’; wc -w novel.txt > yesterday

I love Unix!

You might ask Thesilée. She recently designed an excel-sheet for writing progress for the Tintenzirkel (bunch of German hobby fantasy authors, see www.tinzenzirkel.de ), so that we could do something like NaNoWriMo every month. You can set your own word-goal and enter your daily progress and it will tell you whether you wrote enough to be in the daily pensum and how much you’ll have to write the remaining days to reach your goal.
If you’re interested, best ask Thesilée.

thanks for the writing progress meter links they’re v. handy, i’ve stuck the zokoutou one on my website.

If you’re interested I’ve made myself my own excel spreadsheet to chart my progress. it’s got daily and weekly word goals plus a chart to show you what’s going on. If you want a copy to see if it will suit your purposes just send me an email. I’d send you a link to it but it’s not on any website x

I am a Mac user and also in love with Scrivener. I use it for pretty much all of my writing now, including outlining. For my manuscript export and editing I use Pages (which I will also use with my CP’s for commenting).

I’m primarily a Linux user, but GNU Emacs is available for all three major platforms. It includes an outline mode and knows about several different markup systems including TeX, HTML, and Docbook. Being a pure text editor, it encourages the writer to concentrate on content and leave the details of formatting to a CSS stylesheet, a typesetting system like LaTeX, or the publisher’s book designer.

Like Steve, I’m a fan of GNU Emacs. When writing documentation I use FrameMaker, which has templates for outlines and just about everything else.

I don’t use anything for outlining besides good old pen and paper. I’ve glanced at a few different softwares but decided I liked having an actual copy of the outline right in front of me that I can mark up with a pen during math class.

As boring as it is, I like Word. I’ve heard complaints about it, but it’s always worked for me (knock on wood), and I don’t see a reason to fix something that’s not broken!

I use NeoOffice, which is a Mac-friendly version of OpenOffice. It works reasonably well, is somewhat less obnoxious than Word, and produces files in a format that doesn’t have to be reverse-engineered.

Stickies. I find it to be very useful when I need to remind myself of all sorts of things, from stuff I need to tell my students to things that should go into the next chapter of my thesis,… it’s free - and can be found here: http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/

Let’s see right now, I am using Bonsai (windows) for my outlining and project notes and tracking. It’s available for Windows and Palm (which I don’t use). I love the fact that it can link with external files, include notes and it’s very easy to customize.

After drooling over Scrivener, I looked around began using Page Four (Windows). It doesn’t have the wealth of tools that Scrivener does, but its simple and easy to use format is making it far easier to focus on writing without dealing with all of Word’s foibles. It also exports and imports Word documents very cleanly, which I need for my business clients.

Ooo, I just downloaded “Stickies,” that’s really cool! Thanks!

Thanks for these great suggestions! After I get responses from my Will Write For Chocolate survey (which I’ll post later today), I’ll compile them and post a list.