General Griping About Anything But Politics

Greetings, readers!

As you know, I'm a reclusive sort of person, with few friends (and few acquaintances, too, for that matter, outside those I used to know at work).  As a result, I have no outlet for my griping, so you're it!  This is admittedly dangerous, because a little bit of my griping has to do with the writing, Helen, etc., and the last thing I want to do is to alienate you folks, who I assume are the ones who most of all appreciate my writing!

The first, and most interesting, problem I have is with my nom de plume.  Kay Hemlock Brown is not my real name, since I do not want it known that I am an author, even if my writing is really quite sterilized, compared to the raw form in which it sat in my computer.  Secondly, I began writing a few years ago--actually a couple of decades ago--when alternate preferences were not as widely accepted as they are now, and some of the hangups I had with being identified with those alternate preferences are now stuck in my mind well and truly.  Lastly, I think I have a tiny bit of name recognition, and there's no way I can get anyone to pick up a book of mine under any name except Kay Hemlock Brown.  Remember: it used to be just Kay Brown, but I could never find my stuff, on Barnes and Noble, or anywhere else, because of all the other Kay Browns who cluttered up my search results.

Anyway, because Smashwords got a nasty letter from the Internal Revenue Service, saying that they could not find a decent Social Security Number associated with my pen-name, and that Smashwords is forbidden to send me any money without a good SSN.  I had not given them my actual SSN, because of my desperation to remain anonymous, even to Smashwords, who could turn into blabbermouths any minute.  So, from the time my paycheck was frozen at the level of $23.26 (Tee hee!  I don't earn very much at this racket!) I have been offering the books for FREE.  Those of you who have gone to the Smashwords website already know this, of course.

There is a way around this problem, I believe.  I have to create a formal business, and the Federal Government will assign a SSN to that business, which I can then give the IRS, who will gather taxes on my $23.26 with great delight, to which they are perfectly welcome.  I do not write these books for the income, though pretty soon I might find the additional income very useful indeed.

One reason I want to charge a nominal amount for the books is to find how many of the books are actually being read.  I suspect that people obtain free books, and never read more than a couple of pages!

I went through and figured out how many books had been actually sold, and it is a grand total of 631.  If you're among those who actually shelled out cash for my books, I am sincerely grateful.  I'm even more grateful if you read the book, or books!  I wish there were some way to allow you to tell me your thoughts.  I mean, there is; you can write to me privately, via this Blog, I'm pretty sure.

There were far more downloads of samples : a total of 8363.  I have been having stories published for seven years (I counted), and even that statistic is not impressive for such a long stretch of time.

I know the reason, and I have blogged about it before.  The net I cast is too narrow.  You have to be interested in classical music, and within classical music, early and Baroque music;  you have to be interested in violin; you have to be interested in soprano vocalist, and out-of-control lesbian ones; you have to be interested in kids; you get the idea.  If you're interested in all these things, I would probably really like to meet you!  Just kidding; I'm a people person only in my mind; I purge myself of all my people fascination by all this writing, and then avoid people as hard as I can.

Helen at Westfield

My latest project is a story called Helen at Westfield, which describes the first year or so after Helen starts teaching at Westfield, a fictitious college in the imaginary wilds of northwestern Pennsylvania.

So many things happen to Helen during this period that it is impossible to fit all of them into the periods I have allotted to them.  This happens because the school year is a quite rigid time-frame; various things have to happen: tests, Homecoming, Thanksgiving, and so on, and all Helen's excitement has to happen around these landmark events.  (I think I'm succeeding, but I'm not sure.)  What I have to do is--I thought--just shuffle the material I already had, maybe re-sequencing it a little, and there you go!

For this purpose, I think I have the ideal tool: a piece of software about which I have written before--Scrivener.  This is a program like a cross between PowerPoint and Word, in that you have a window on the left that looks like the PPt outline pane.  (Or even the Index Pane of Acrobat Reader.)  Then, you write your story in little packets, and each packet becomes an independent file.  It is given a name, and the Outline is a list of all these little files, which are actually called Texts.

When you're finished, and you want to combine the whole lot into a single continuous document, you tell Scrivener to compile.  You also tell it into what form you want it compiled: pdf, text, docx, ebook, html, etc.

This is a total winner, for most cases.  However, in my case, I need to rewrite each lump of the story, to make it fit into the time-frame!

Anyway, it is both less fun, and more fun, to do this than it might seem from my description!  Mostly because this part of the story is about some of the most beloved of my characters: Sophie, Nadia (an elderly Belgian professor), the kids: Gena, Erin, Alison and James; the kids at the college (who are a lot less annoying than some undergraduates I have met), and not least, Rain--Lady Evelyn Woodford--and her parents; and Lorna Shapiro.

Well!  Now to get started!

Kay

Scrivener versus Word

I recently bought a program called Scrivener, which helps writers organize their material.  I have used Microsoft Word for years and years, and have become sort of a minor authority on Word.  Before Word, I used WordPerfect, a word-processor that has largely gone out of use, and I had an almighty battle with Word to figure out how to use it.  Every time I get a new program, I have to really struggle to get to use it effectively, only to learn it so well that it is once again a struggle to use a different program, as becomes inevitably necessary sooner or later.

To get started, let me say a little about WordPerfect.  It was a perfectly good program for everything I wanted to do.  Obviously, I used a lot of different styles, starting with italics and boldface, and various colors, and tables, and margins, and so on.  If you don't want any of this, you should just use an editor, like Notepad (or Emacs, which you've probably never heard of).

Small to Medium Documents:  WordPerfect and MS Word
Let’s start with Italics.  In WordPerfect, when you want Italics, you select a portion of text, and turn it on.  Inside the program, it places a sort of invisible marker that says Italics starts here, and then at the end of the selection, it puts another marker stop italics here.  In addition, WordPerfect had a split-screen mode, where you could actually see where these markers were.  The screen looked like this:

The two tags in the lower screen that show where Italics start and stop are just there to help the user.  I could delete either tag, and the whole Italics thing would go off, and the text would be plain once again.

Then I started using Word, because many computers I had to work on only had Word, and I was frustrated because I did not know how to get rid of Italics precisely, because I could not see the tags.  In later years, Word made it possible to see these things, and my comfort level went up.

As my writing projects grew larger —and they grew enormous— the WordPerfect implementation of a wordprocessor which actually placed those invisible markers in the text, became too clumsy.  If something went wrong, which it does most of the time, the program would go insane, looking for italics tags that had got accidentally deleted, without WordPerfect knowing about it.  (Don’t ask.)  Word, in contrast, flags every character as either italicized or not.  It therefore doesn’t have to go looking for tags, which is a point in its favor.  As WordPerfect got harder to find, and as all my friends started using Word, and because PowerPoint and Excel came along with Word, I decided to use Word, just about the time when Word started implementing “character”-type attributes, like Italics and Bold, and “paragraph”-type attributes, like margins and indents, which WordPerfect had done long before.

With Word, you can get your (short-to-medium-sized) document to print out almost exactly how you want it.  Word is a good general-purpose word processor, especially if you take the time to learn all its features (and if Microsoft stops fooling with it every so often).

Large Documents: Scrivener
Once I started writing really large documents —or when my short documents became enormous documents while my back was turned— I had to resort to keeping them as entire folders of chapters, which were later combined into a single book.  Word (and WordPerfect, for the record,) has a method of “linking in” subdocuments, to make a longer document, but somehow that doesn’t work as well as it should.

Enter Scrivener.

Scrivener is more of a document organizing program than a document creating program, and furthermore, I haven't still learned how to use it well.

To give you a quick overview, Scrivener looks like PowerPoint, where you see the list of slides down the left, and you usually see one slide on the rest of the screen.  Lots of other programs are like this, for instance such things as PageMaker, or QuarkXpress, where you have immediate access to any portion of your project.  There is a panel along the left (called the Binder) that contains lots of documents and folders.  Each folder would normally be a chapter, and inside each folder, you get a number of scenes.  This allows you to rearrange the scenes as you prefer (not trivial, but just needs careful dragging, really), just as you would rearrange slides in PowerPoint.  In fact, there is a view very much like Slide Sorter View (that you get in PowerPoint) in Scrivener in which you can just rearrange things pretty much by dragging things around.

If rearranging your scenes within a chapter is a central problem in managing a large writing project —and it is, for me— then Scrivener will help you immensely.

You can even do your writing in Scrivener.  It has a rudimentary editor that can do most of what you want: Italics, Boldface, Colors, etc.  However, once you apply a certain style to a piece of text, Scrivener forgets that the block has that style, unlike Word.  In Word, you can modify the style, and then all instances of that style will change throughout the document.  In Scrivener, you have to go back and change each instance —if you really want to.

You can put all sorts of text into Scrivener, e.g. Word documents, RTF documents, plain text, HTML, Open Document format text, etc, etc.  Getting text into Scrivener is not hard, provided you don’t already have a structure in your document which you want to preserve.  If you do, you have to work harder, and find out for yourself how that is done; I don’t want to set myself up as a Scrivener authority, because I just don’t know enough.  There is a website forum, where you join up, and ask all the questions you want from people who really know.

Compiling
Once you’re ready to take a look at your document, to print it, or read it through, or send it off to a publisher or anyone, you make a single document out of it by Compiling.  At this stage, you can get Scrivener to make anything in the document —that it recognizes— look any way you want.  You can tell it to make the Chapter Titles look like so, and the paragraphs look like so, and so on.  I’m still trying to figure how to make an excerpt from a letter look the way I want.

Scrivener can compile your project as an Ebook directly.  It does a really good job of this.  It can also compile to pdf format (to be read on Acrobat Reader).  It can also compile your project into the form of a Word document!  And, as a bonus, your styles will be a nice, minimal set, just the way Smashwords likes it.  (Smashwords doesn’t like millions of different styles throughout your document; if they find too many styles, they ask you to fix your book.  Consistency of style is one ingredient of a professional-looking piece of writing.)

The software you use really affects the outcome of what you produce to some degree, so I hope this blog post helps you choose the appropriate tool for your writing.

Kay