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I'm the Post-It queen; it's how I plot my novels. My bedroom door is covered with them. |
The experimentation with mobile devices creeps along. I've added an EEE pc to the arsenal. Whipped it out during my dayjob lunch break the other day. 40 seconds turning it on, another few minutes trying to connect to the strictly protected wireless network, yet another few minutes trying to get into Google docs (ultimately fruitless), and finally ended up writing in OpenOffice, which does weird things to my formatting. I seriously should've gone with a pad and pen. Been reading ebooks on the iPod via eReader and Stanza apps. You should see the locals when I whip out the Touch. You'd think I had a Maxwell Smart shoe-phone or something. I'm always like, "No, it's just an iPod." Having lots of success with Toodledo for prioritizing my tasks, with Letter Me Later for allowing me to schedule a whole bunch of promo emails all in one sitting, with MailChimp for my newsletter, and with Google Docs spreadsheets for tracking my word count. Especially once I realized I should use a column rather than a row. (Duh.) The Dana wiped itself clean when I let it go uncharged for a few months. Note to self: don't do that. 3.7.09 -•-•- Cripes, the stuff below is like a year out of date...I'll update it soon! (JCP - 11/19/08) I'm experimenting with using the AlphaSmart Dana for my latest project. Note to self: BRING the Dana with you. Otherwise you can't write on it. Luckily for me, I found a few old forms that were blank on one side stashed in my dayplanner when inspiration struck yesterday between an appointment and my day job.
Below are my notes for Body & Soul. I'm relieved you can't actually read them. Some of the Post-Its are brilliant, I'm sure. While others say, "Really scary thing happens here," and other pearls of wisdom. A bit of trivia: the brand name printed on all these Post-Its is a drug called Spectracef. It was my inspiration for Auracel, since it sounded somehow ghostly. (In reality, it's just an antibiotic. Man, the real world is so anticlimactic sometimes.)
It's crazy-cold here in Wisconsin, which is unusual, at least in the southern part of Wisconsin where I am. I used to live in Chicago, and I remember one New Year's Eve waiting for a bus and it was twenty below. Not the wind chill; the actual temperature. It sorta feels like that now, except I know it's just barely above zero. I've got a new Mac, the very nicest iMac they now make. I expect it'll be paid off by the time I'm fifty or so. (Just kidding. Forty-nine.) I've been teaching creative writing workshops occasionally for the past couple of years and I'm thinking it might not be the best thing for me creatively. I used to come out of them inspired, and maybe somehow validated. But lately they seem more draining. Of course, I just got the booklet for the most recent Rec Department course offerings and there's my name. I've been working with Soundsdirty.com for the past few months. My name's not on the stories, but several of the characters there are my creation. They're a subscription-based site that offers erotica MP3s. So far, the favorite character of the ones I've written is Charlie. The actress who read for her got the ironic, "Damn, look, my clothes just fell off," tone exactly right. The site's geared toward straight men, but I suspect women would enjoy it too. My characters, anyway. One of the site's owners remarked that my writing felt like it was for women's benefit but he couldn't pinpoint why. I think if you're writing a sex scene from a woman's point of view, how could it be otherwise! A deal with another audio site's in the works. I'll toot my horn about that once I get a contract in the mail. That one will be downloading one title at a time and paying per item rather than a subscription, so I think it will be more appealing to a wider audience. And all this audio stuff has got me looking into playwriting. Whew! I've been busy!
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