Monday, August 31, 2009

My Writing Tools

For anyone interested here are some notes on what I use:

Great podcast website called Writing Excuses is by the intelligent and engaging Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells and Howard Tayler. Each podcast is a short but informative 15 minutes long; full of excellent advice, tips, information, and always lots of laughs for your fantasy and sci-fi inner (or outer) geek.

Absolute Write forums is a very involved community of aspiring and realized writers in all sorts of genres and mediums, you can also post your story for critique if you dare. I have not yet dared, but I claim that it is merely out of paranoia and not fear of critique - ok there may be a little fear.

Duotrope is an excellent site with the ability to search - in a variety of ways - their large database of information on publishers, magazines, etc to find out where to send your work and other useful information on each entity. There are other sites out there, but Duotrope from my limited experience is the most comprehensive...and searchable.

For actual writing I use WordPerfect 12 from Corel, though one day I may look into other tools that are more streamlined for novel creation, this works for now and I think it is a good way to start since I don't want to constrain my style because I'm using something that "automates" it. This could be a gross misunderstanding of what more specified software out there offers, but I won't find that out or a while.

My Blackberry, is my on the go notepad when I can't pull out the laptop. It is much more handy than pulling out a pad of paper to scribble on. I even typed up my 11k word short story that I just submitted to F & SF on it; though I brought it into WordPerfect to make revisions, it was primarily created while I stood on the BART or during breaks at work while I took a walk.

Do you have any great writing tools to share or comments to make? Please comment below.

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