A writer's look at the writing industry and the Internet.

Tried new software to
write more productively, but
it ate all my work!

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Spring edition of a magazine that I’ve been interested in submitting something to for a while now, called The First Line, as mentioned in an earlier post. I nearly chose not to write something for this edition, as I’m not a big fan of writing on religious themes, but I found a way around it and decided to give it a go.

As I had all afternoon and evening available, I decided to try out a new piece of writing software I bought this weekend that’s designed to make you more productive, the desktop edition of Write Or Die! (US$10). It’s written in Adobe AIR (familiar to most Twitter users) and — along with the expected text input area and ability to save as plain text — it will give you a progress bar if you specify the number of words or the amount of time (or both) that you want to write in that session, and it has a few options that will first prod you or even punish you, if you want. Not a bad motivational tool, as you find yourself typing continually to avoid the flashing and noise, while avoiding self-editing, and it’s easy to churn out words with little effort.

Or so the theory goes. Cutting a long story short, after using it to write a story that I was quite pleased with, I saved it over a file of the same name (no big deal, the operating system should ask me if I’m sure, etc, and do it seamlessly), exited the program and opened the file in an editor to discover that the save I’d just made didn’t happen. I don’t know what went wrong, but none of it got saved: 1200 words and 45 minutes flushed away.

I was not a happy bunny at all. I’m not pointing my finger at the software, as I really don’t know what went wrong and where. It could have been the software, it could have been AIR, or it could have been me, I just don’t know. Besides, it’s not like it was a novel.

So after making a cup of tea to regain my composure, I set about to writing it again, with as much of it from memory as possible. This time I used another piece of software that I’ve been meaning to use properly for some time: OmmWriter (watch the demo video, it’s stunning). It’s currently only available for the Mac, it’s free, and it uses a Zen-like atmosphere to stop you from getting distracted. It’s a beautiful looking piece of software and does the job very well.

The story has now been fully written, imported into OpenOffice.org for formatting, edited and improved, saved as a Word document (per their submission guidelines), and submitted for their consideration. Now begins the waiting game…

Borrowing an idea from a friend’s website, here’s a bit of fun to sum up today’s writing:

Last night I went through
the writing markets. Cast the
net. Waiting game starts.

I spent last night polishing up a couple of short stories and going through the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2010 looking for suitable markets for them. There were a number of matches, so now I’ll have to wait and see if they bite.

The time has come to stop messing about and begin pitching my stories and see if I can see them in print in a recognised magazine (no offence intended to e-zine and online-only publishers). It will give my confidence and ego a boost, and will hopefully provide openings — or at least a foot on the ladder — for future efforts.

Some of you know I also write elsewhere on non-fiction issues, and I’m also aiming to get that work into print. So if things go well with one or the other, I hope to be able to brag share the details here when the time comes.

Until then, my life will consist of writing fiction and non-fiction material, finding and pitching markets, continuing to learn how to go about successfully writing novels, and of course the long waiting game between making a submission and hearing back on whether or not it has been accepted. It’s a strange choice of career…