S. W. Shinn

I like this prayer I heard from the April 5, 2006 Pre-sanctified Liturgy. It is referred to as a “Prayer behind the Amvon”:

Almighty Master, You created the universe in wisdom. By your ineffable forethought and great goodness, You led us to these sacred days for cleansing of souls and bodies, for subduing passions, and for hope of resurrection. For forty days, You shaped the tablets written with godlike characters for Your servant Moses. Grant also to us, good Lord, to fight the good fight, to finish the course of the fast, to keep the faith whole, to shatter the unseen heads of dragons and to show ourselves victorious over sin, and to arrive blamelessly, without condemnation, to worship also Your holy resurrection. For blessed and glorified is Your honored and magnificent name, of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and forever and to the ages of ages. Amen.

This prayer at the dismissal is said before the icon of Christ. Commonly we see dragons in the LXX , and to shatter their heads is a very biblical theme. In the book of Job, in the LXX, the leviathan is ‘the dragon’ literally. It is stated later in the Old Testament in the Prophets that the creatures listed in Job are demonic beings, hence the icon of St. George slaying the dragon.

Using a timer for writing? I’m not sure if it will boost productivity, but at least you can use it to track yourself and measure your progress.

With the introduction of a $10 countdown timer that one can purchase in any housewares department, we can create our own artificial deadlines that create that sense of urgency for us. By setting the timer for 15 minutes to allow us to complete a task, it seems easy to focus and weed out the unimportant. When I use this technique, I get much more work done and I hear myself telling others, “Call me back in 30 minutes. I’m in the middle of something!” Productivity soars.

Read more at: Open Loops: Boosting Productivity With a Timer

I loved this quote from Irish-American novelist J. P. Donleavy:

Writing is a way of turning the unhappiest moments of one’s life into money.

Read other quotes from this article.

A productivity boost for all writers — deleting entire words in a keystroke:

Hot off the presses from Lifehacker headquarters LA (i.e., just discovered this morning in my dining room-cum-office) comes my favorite new keyboard shortcut, Control-Backspace (Windows)/Option-Delete (Mac).

Ctrl-Backspace/Option-Delete will delete the entire word to the left of your cursor in one keystroke, meaning no holding down and waiting to individually delete every letter from Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - the swift shortcut will take care of the whole word in one fell swoop. Source

If you’re like me, you find yourself working on multiple computers, and lugging a USB stick around can be a pain (what if you forget it?). Moreover, what if you lose your ISB stick?

Answer: use Box.net to store your writing documents and have them accessible from any PC or Mac.

This article shows how to connect to Box.net via the Mac Finder, giving you desktop access to a free, mountable 1 Gig online storage account. In a nutshell:

1) Get a box.net account.
2) In the Mac Finder select the GO menu then choose Connect to Server (Or Command-K).
3) Put in the address: https://www.box.net/dav
4) When it prompts, put in your Box.net username as your name and your Box.net password in the password field.

That’s it, look on your desktop. There should be a new connection mounded on your hard drive called dav.

Here’s an article for connecting to Box.net under Windows XP.

The secret is a web protocol called WebDav, which both XP and Mac support, and Box.net now provides as one of their many ways to access your Box.net file storage.

Here are some helpful shortcuts for those of you using Writely to compose your works.
FROM THE EDITOR MENU:

• Ctrl S to Save
• Ctrl K to Insert Link
• Ctrl M to Insert Comment

FROM THE BROWSER:

• Ctrl B to Bold
• Ctrl I to Italicize
• Ctrl-Z to Undo
• Ctrl-Y to Redo
• Ctrl A to Select All
• Ctrl C to Copy
• Ctrl V to Paste
• Ctrl X to Cut
• Ctrl Home to go to the top of the document
• Ctrl End to go to the end of the document
• Ctrl Alt-? to select the next word
• Ctrl Alt-? to select the previous word

OTHER TIPS:

Here is an interesting page-turner technique. James Patterson (www.jamespatterson.com), author of numerous best-selling books, has released the latest installment of the Young Adult series.

In this book (titled School’s Out Forever) there are 142 chapters (yes, 142!). There are only 406 pages. Some chapters are three or five pages; others are only a paragraph or two.

Each scene gets a chapter break. You end up with a lot of white space, but I think this is on purpose. My theory is that by having each scene be a mini-cliff-hanger, and requiring the reader to glance over at a new page or turn to a new page, you create suspense.

A glance at some of his Patterson’s books targeted to adults make me think he does this all the time.

Is this a new trend? A gimmick? Or a valuable tool for thriller writers to create suspense?

More importantly, what do you think publishers think of this technique? Should writers consider this technique when they are preparing their manuscripts?

Let me know your thoughts. Discussion is underway at the Faith*In*Fiction ‘For Writers’ forum where I have also made this post.

Need some help creating some character names? Check out these useful sites that have very interesting tools to generate names and do research on names:

• 20000-names.com
• seventhsanctum.com/index-name.php
• lowchensaustralia.com/names/generators.htm
• rinkworks.com/namegen

Trying to recall a magical quote from your favorite book? Wondering who else has used the character name ‘John Hoggins’? Google’s new Book Search feature allows you to do this and more.

Try it out at Google Book Search

A great resource for any writer. Common English language mistakes or misconceptions are included in detail. Some examples:

• oversee/overlook
• palate/palette/pallet
• ran/run
• sail/sale/sell
• taken back/taken aback

Much of the content is online here: Common Errors in English