Becoming A Writer Seriously

After six weeks of travelling and resettling into a new apartment in Manila, I finally have a broadband connection at my home. No more internet cafes and wi-fi hotspots — yippee! The new home connection, sadly, turns out not to be fully reliable, losing 45 minutes of my work a couple days ago — but I’ll perservere.
That means I can once again freely roam the web for the best items online for writers. Here are my initial finds.

Writers Digest Redesigned Website

Writers Digest has just unveiled its redesigned website. Always excellent in the past, it now establishes new benchmarks for itself. It should be on every writer’s bookmark list.

For one, writers can find articles by genre so much more easily now. There’s a new blog tracking agents and writers’ conferences, a great addition. And more…

Particularly, check out The Writer’s Ultimate Resource Guide for 2008. Included on the reasonably-priced CD is the highly-regarded annual list of 101 Best Websites for Writers — and, this year, a guide to the best writing software. The website also currently features an important article about how to back up your writing for free.

I normally visit the website once a week. You wouldn’t go wrong by doing the same. It brings you directly into the writer’s community.

The Writer’s Technology Companion

Just online now for 24 hours or so, this new blog, authored by our reader Dustin Wax, promises to be a very interesting resource for writers. Dustin immediately sets forth his objectives:

Stay tuned for:

• reviews of software and hardware to make writers’ lives easier (or at least more organized),
• tutorials on using and maintaining the tools of the writing trade,
• tips and advice on using technology to promote yourself and your work, and
• links to resources for writers across the web.

The Writer’s Technology Companion will post at least three times a week, with extra posts for breaking news (whatever that turns out to be?—?I’m not sure there’s “breaking news” in the writing technology world) and tutorial series. I’ve got lots of great stuff planned for the weeks and months ahead, with special series on podcasting, getting the most out of Word 2007, and creating e-books in the works.

Already, in his very first post, Dustin tackles the interesting arena of Content Directories, with an interesting case study and some definitive conclusions.

I am very pleased to see another voice join our cluster of blogs/websites — also including Jeremy Osborne’s blog with exceptional content — that address the issues of productivity of writers. Anyone who reads my blog should also check out these other two. AND join us in the evolving conversation, with your comments to the posts on these three blogs. I envision a community growing from these blogs that may become invaluable to many writers.

Tracking Evolving Versions of Your Writing

Speaking of Jeremy’s blog, I am fascinated with his current how-to videos on the open-source software Subversion. Jeremy and I have engaged in conversation before about the importance of keeping track of all versions of any big evolving writing project. Some time ago, he promised to investigate this free software — and now he’s delivering. Definitely worth a read! Visit his blog and scroll down to view the posts and demos.

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A couple of quick references to pass along…

Thriller

Ray-Anne Carr has launched a blog where she shares her notes about writing good thriller novels. Worth a look by anyone writing fiction.

Freeware Followup

PC Magazine has been kind enough to post its recent article about freeware on its website, complete with links that take you direct to downloads and additional information. Go HERE.

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My travels — which, I’m pleased to say, pushed my writing projects forward significantly — still interrupted my blog writing. Now that I’m back home and settled back into my routine, I’ve uncovered some particularly useful items for my “Best of the Web” series.

Write to Done

Every week I find interesting and useful resources online — but seldom do I find something that excites me as much as the brand-new blog Write to Done. Blogger Leo Babauta knows what he’s writing about — just read his “About” page to learn about his impressive career. Playing with my StumbleUpon extension that I’ve added into Firefox, I discovered this blog for the first time, coming across a most remarkable blog post about How To Write First Thing in the Morning. As a morning writer myself, I learned some valuable new tricks which I will put to immediate use. Scrolling through the blog convinces me that he lots more to share. By all means, take a look yourself.

The Writer’s Chatroom

The Writer’s Chatroom [TWC] has many offerings to help writers — a new monthly newsletter, twice-a-week online chats, a 24/7 forum and more.

This month’s email newsletter, which just arrived in my inbox, carries a feature article that is particularly useful. In “Keep Track of your Romance Characters,” Rita Karnoop provides concrete suggestions that certainly transcend her genre — they will be valuable to any writer who must juggle characters and plot.

A visit to the Chatroom website will give you a chance to sign up for the newsletter, as well as learn about the online chat service as well. While I myself do not participate every week, I do sign in for chats that involve the business side of writing or feature non-fiction writers. They are always informative, and it’s fun to watch how the moderators handle the writers who queue up to ask questions. It’s quite a community.

Writer Biz

Readers of this blog may wish to check out Erik Sherman’s WritersBiz blog, which I’ve just discovered through the magic of internet networking. I naturally found it very interesting.

Internet Resources

For the most extensive list on online resources for writers that I’ve ever encountered, go to this resource list, maintained by Sal Towse. Broad coverage, tightly organized into nested categories, you’ll find your way to writers communities, learn about article submission guidelines, track down dictionaries of all sorts, discover research tools, uncover hints about the business of writing and more..

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Blogs are richer when they evolve into communities. Active discussions among writers with different perspectives and experience enrich and clarify the blog’s content. This action takes place within the COMMENTS to individual posts. It is the COMMENTER that truly brings a blog to life. Thanks to those readers who contributed to discussions this month.  [And thanks to Jeanne Dininni at Writer’s Notes for providing a model for this post.]

Many of the commenters maintain blogs of their own. Click on the links to take a look — or when reading a comment, click on the writer’s name if it is underlined.

This month’s commenters, in no particular order:

• Michael Downend — American Society of Media Photographers
• Jeremy Osborne — discover fire
• Jeanne Dininni — Writer’s Notes
• Jesse Hines — Vigorous Writing
• Lillie Ammann – A Writer’s Words, And Editor’s Eye
• Charles Wilkes
• Benjamin Eavey
• Dianna
• Deborah Ng — Freelance Writing Jobs
• Scott — Spennies
• Janet — Fashion Blog
• Tom Chandler — The Copywriter Underground
• Debra Broughton — Nothing To Write Home About
• Silvie Mac — High Cognitive Minds
• Peter Paulenz
• Stephen B Cohen
• Yuwanda Black — Inkwell Editorial
• Barbara Rozgonyi — Wired PR Works
• Mac Blogger — Mac Software — Freeware Und Shareware
• The Video Nova — The Video Nova

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Last week I wrote a discouraging post about the “dumbing down” of the American public, which is reading less and engaging in substantial conversation almost never at all.

Now here’s the good news:  never in history have so many educational opportunities been easily available to so many around the world.  And that includes us writers, even if we lead busy lives or spend most of our time at home.

Today’s USA Today online edtion carries an enticing article detailing the explosion in college courses and lectures now available online.  And most encouraging is the data about the response of people world-wide to these offerings.  After first pointing to pace-setter Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Today declares:

MIT’s initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an Internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow.” 

We ourselves been following these developments in this blog over the past year.  The information bears repeating, gathered together here as we reflect about the coming year.  Several times we’ve pointed readers to the best source of information about this arena:  Open Culture, a guide to smart media  This blog, hosted by a professor at Stanford University, really keeps its readers up-to-date about university lectures available online.  During the upcoming year, we’ll try to pinpoint such lectures that may interest writers.  If any of you readers uncover such lectures, please share the information with our community of readers.

Apple’s iTunes serves as a host for universities and has even set up a special section of its online store to handle these lectures, some in audio, some in video  For example, Standord is currently offering via iTunes several streaming audio lectures of interest to writers:

• An Evening with Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass  
• The Future of Theater in America:  Are We in Peril?  
• History in the Hands of Playwright August Wilson  
• Sex, Lies and the Theater:  Shakespeare for Today  

Some universities offer courses via other websites.  UC-Berkeley lectures are hosted at YouTube.  Open Culture keeps a full listing of such sites, and readers can subscribe to email notices and RSS feeds to keep up-to-date.

Online learning opportunities, however, stretch well beyond the university offerings.  YouTube hosts a very interesting series of lectures sponsored by Google,, including Google’s scintillating Author at Google series.

More directly aimed at writers are downloadable videos and online courses offer by  a number of organizations.  Mediabistro, an organization I encourage every freelance writer and journalist to join, offers from its website a growing list of videos, taken at its various workshops around the country, along with full online courses, at Mediabistro On Demand.  Writer’s Digest offers online courses that will intrigue fiction writers and poets, as well as free-lancers, at its Writers Online Workshops.  You’ll also find videos from the BookExpo America conference, co-sponsored by Writer’s Digest. 

Another route to stimulation are, of course, writers conferences.  However, you no longer must travel to have access to the lectures.  Read our previous post A Writer’s Conference in Your Living Room, to learn where to find them.

Yes, US TODAY is correct:  there is a revolution in learning going on.  Join it!

Technorati Tags: online learning

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For new-comers especially, there’s more here than meets the eye right off. And even long-time readers tend to forget about some of these resources.

CHECK THE TABLE OF CONTENTS: In the right sidebar, the Table of Contents lays out in logical fashion just what topics are covered by this blog. Each line also contains the number of posts for that topic. Just click to view those selected posts. This is the easiest way to catch up with past posts that might be of interest.

LOOK INTO THE ARCHIVES TAB: One of the tabs along the top, this page lists the titles of the past 100 posts — another quick way to review and find past posts that may be useful to you.

CLICK ON THE ONLINE WRITER’S OFFICE: This may be the most powerful and useful element of my blog’s work. A click will take you to my PageCast at PageFlakes. One of the tabs there gathers an annotated list of the blog’s most recent 10 posts, Even more important, you’ll find my Best of the Web citations from my Google Reader Shared Items page, where I gather links to the best posts I’ve found among the 100+ blogs and websites I monitor. On another tab, you will discover an online office, with a gateway to Zoho Writer, a dictionary, calculator and other valuable tools. Yet another tab gathers lists of recent posts at many of the very best productivity blogs and websites, with information that goes beyond writing into general productivity advice, software reviews and such. There’s even a gateway to the best podcasts by and for writers — just turn up your speaker and click your choice. It’s worth “going to The Office” several times a week.

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES: Rather than simply provide a cluttered list of websites, I place my recommendations in a series of pages that categorize the sites and provide brief descriptions. I add to this list continually. You can view it as your annotated bookmarks for writing-related sites.

SOFTWARE: While there are many posts relating to software, this tab pulls together the most important software reviews. This list is updated periodically.

BOOKS: This tab presents reviews of carefully selected books. Rather than inundate you will countless books, I try to steer you to the very best on selected topics.

SO… Please enjoy this blog and all that it has to offer. I encourage feedback and comments so that the blog will tap into a broadest possible range of expertise and insight. NOTE that it’s necessary to click on the post’s title or “Comments” link at the bottom of an individual post to read what others are saying. Moreover, if the commenter’s name is underlined, you can click on the name to go directly to the commenters blog/website, a great way to find other useful sites.

Tom

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Well, Jeremy Osborne has followed up on his promise to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month exercise. But he’s gone one step farther: he has created, as an experiment, a NaNoWriMo wiki. which he will fuel — BUT which anyone else can contribute to, a group-written novel. An interesting idea, which I wish to bring to your attention.

Here’s a chance to watch the NaNoWriMo process at a comfortable distant — no obligations, other than reading the wiki from time to time, to see how the novel progresses, and perhaps checking in to the official NaNoWriMo website.

For the more industrious, you can become a contributor to the evolving novel, without committing to writing the whole thing. Just putting a big toe in the water, so to speak. Who knows, you might enjoy it enough this year to join in next year’s NaNoWriMo as a full-fledged writer. In fact, you can even sign up as a participant this year, so that you can keep up with the inner-workings of NaNoWriMo — there are some interesting benefits for doing so.

There’s an additional benefit to following Jeremy’s experiment: you will learn through direct experience how collaboration via a wiki software actually works. With that knowledge, you may come up with applications that will be helpful to you in your own writing career.

Check out Jeremy’s description of his experiment to better understand what he’s up to. You can also jump straight into his nanowiki. As I write this, on the very first day of the month, the wiki contains only information about the rules of the game and such, but by midnight, I’m sure that Jeremy will have his first installment registered at the wiki. It will be interesting to see who else joins into the exercise [actually you can make anonymous contributions, if you are shy].

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Thanks to the blog Open Culture, I’ve just learned about the National Book Critics Circle, its website and its blog.

The NBCC has been around since 1974 and has 700 active members from around the US.  Its website offers an incredibly useful and quite extensive page of links, pointing one toward book-oriented blogs, various review sections, book-related magazines and online publications, and other book-related sites.  Its blog Critical Mass is quite active, with postings from many sources.  Recently, it invited authors to write about the five most important resources for book reviewers, leading to an informative, ongoing series.

The site also offers an article offering tips on writing good reviews, which is actually quite informative for us authors-in-waiting.

Writers who wish to be part of the book world will find NBCC an organization worth following closely.

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After weeks of travelling and tending to pressing matters upon my return home, I finally found some time for browsing — and I’ve come up with some useful tidbits for writers.

55 Top Reference Websites — I’ve bookmarked this most helpful directory at eBizMBA. It was written for university students now that research paper time is looming, but the list will be very helpful to writers of all stripes, even fiction writers who might need to check some facts.

The Water Cooler Forum — Most writers I know have never discovered online forums, one of the internet’s most useful facilities. Forums allow like-minded people, writers for example, to pose topics for discussion, with all forum members free to toss in their ideas.

Absolute Write, one of the best email newsletters for writers, also maintains a vast online forum, The Water Cooler, with separate sections for different genres, types of writing, almost every subject you can think of for the active writer. While I’ve been a newsletter subscriber for quite some time, I’ve only now joined the forum. To my utter surprise, there’s even a section for people who write HISTORY — I’ve been searching for such a place for months. The Water Cooler, as the overall forum is called, is certainly WORTH A LOOK. If you are new to forums, read the particularly helpful Newbies Guide.

10 Forums to Make You a Better Blogger — Speaking of forums, here’s a list of 10 of them dedicated to blogging. If you are new to blogging, or even an old hand looking to increase traffic, these forums may be very helpful to you. Just posted today, this blog post apparently received so much attention on Digg that the server went down for awhile. Keep trying to get it — it’s worth the effort as no one else, to my knowledge, has ever gathered such a list.

Adrive — Announced only today is the beta release of a new online backup facility that may well shake of the internet. This startup is offering 50 gigs of free online space to back up your files. If this company thrives, it will be particularly useful to photo-journalists, but even we wordsmiths, particularly the long-winded ones, may find this facility useful. Of course, it’s very early in the day for this start-up — I’ll keep my eye on it. In the meantime, my favorite is Mozy, with 2 gigs of free space — just search through the website to find the little MozyHome Free sign up box.

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After reading lately a spate of articles heaping lavish praise on Facebook, I decided to join that social network. I’ve been intrigued, and that experience is leading me out to other social networking facilities, with some of the stops opening fascinating new doors.

This has taken me to a blog which may be of particular interest to writers who seek information beyond their own bookshelf and brain: Contentious by journalist Amy Gahran, who explores “how we communicate in an online world” and who has just written an item about how writers can harness Facebook and LinkedIn to increase and improve productivity. Gahran also edits the blog E-Media Tidbits, another useful source of information for the plugged-in, out-in-the-world writer.

If you follow these links, you may be hooked for an hour or two — there’s a lot there to explore and digest.

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