WritersTechnology.com issues the second in a series on
The simplest way to track submissions is using a spreadsheet program like Excel. You could also use an online spreadsheet like Google Docs. Create a new spreadsheet and put the following as column headers:
Title of Piece | Length | Genre/Type | Query or Submission? |Market Submitted to | Market’s Address | Pay | Date Sent | Response Time | Response (Y/N) | Accepted? (Y/N) | Due date | Publish date | Pay date | Paid? (Y/N)
Tune in to their site their site for future articles on this topic.
Read below to learn about gDarkRoom — a Google Documents tweak tailored to provide a full-screen writing console with these features:
- Full-screen editing usable from any computer
- Automatic backups of your documents
- Write full-screen on the road and sync your document back up once you reconnect to the Internet
I have long used full-screen text editors for banging out fiction. Having the old-school dark full-screen — free from distractions — makes for the ideal writing environment. Some of the full-screen editors I have used in the past:
I like to store my writing in Google Documents. The portability can’t be beat (you can log in and read and edit your documents from any computer). And best of all, Google Documents provides built in version control so you can always go back and find old text you’ve (perhaps accidently) deleted. So in the past I’ve used one of the above software packages to write my fiction, and then pasted it into Google Documents after the fact.
Google has recently added a Full-Screen mode. (Hint: it’s under the View menu, or you can click Ctrl-Shift-F). They have also added a feature called ‘Edit CSS’ (CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet — a feature to change the look and feel of web pages). This, combined with the Google Gears software allows you to write full-screen from any computer with or without Internet access.
How? By using the ‘Edit CSS’ feature, you can add CSS code.
Note this part in particular — this is monitor size specific. You may want to increase or descrease the “260pt” to change the side margins and make corresponding change to the “520pt” width until you get the settings right for you monitor:
.pageview body {
background-color: #000000 !important; /* Make the background color black */
width: 520pt !important; /* Page width */
padding: 0pt 260pt 0pt 260pt; /* Side Margins */
margin: 0;
}
To the right is the resulting look and feel. In full-screen mode you no longer have access to the menus, so it’s useful to know Google Documents’ keyboard shortcuts and to remember that Esc brings you back to the normal mode.
To style the search bar at the bottom of the screen black, you can download and install the NASA Night Launch Theme for FireFox.
Here is the full CSS code I use to achieve these font effects:
/* Full Screen Editing Style (for 1240x1024 resolution monitor) */
body {
background-color: #000000 !important;
font-family: Garamond !important;
font-size: 18pt !important;
color: #D0A000;
}.pageview body {
background-color: #000000 !important;
width: 520pt !important;
padding: 0pt 260pt 0pt 260pt;
margin: 0;
}h1 {
padding-top: 26px;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 22pt;
color: red;
border-bottom: 3px double red;
}
h2 {
background: url(‘File?id=ad8wdwbvms_905cwjztrfc_b’) no-repeat top left;
padding-top: 12px;
padding-left: 32px;
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 18pt;
color: #003300;
border-bottom: 2px solid #003300;
}
h3 {
background: url(‘File?id=ad8wdwbvms_906cb8g4mgj_b’) no-repeat top left;
padding-top: 0px;
padding-left: 32px;
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 14pt;
color: #003300;
border-bottom: 1px solid #003300;
}
The winner fo the 2008 Evangelical Book of the Year—
Is not a book.
For the first time in the awards’ 30-year history, top honors go to an audio Bible —- The Word of Promise, a 21-hour New Testament read by performers including Jim Caviezel as Jesus. Caviezel played the role in Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ.
The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association announced the award Sunday at the International Christian Retail show in Orlando.
Last year the top honor went to a novel — Ever After, by Karen Kingsbury. It was the first time a woman has won and the first fiction winner.
The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association award winners in the six categories:
- Bible: Discover God Study Bible, Tyndale House;
- Bible Reference & Study: An Old Testament Theology, by Bruce K. Waltke, Zondervan;
- Children & Youth: Teen Virtue: Confidential by Vicki Courtney, B&H Publishing;
- Christian Life: When the Game is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box, by John Ortberg, Zondervan;
- Fiction: In Search of Eden, by Linda Nichols, Bethany House/Baker Publishing Group;
- Inspiration & Gift: Step into the Bible, by Ruth Graham, Zondervan.
OpenOffice.org’s excellent software suite has now release version 2.4. This is available from OpenOffice.org, or get a portable version for toting around on a USB drive or to use on locked-down worked computers. OpenOffice now supports extentions (like FireFox) to extent the software’s features. Here are some of the best extentions for Novelists and Writers:
- TestFonts — Reporting for missing font faces, all used fonts and get statistic available system fonts.
- OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs — Export and Import your documents to and from Google Docs.
- Writer’s Tools — Back up documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics.
- OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs — Export and Import your documents to and from Google Docs.
- Linguist — Provides an easy way for users to create a list of new candidate words to the existing spellcheck dictionary.
- Alternative dialog Find & Replace for Writer — Advanced search capabilities including regular expressions, multiple search and replacement in one step, and more.
O3Spaces is another service you should look into. O3Spaces Workplace brings document management and document collaboration features to OpenOffice.org, including real-time version control, check-in/check-out and document security.
The OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension imports documents from Google Docs and Spreadsheets to OpenOffice.org and exports from OO.org to GDocs so you can work with your docs both online and offline. Works onWindows/Mac/Linux. Also it is a simple way to backup your local documents to the internet.
The OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension is free, works anywhere you’ve installed OpenOffice.org. Web site DocSyncer is looking to do similar things for your Microsoft Office docs, but right now it’s in an invite-only beta. Needs Java 6 to work.
Whether on Windows, Mac, or Linux, the Writer’s Tools extension adds a useful new menu to the popular, open source office suite OpenOffice.org that bakes convenient tools like Google Translate, an online dictionary lookup tool, email backup, remote backup to an FTP server and more directly into the OpenOffice.org free software suite.
If you’re using OpenOffice.org as your main word processor, the Writer’s Tools extension is a must-have. Writer’s Tools is free, works wherever OpenOffice.org does.
Another valuable to is OxygenOffice, also for Windows/Mac/Linux. It adds clip art, advanced PDF functions, and in-editor Wikipedia searching to OpenOffice.org. Along with adding roughly 3,400 clip art files and templates, OxygenOffice’s extensions also add support for Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications in the Calc spreadsheet program and conversion tools for the Office Open XML format used in Office 2007. Combined with the Writer’s Tools package, this gives OpenOffice.org a number of exclusive features.
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
(4.00 out of 5)