Category: Writers’ Tools of the Trade

Writers' Tools of the Trade

Tools of My Trade: Day 7 iPad 2

I probably sound like a broken record since my final tool of the series has been mentioned in almost every post this week. Last July my first generation WiFi-only iPad without a camera was one of my favorite tools. It was the thing you never knew you needed until you got it. And even then, it’s not really a necessity, but it’s something you find you don’t want to live without once you get used to having it. Over a year later, I’m still in love with the iPad but I’ve upgraded. Last August (for my birthday) I bought the newer version with the 3G connection as well as WiFi, and with the camera and video, Skype and FaceTime capabilities. I love it even more than the first generation I have. I’ve found it invaluable for travel. When I go to a convention and the hotel wants to charge us $10 or more a day for WiFi in our room, or when I’m away on a beach vacation and internet is no where to be found, I switch on my AT&T 3G for $15 for the entire month. When the month is up, I cancel. No penalty. No fee. No […]

Life, Writers' Tools of the Trade

Tools of My Trade: Day 6 Pocket

Last year one of my featured tools was Flipboard and I still love that app and use it all the time on my iPad. It’s like reading a magazine instead of ugly news feeds from Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. For this year I found something else that is kind of related to Flipboard, but different. It’s Pocket (formerly named Read It Later). And good news, it’s not just for iOS, it also works for Android and Kindle Fire! Today’s favorite tool is perfect for offline use. Find an article online or a blog post you want to save and read later? Maybe while you’re commuting on the train to work? Save it to Pocket. It will be available for off line reading anytime anywhere. Log into your Pocket account on your computer at home or at work, and your saved items are there. Open the Pocket app on your iPad, even without wifi (such as while you’re on a plane), your saved items are there too! Open it on your iPhone while waiting in the dentist’s office, your reading materials will be there! Are you done with a specific article after reading it? Delete it. Is it something you’d […]

Writers' Tools of the Trade

Tools of My Trade: Day 5 SmartEdit

An author friend of mine suggested a self-editing program she uses–AutoCrit. I tried it and I found it was indeed an eye opener. It called me out on all the words I overuse. However, unless I wanted to pay something like $79 a year for the pleasure of using the tool, I could only paste 500 (or maybe it was 800 words) in at a time, and there was a limit to the number of uses per day. For an 80,000 word novel, that would suck. So when self-editing my recently released NEW ORLEANS short story, I ran a sample through, knew where my challenges and problem areas were, and kept those in mind while word-smithing the work. It definitely helped tighten the writing in the piece. Shortly after, I read (I think in GalleyCat MediaBistro) about another program that sounded like it did the same thing as AutoCrit so I checked it out. It was SmartEdit. It’s free to download, at least for now, and it analyzes the entire document as a whole at once. It finds, counts and lists the follwing: clichés, dialogue tags, repeated words, and ‘ly’ words. You click on one of the items in the […]