Since the days when I first ran the Writing Adventure Group, which used techniques designed to get the writer out, observing, and moving around in the real world, I’ve always cheered recognising the big picture. It’s so easy to get caught up in the publishing cycle, writing, querying, promoting and the many,  many ups and downs in the every day of an author’s life. But there’s a huge world out there and things going on. Important things. Trivial things. Tragic things. Beautiful things.

I ran across this World Clock some weeks ago, and I tell you, it not only tells you what’s going on outside, but how often. Want to watch people die (figuratively, of course), then set the clock to ‘now’ and see how many people are dying (and of what) since you clicked the button. You can see births, deaths, cars produced, the number of internet users… it goes on and on. It never stops. It’s fascinating. (And a little morbid.)

Oh, and then I got the bright idea of clicking on the life expentancy calculator. If I wasn’t a non-smoker, a non-drinker, and happily married, apparantly I would have died last week.

8400 more days? I’d better get cracking on doing something useful. Oh wait… maybe after I watch some YouTube while eating a cheese sandwich.

Like most people with blogs, I do love an occassional redesign. Some chicks buy shoes, I play with websites. I’d been wanting to redo the site though to something lighter and cleaner. And here it is! (If you’re reading this on a feed reader, and feedburner tells me that a hundred of you do every day–wow–then you’re going to have to click through to see the new look!) I feel like I have a new haircut and am walking around with a little extra (virtual) flounce in my step.

I was waiting for my cover art for Ordinary Angels, because I wanted to incorporate it somehow. I had thought about making it a part of the design, but went with the slider bar you see in the centre instead. I’m digging the new layout. It combines the feel of a website with all the info of a blog. I wish I could say I designed it, but no, all the schmanciness you see is way beyond my javascript-curdling brain.

The previous theme lasted longer than most, mostly due to the uber-awesomeness of the folks at Elegant Themes (who also designed this one–an anual subscription with them gives you access to all their themes, making them the best and best value “premium” theme designers out there, in my opinion.)

How often do you change your blog theme? Do you like doing it?

I confess. I love measuring things. I don’t know if it’s a competitive streak, or it’s related to my word-meter + office supply obsession I mentioned yesterday, but ooooh how I do.

I found this little “test” for writers yesterday called The Wasteline Test. It measures the overall flab of your writing by checking out your use of passive voice, abstract nouns, prepositions, adjectives & adverbs, and this-that-there. Not fully comprehensive, by any means, but still. All you do is paste 100-1200 words of your writing into the box, and then it rates your writing from “lean” to “heart-attack” in the five categories, and highlights your useage in colour-coded form. (oooh.. colour-coded!)

I was pleased to get “lean” rating all across for the first 800 words of Wildings, and I also tried yesterday’s blog post. I thought I’d do much worse on the blog, since I do almost no self-editing here, but my blog post came out “lean” on all categories except for passive, for which I got “fit and trim”.

Whether or not any of this means anything, I have no idea! But it’s a bit of fun anyway, and you never know… it might just help!

I wish I could remember where I found this … so a big thank you to whichever of my bloggy friends posted this first. Sorry.. I’m not THAT organised!

I don’t really mind that, but I was wondering if people would prefer to be able to log in here using Facebook or Twitter and leave a comment that connects to those accounts? I’ve found one plugin that will also allow logging in here via Blogger, MSN, etc.

Would you use it? Is it worth it? Or would you rather just type in the links to your own websites here, and keep sending me replies wherever the hell you feel like it? (you know who you are! hee)

Let me know! I want the blog to be as easy to read and use as possible, so if a few people would like and use it, I’ll add the Facebook/Twitter/Blogger/Wordpress.com signin plugin.

On Twitter yesterday, someone posted a link yesterday to a Readability Meter. Now I’ve never paid that much attention to these tools, even though a lot of them come with Word and WordPerfect and such.

As it was one of those days (you know the ones), I decided I could fritter away a little time testing some of my stuff to see what US grade reading level someone would have to have to understand my stories.

I entered about 400 words of each of these:

Faerie Blood (Urban Fantasy): grade level reading required: 8.00

Crazy (Slipstream): grade level reading required: 8.43

Open House (Smut): grade level reading required: 6.4

Ordinary Angels (Moderately Smutty Paranormal Romance): grade level reading required:  6.39

The first thing I noticed is that the smuttier I get, the dumber I get.

I’m not sure what this means… unless it simply means I should quit frittering away time looking at things that people post on Twitter.

Access costs $6.00/month or $40/year or $55/2 years.  I figured $6 is a cheese and onion sandwich, so worth a try.  If you were to get the print edition, it would cost $20 and you’d have to replace it in a year.  I believe you can buy a “deluxe edition” that includes access to the website for $30. (These are amazon.com prices for the 2009 edition as of today.)

What is WritersMarket.com? (from their about page)
WritersMarket.com is the Internet’s most comprehensive guide to getting published. Since 1921, Writer’s Market has been the “freelance writer’s bible”, providing contact information for thousands of editors and agents, tips on manuscripts formatting, query letter clinics and more. And now it’s all available online, in a searchable database of information that can be personalized to meet your specific market needs. You can search through the thousands of markets in seconds, easily eliminating those that don’t fit your criteria. You also get daily market spotlights, a guide to Web resources for writers, tips on getting published, news from the publishing world, our online submission-tracking tools, and more. And, WritersMarket.com is continually updated, so you can be sure you’re getting the latest information available.

In addition to the publishing information available on the site, you also get access to the “Community” section which includes member blogs, a forum, groups and in general takes a stab at social networking.  I don’t think this works very well, personally.  I posted a couple of items on the forums, and noticed that days could go by without any new posts from other members.  So, it’s not very active.  Member blogs were unnecessary, because I would expect most writers have blogs already, and I would never suggest anyone make a blog that isn’t available to the public at large, but only to paying members. I noticed that only a bare handful of blogs were actually posted to on a daily basis, and the member groups didn’t seem to be all that active.

The meat of WritersMarket.com (and the reason to subscribe) is the information available about markets, agents, and editors. Back when I used the print edition of Writer’s Market, I would spend hours marking up pages, drawing big x’s through unsuitable entries, and wishing it was all a bit easier.  With the website version, it’s 1000x easier.  The search works well, you can save searches, and even save markets in folders.  I made a folder called “To Query” and came back the next day to send out query letters to those agents. Folders are slightly awkward in that simply moving a market from one folder to another is difficult, and you can’t see what folders a market is already in by looking at its listing.  Also, there’s no place to put notes, which I personally would find very helpful.

They did not have a search criteria for agents that accept e-queries.  This is important to me, but I had to use “has a website” instead, hoping that most agents who accept e-queries also have websites listed, but I know this isn’t necessarily going to be the case, and I’m going to miss on a few.

I found it slightly difficult to wrap my head around how to track queries with their “My Manuscripts” section.  Frankly, I think LitMatch.net works a lot better, plus the information they have about your submission is much more nicely laid out at LitMatch.  That being said, the information about the markets is better at WritersMarket.com.  It was current, detailed, and complete.  It felt more like a “no more stops needed”, although I did go to the agents’ websites to verify their current needs and submission guidelines.

Could it be better?  Absolutely.  The place where it fell down for me was user record-keeping.  It was awkward, as though it had been programmed as an after-thought by someone who didn’t actually try to USE it.  I plan to keep my free membership at LitMatch for tracking, and use the two sites in tandem.

Is it worth the money anyway?  Yes.  Despite the quirks and places the website could have been more user-friendly, the information for writers is pure gold.

Recommended! Plus, by using the website instead of the print version, you probably save a couple of trees every year, not to mention an entire bookshelf if, like me, you’ve been buying these things for a while.

Yesterday I didn’t blog because my blogging time disappeared into the world of Twitter via Tweetdeck.  Tweetdeck has an interesting feature where you can follow certain phrases, so that any time someone Tweets one of those phrases, you get to see it in real time.  It’s better than watching TV.  I settled on “writers” and “literary agents”.  The “literary agents” one turned out to be a dud, because it was mostly people tweeting things like “I just wrote a book.  Anyone know a literary agent?”  Uhhh, yeah.  There’s so many things wrong with that I don’t know where to start.

The former though… an intersting thing.  While I watched, I noticed about half the posts on “writers” were actually about “writers block”.  I’ve been writing since I was old enough to hold a pencil, and that’s longer than some of you have been alive, I’d guess, and I have never experienced writer’s block.

I’ve had bad days, lazy days, crabby days, headaches, days laced with procrastination and days when the sunshine beckoned and even more commonly, days when the pile of laundry just wouldn’t wait any longer because I was in danger of being buried alive under a collapsed sock-tower.  But I have never in multiple decades had writer’s block.  If I’m honest, I’m not even sure what it is.  So I googled it.

It seems the most common complaint of blockees is “lack of inspiration”.  What the hell?  Well, there’s your trouble right there.  To write you do not NEED inspiration.  Oh sure it feels good, and invariably when I write under its influence I write better, but you’ve got your cart and your horse all bass-ackwards.

Writing leads to inspiration.  Not vice versa.

So, sure, if you want, try the “cures” like invention strategy, or writing prompts or whatever will get you writing.  But I stand by my original assertion and just say this:  Anything that can be cured with a widget isn’t a real thing.

Now there are several websites that will do the job for me, and wow… what a difference a few years makes!  Now a lot more agents have blogs and websites, and e-querying makes life so much easier for everyone (and saves trees).

Probably my favourite is LitMatch.net.  The name is silly, as it sounds more like a dating site for people who know how to read, but I can get over that.  I also hate that they used a .net address, because I’ve accidentally sent a couple people to the .com because I tend to filter out that type of thing in my brain.

Above is an example of the type of tracking data you can keep on a project.  I like this.  But then I’m a sucker for pie charts too (which they also have!)  Okay, mostly I like pie, but still…. good information!

I also like that so many of the agents I was interested in have updated their own listings, and I could filter for things like “accepts e-queries”, genre, even down to things like whether or not they have a blog or agency website.  This is useful for research, even if you aren’t going to use the site to track your queries.  You can also see data from other querying authors about how long it took for an agent to answer their queries.  With small samplings, this doesn’t really tell you a lot, but some have enough responses to actually build a picture.

A less pretty version of this site is QueryTracker.net [Side note: What's up with the .net websites?  Take it from a web professional (yes, I'm a woman of many talents).  Hold out for a .com when buying a web domain.]  Anyway, this is a very similar site to LitMatch, but not as nice to look at.

A site with more information about individual agents but no features for tracking anything is AgentQuery.com.  This site has some great writer’s resources, including a page which lists editor and agent blogs.

What are your favourite writer’s resources?

When I started a new project last year, however, I decided to check out the market and see what tools there are for this.  I tend to shop and compare, so I went to amazon UK to see what reviewers said about various writer’s solution.  The choice left me feeling fairly dismal.  I know.  Amazon reviewers are notoriously cranky and often spiteful, but there’s really little that annoys me more than plunking out for a program that, for example, the publishers say is Vista compatible, but when I try to install it, it turns out “compatible” means “will eat all your other software and you will never reboot in peace again”.

In the reviews for one program, Writers Café, I noticed the reviewer said that if you go to the official website, you can download a free trial.  I went, I downloaded, and two days later I bought the full version.  I can’t imagine beginning another writing project without it!

Features:

• Drag and Drop cards for organising your plot.  I used one card for each scene.  Also, the cards can be colour-coded, so, say, the mystery element of the plot is in the “brown” line, while the romance element of the plot is the “blue” line.  This helped me see how my plot was progressing, but also how balanced my chapters were.
• Character Sheets: I used these, but I felt they could be bigger.   This gives you a place to write out details of your character from their age to their appearance to their motivation in the story.  The best part is that you can customise the fields, so, say, if you’re writing a supernatural story, you can have a field for “Superpower” or whatever.
• You can do something similar with locations, although I didn’t use this for this particular book.  I probably should have though.
• It interfaces with OpenOffice.org Writer pretty seamlessly, although you can add links on your “Writer’s Café desktop” to any program.  I found I liked Open Office’s Word Processor.  It works just like MS Word, but it’s FREE.  Yes.  FREE.  Plus it has PDF export support so I can easily put things on my Sony Reader.
• I did NOT compose within Writer’s Café, but I think that feature would work best for writing screenplays.  Instead I used OpenOffice.org Writer, because I had better control over my formatting, which all writers know needs to be precise for manuscripts.
• It has a name generator, which is fun, actually.  It makes some pretty wild suggestions, but you can also just browse through a list.  Saves me having to go to baby name websites to find names!
• Pinboard.  This feature I LOVED.  I was able to import pictures for my characters.  I often like to use photos of real people (I always use strangers and no famous faces) so that when I describe characters, if I need to, I can look at a photo.  This helps me so much.  I also added notes, put characters into groups like “Zoe’s Office” or “Thomas’s clients” and also posted a picture of some of the locations, again to help me get over bumpy description patches.  I cannot tell you how wonderful this feature is.  I would buy this program for this alone!
• Notebook and Journal.  These features are similar.  The only difference is the Journal pages are dated and progress each day you log in, while the Notebook pages are static.  I used the Journal to track my daily word count goals, and the Notebook for research notes.  Perfect!
• I liked that it supports many platforms, and your work is very easy to back up.  I used this when going between my laptop and my PC, because my laptop is Unix based, and Writer’s Café is Unix compatible as well.  There’s also a Mac OS version!

Price:  If you want a disk, it’s $65 / £32.20.  Download only: $45 / £22.  I bought the download version (I always lose disks anyway) and it was perfect.   There is a free trial, but you’re limited to how many cards you can put into your storyboard on the trial version.  But it’s definitely enough to play around and decide if you like it!

Website: Writers Café

Note: I’m not being paid to promote this, nor do I earn any commissions, etc.  I just love this program!