April 23, 2013 · 6:32 pm

Idea for a writer’s tool: homophone finder

I’ve done a little php programming and might make the tool myself since I don’t think it’d be that hard, but it sure would be nice if I could find one (that I could trust – your manuscript would be beyond your control).

Basically, it’d work like this:

  1. Go to: h-t-t-p-://<sitename.com>
  2. click the upload your manuscript button
  3. choose “find homophones”
  4. click “do it”

What follows would be your manuscript, rendered in html, scrolling past and stopping at each homophone it finds and then waiting for you to click “next.” Then you could look up the different meanings, if needed.

Homophone finder would stop at words like:

  • its / it’s
  • their / there / they’re
  • councilors / counselors
  • peak / peek
  • rite / write
  • new / knew
  • etc / etc

There’s nothing more embarrassing than firing off a manuscript you’ve read 300 times and discovering one of these horrors after the fact.

A tool like this would be fairly easy to make.  All it would need is:

  1. a php library to read word docs
  2. a text file of homophones (lots of them out there)
  3. a web server to take input/output

Not sure if anyone else would find something like this useful or not, or just me. If anyone knows of such a tool, I’m not above reading comments 🙂

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April 22, 2013 · 7:51 pm

Funny blog I read today

Tooling around at “awriterstouch” (in my links), I found: http://beidealistic.wordpress.com/

Incredibly funny blog by a very good writer. No idea if the author is published, but will be if he/she wants to be, I’m sure of it.

Update:

The two posts I read are funny, but there’s some serious stuff here too.

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April 20, 2013 · 4:36 pm

On to the next project

A great lady I know who has edited for magazines is editing my book before I send it off to agents.  The money I’m paying her is an insult to her skill and I hope to make it up to her one day.  Now I’m stuck here with nothing to do. I could paint the walls in the basement or clean out the car (I’m messy), or take the dogs to the dog park, or go to the library looking for a good book.  I could do a little overtime at the job I hate, I suppose.  But the truth is, I don’t want to do any of that.  I want to be off on my next project.

I have a number of ideas in the hopper and I’m trying to figure out if I should go with one of them or something else altogether. Writing another book is a major undertaking so I want to make sure it’s something I like vs. something I think “will sell.”  And yet it has to do that too, if I ever hope to quit that horrible job of mine (they pay me to sit next to a window and work at my own pace, the bastards). What I’d love to do is begin a follow-up to the one I just finished, but that’s a little ambitious, isn’t it?  I mean, I haven’t even shown it to an agent, let alone sold it. So these are the things I’m thinking about as I try to pursue this thing called writing.

1386501_typewriter

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April 17, 2013 · 2:07 am

Queries and Synopses and what not

I was tired of editing so I took a stab at the dreaded synopsis. There’s at least 2 types: brief, and long. Brief ones go a few pages, and the long one about 1 page per 35 pages of manuscript. So I sat down to write the brief synopsis, the most requested these days, and it turned into a long synopsis with still more to write.  I got tired of that and made a stab a generic query letter–and it turned into my brief synopsis.

You know, it’s funny.  I started writing the query and it was horrible.  Then I wrote at the top, “To whoever the F* you are” and the words started flowing.  The real line is missing that polite little asterisk.

No, I’d never send it out that way, but the absurdity of the opening took all the pressure off. Because let’s face it, this is my foot in the door we’re talking about here: THE QUERY.  Look at all those capital letters.  Scary.

So there’s a tip for you from Mr. Unpublished: write your query like you’d never send it out.  The second part of that tip should be: then go back and fix it.  I just haven’t gotten there yet.

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April 15, 2013 · 3:35 pm

Fiction editing tip – leverage your Kindle Fire

I just finished my second official edit of my novel and I thought I’d pass along the experience.  We’ve all heard the various ways you should edit your book:

1) wait a month and read it fresh.

2) change the font and read it fresh.

3) Read it out loud and hear it fresh.

The common theme?  Reading it fresh, or differently than you are used to.  So here’s a new one:

4) publish it to your Kindle Fire and read it fresh!

If you go to your amazon account and click “manage my kindle”, you’ll see a section for personal documents.  Somewhere in the settings you can specify what email addresses can send documents to your amazon account.  There are better resources on how to do the exact steps, but in a nutshell you:

1) save-as your document to “stripped html” or (in office 2011 for mac) just html.

2) send it to <emailaddress@kindle.com>

3) publish to kindle

Once it arrives on your kindle you can read it as an ebook.  The best part is: while you are reading it, you can add notes DIRECTLY ON YOUR KINDLE.  You can highlight bad sections with “the the” or “your” when it should be “you’re”, etc. etc.  After re-reading your book and editing it up, you can easily go through it note by note and put it all back in your document.

That’s what I did this weekend.

Quick notes:

1) publishing to your kindle costs like 2 bucks (or something, very cheap)

2) you can also do this on your other kindle devices (it’s just easier on the Kindle Fire).

3) I’m guessing you can do it on other ebook readers, but that’s just a big fat guess, now ain’t it?

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April 6, 2013 · 8:28 am

Neat writing blog I found

Amusing 🙂

http://tonycanehoneysett.wordpress.com/

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April 3, 2013 · 8:06 pm

Looking for some good proofreading checklists

I found one with good tips on using search/replace:

http://www.fictionfactor.com/guests/agentsubmit.html

Here’s a list of homophones:

42 commonly confused English words (a.k.a. homophones!)

From my blogroll, here’s an amazing list of crap that can be snipped from your writing.

http://theeditorsblog.net/2013/01/22/cut-the-flab-make-every-word-count/

She has a lot to say about numbers, too:

http://theeditorsblog.net/2013/01/13/numbers-in-fiction/

I’m working on a style sheet of my own, tailored to the mistakes I make.  When it’s done, I’ll post it.

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March 24, 2013 · 1:35 am

Still going strong

I’ve written three quality chapters in less than a week, 7-9 pages of 12 point TNR each.  I say quality, but only the reader knows.

It’s weird how blind we are to our own bad writing. I remember sitting in a creative writing class, reading other people’s stuff and having to lie about how good it was.  It didn’t just need edits, it was simply unreadable. And yet those same people could tell a good book from a bad one.

Until I’m published, I won’t know if I’m good or bad (or ugly), but that’s fine.  My competition for a book deal doesn’t know either, unless they’ve been previously published.

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March 19, 2013 · 4:43 am

Happy day of writing

So I went to work today and hated it. I should have been born a rich man’s son.  After I got home I was happy again.  Then I sat down to write . . . and became swept away to the tune of about a thousand words.  Good, glorious content, too, else I would have just done some re-reads rather than ruin an otherwise good project.

Hmm, what else?

I explained to my wife that every time I have a good idea, if I don’t write it down I usually forget it.  I wasn’t kidding.  I think it’s because the ideas don’t come from the logical, stepwise portion of my brain. And so, like dreams, I forget them if I don’t write them down.

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March 16, 2013 · 12:23 am

Stopped playing WOW (again)

I’d mentioned how I used to play WOW, then quit and wrote my first novel (still unpublished, but I did it).  Well, about 4 months ago I started playing WOW again, and my writing suffered. A few weeks ago, I quit WOW again, and now I’m about forty pages further along.  I just passed page 200 the other day, and the story’s doing great.

But . . . I keep looking around for a way to escape the horror of productive writing!  I need to sabotage myself some way.  Another game?  A cool Elmore Leonard novel I haven’t read yet?  A movie?  A nap?  I know, I’ll go write on that blog I started last time I wasn’t playing WOW.

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