In today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Follow-Up Comment
* A Techy Morning
* Of Interest
Quote of the Day
“I strive to remain invisible in my writing. I want my readers to be fully aware of everything my characters are thinking and feeling, thoroughly immersed in [the story]. The moment I draw attention to myself, I show disrespect to my characters and their tribulations.
“Writerly affectations–lack of quotation marks for dialogue, impossibly long paragraphs, and the like–annoy me. They eject me from the story.” John Gilstrap in “The Invisible Writer” at KillZone blog
Follow-Up Comment
If you are racing through the story with your characters, simply recording what happens and what the characters say and do in reaction, there can be no writer affectations and readers will have no choice but to be immersed in the story.
If, on the other hand, you are focused on words and sentences instead of Story, the characters will race away through the story by themselves.
However you come to it, eventually only you can decide whether you will record the characters’ authentic story and actually be a storyteller or craft and construct a false account of your own device, word by word, sentence by sentence, merely to keep up the appearance of being a storyteller.
And no, I didn’t leave a comment on the original post. I don’t like participating in dogpiles, especially when I’m on the bottom.
A Techy Morning
Yesterday I was not a writer. Yesterday started with a very techy morning and ended with a trip to the grocery.
The techy stuff lasted until almost noon. I had to file yesterday’s edition of the Journal on one of my other computers because I didn’t yet have Office or any other productivity suite on my new business computer yet. (I refer to a spreadsheet toward the end of filing a new edition of the Journal. I don’t keep all the Numbers stuff manually.)
LibreOffice—So I took the opportunity to dowload and try LibreOffice again. Ugh. I found it full-featured (or very nearly so) but extremely clunky. Admittedly, I didn’t invest a lot of time in playing with it, but in the end I didn’t like the feel and look of it.
LibreOffice is of greater value, I think, to the Open-Source community of techies than it is to everyday personal and professional end users. The emphasis seems always to be on development rather than ease of use or even actual usefulness. Maybe if they’d stop comparing themselves to Word and just create a dynamite office suite.
Corel WordPerfect—I was a massive WordPerfect fan back in the day when it was first out. This was in the early to mid-1990s, so yeah, 28 to 32 years ago. Still, the rise of Microsoft Office notwithstanding, I’ve never understood why WordPerfect couldn’t keep going. And yes, occasionally I still mourn it.
Someone somewhere out there still has the code from the original WordPerfect. It would have to be tweaked to be used in today’s e-world, but why that hasn’t been done is beyond my understanding, especially today when people are feeling a little bullied by Microsoft.
WordPad—Today there is a version of Corel WordPerfect, but it isn’t even a shadow of a shadow of its former self. In fact, from the trial (full version x limited time) I downloaded and played with yesterday morning, Windows 10’s WordPad is just as good as WordPerfect. And by comparison, WordPad actually looks better on the screen.
In fact, if WordPad had an automatic word-count feature in the status bar, I probably would use it as my go-to word processing program.
While I’m still in a mood to play a little, I’ll probably download WPS Writer and try that this morning. If that one changes my mind, I’ll report that next time. If it doesn’t work out, well, then it’s back to using Office 365 or, in the alternative, Office 2010. I still have a copy and it still works just fine. Oh, and sometime today I’ll get back to the novel.
If anyone out there knows of any other good word processing programs, please take a minute to send me an email.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
See “Valuation, Bite-Sized Copyright, and The Decade Ahead…” at https://deanwesleysmith.com/valuation-bite-sized-copyright-and-the-decade-ahead/. You want to read this.
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………………… 710 words
Writing of Wes Crowley: Deputy US Marshal 2 (WCG9SF4)
Day 1…… 3231 words. Total words to date…… 3231
Total fiction words for January……… 40053
Total fiction words for 2023………… 40053
Total nonfiction words for January… 16170
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 16170
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 56223
Calendar Year 2023 Novels to Date…………………… 1
Calendar Year 2023 Novellas to Date……………… 0
Calendar Year 2023 Short Stories to Date… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 72
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31
Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer because of my zen-like non-process. If you want to learn it too, either hang around or download my Journal Archives at https://hestanbrough.com/the-daily-journal-archives/, read them, and try WITD for yourself. For the time being, the archives are free.