From Galleycat:

What’s your favorite writing music from 2013? We’ve already found some great albums for our annual list of the best music that helped us write this year.

Follow the links below to listen to the instrumental songs we’ve picked so far this year. Share the instrumental songs or albums that inspired you in the comments section and we will add it to our growing Spotify playlist.

Link to the rest, including the music list, at Galleycat.

So, here’s a question: How many of you listen to music when you write and how many require silence?

PG is a member of the group that generally prefers to hear nothing more than the cooling fan on his computer, but sometimes puts on an instrumental Pandora channel.

Since authors tend to have longstanding intimate relationship with chairs, a new chair from Steelcase:

Technology is the single greatest force driving the changes in the way we work, live and behave. The new, multiple devices we deploy throughout our work day allow us to flow between tasks, fluidly, and frequently.

. . . .

We undertook a global posture study in 11 countries, observing 2000 people in a wide range of postures and uncovered nine new postures as a result of new technologies and behaviors. We studied how the human body interacts with technologies and how it responds as workers shift from one device to another. Research revealed ergonomic implications that, if not adequately addressed, can cause pain and discomfort for workers.

Link to the rest at Steelcase

From Slate:

Would best-selling novelist Len Deighton care to take a walk? It was 1968, and the IBM technician who serviced Deighton’s typewriters had just heard from Deighton’s personal assistant, Ms. Ellenor Handley, that she had been retyping chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. IBM had a machine that could help, the technician mentioned. They were being used in the new ultramodern Shell Centre on the south bank of the Thames, not far from his Merrick Square home.

A few weeks later, Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing in the leafy square in which I lived, watching all this activity, I had a moment of doubt,” the author, now 84, told me in a recent email. “I was beginning to think that I had chosen a rather unusual way to write books.”

. . . .

Like many other commercially successful novelists before and since, Deighton could not afford to indulge a solitary muse. Ellenor Handley had worked with him in his south London home since 1966. In an email, Handley, now 73 and retired, detailed her role in Deighton’s writing process.  “When I started Len was using an IBM Golfball machine to type his drafts,” she wrote.  “He would then hand-write changes on the hard copy which I would then update as pages or chapters as necessary by retyping—time-consuming perhaps but I quite liked it, as I felt a real part of the process and grew with the book.” When the MTST arrived at Merrick Square, the author and his assistant recall, it was Ms. Handley who mastered it.

Like many early technologies, the MTST began as a hybrid creation, a kind of mechanical centaur consisting of two separate devices fused to work in conjunction with one another. At the same instant a character was imprinted on the page from the Selectric’s typing mechanism, that keystroke was also recorded as data on a magnetic tape cartridge. There was no screen, but backspacing to correct an error on the page also resulted in the data being corrected on the tape. Unblemished hard copy could then be produced with the push of a button, at the rate of 150 wpm.

. . . .

“One might almost think the word processor (as it was eventually named) was built to my requirements,” Deighton told me:

“I am a slow worker so that each book takes well over a year—some took several years—and I had always ‘constructed’ my books rather than written them. Until the IBM machine arrived I used scissors and paste (actually Copydex one of those milk glues) to add paras, dump pages and rearrange sections of material.

Link to the rest at Slate and thanks to John for the tip.

Found this here – from Gary Taaffe:

“Welcome to Skinny Fiction where you can read, write and host Skinny Fiction stories. I’m talking really skinny like 10, 25, 50 and 100 words or less. The less the better. Here’s a great example:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
by Ernest Hemingway”

Read more here:  Skinny Fiction

Looks totally fun!  Julia

When an Algorithm Can Do It for You.

From ReadWrite–

“Phil Parker is unlike any writer you’ve ever met – or read for that matter. That’s because he doesn’t write most of his books. Instead, the trained economist uses sophisticated algorithms that can pen a whole book from start to finish in as little as a few minutes. The secret is sophisticated programming mimicking the thought process behind formulaic writing. It can take years to create these programs, but once completed, new books can be churned out in minutes.”

*****

Writing By The Numbers

ReadWrite: Tell me about the algorithm you created to auto-write books. 

Phil Parker: The non-fiction algorithms and methodology are not original at all… The whole field is called econometrics. All the algorithms we did was mimic what economists have been doing for decades.

In the 1990s I was working on reports where you had to do a lot of economic analyses and I realized that most of what an economist does is itself extremely formulaic in nature. With the advent of larger hard disks, Windows, RAM, a lot of that process could be reverse engineered and basically characterized by algorithms and be used in an automated fashion. The methodologies are extremely old, just like the methodologies of writing haiku poetry are very old. An Elizabethan sonnet is 14 lines – that is a line of code if you think of it that way. The code is constrained. So all genres, no matter what the genres are, are a form of constrained writing.

Read the rest here:  ReadWrite.

Thoughts?

Julia Barrett

“In his book, Story, Robert McKee states that “to anticipate the anticipations of the audience you must master genre and its conventions.”

“Genre is as much a marketing tool as it is a story creation-tool. If a film or book has been correctly promoted the audience or readers approach the story with a certain expectation. In marketing jargon this is referred to as “positioning the audience”. This alleviates the danger of readers or audiences spending the first part of the story trying to find out what it’s about.”

***

“In film, music forms one such convention. Traditional love stories, for example, use a certain type of score to elicit emotions appropriate to that type of story. The mellifluous musical score for Gone With The Wind would not be appropriate for Alien, or vice versa.”

Interesting stuff.  Read the rest here:  Stavros Halvatzis.

Julia Barrett

Passive Guy has been using a handy freemium program for his To Do lists lately - Doit.im.

The program is designed to work well for Getting Things Done fanbois and fangurlz, but you don’t have to be into the whole GTD system to gain benefits from it.

It’s dead-simple to use. You just type in a to-do item, then hit return and it’s on your list. If you want the task to show up tomorrow, you just drag it to the Tomorrow button and it will show up then. For a future date, drag the item to Scheduled and a calendar will appear for you to drop it on whatever date you like.

When you finish an item, click on the box next to it and it disappears. Each item will automatically carry over from day to day until you mark it done. Items not completed on the date scheduled will show the date they were supposed to be completed.

The company offers free iPhone and Android apps that put the same screen on your smartphone/tablet so you can add or clear items while you’re away from your computer. Unlike a lot of web apps, the smartphone/tablet system works very nicely on a touchscreen. The app/computer integration is very smooth with information flowing back and forth seamlessly. The free version syncs once per day between all your devices. If you pay $2 per month or $20 per year, you get instant syncing.

There are lots more features, but this is all that PG uses the program for. For a long time, PG would schedule to-do’s on his calendar, but then he would have to re-schedule them if he couldn’t do them on the date scheduled. He also used the List feature on Outlook but swore off that program when he left the corporate world.

It’s a nice psychic reward to click the Done box and have the task fade out then disappear. Unfortunately, the next task automatically jumps up to the top of the list.

Here’s a link to Doit.im and a more comprehensive description on Lifehacker

From The Harvard Business Review:

A group of Brazilian entrepreneurs who have come north for a week’s worth of ideas on growing their ventures, are leaving a class, when one of them breaks from pack toward the coffee maker, where I’m heading too. He works the machine first, reciting something again and again in Portuguese as he watches his cup fill.

“Excuse me?,” I say, unsure he’s talking to me.

“Sorry, I am repeating what the lecturer said,” he explains, “so I remember later.”

Remembering new information is an underappreciated skill. The fact that most of us have never evolved our technique beyond the rudimentary and ad hoc approaches we used as middle schoolers suggests this.

. . . .

Fortunately for us, insights from cognitive psychology have vastly improved our understanding of how we remember. Many of these are accepted wisdom in the neurological and psychological realms. But it hasn’t been easy to transfer that knowledge to actual tools for individuals. Until recently, anyway. Easy-to-use auto-analytic tools that exploit our understanding of memory can now help you treat remembering as the skill it is, and improve it the same way you improve any professional skill, like public speaking.

. . . .

First, focus on the right unit of measure. Yes, your objective is to remember better, but you’ll get the best results by focusing on forgetting as your base unit of analysis.

Experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus’s pioneering discovery of the forgetting curve shows that we forget the majority of newly learned information within hours or days, unless we review it again and again. This alone won’t be a shock to many of us. But Ebbinghaus demonstrated how systematic forgetting. It occurs exponentially on a predictable curve — researchers call this “exponential decay.”

Different things you’re trying to remember will have different curves. For instance, that piece of operations data that you remember clearly, since you prepped and presented it to your team, has a flatter downward curve (you’ll remember longer) than that the now hazy sales figure a colleague mentioned during the same team meeting. Even so, each curve is predictable.

Practice remembering at the right time. Think about how you really use your memory for things that matter to you and your career, like in preparing for a speech. Maybe you’re a crammer who tries to prime your memory by doing as many dry-runs as possible the night before. Or perhaps you’ve committed to ploddingly rehearsing your lines each afternoon for a month from 3 pm to 4 pm. Or maybe you’re an improviser who finds time here and there, rehearsing what you’ll say at random moments between meetings.

The forgetting curve suggests you should follow a very different memorization process than any of these entail. It shows that there’s a precise moment that’s best for practicing your lines. That moment is just before you are about to forget them.

. . . .

Almost like your fingerprint, your forgetting curve is very different from anyone else’s. But a type of auto-analytics tool called “Spaced Repetition Software” or “SRS” can learn the idiosyncrasies of your memory, and then ping you to practice at the optimal time.

These mobile and desktop tools are like automated flashcards, though you work through your “pile” according to your personal algorithm and the rules of spaced repetition.

Link to the rest at The Harvard Business Review and here is more about Spaced Repetition Learning Systems

From LiveHacked:

It’s no secret around here that I’m a huge fan of Scrivener, the #1 tool for writing. I’ve used it for two novels, six nonfiction books, and even for quickly formatting copied text to generate personal-use PDFs.

Still, I get questions all the time about what it really does that Word or Pages can’t handle.

There’s no easy answer. 

However, I wanted to write a post that would provide the “pre-user” a good starting point for comparing Scrivener to their current writing tool of choice, to help people decide if it in fact would benefit their workflow.

. . . .

Scrivener makes writing easy. Unbelievably easy — it won’t give you the correct words, but its easy-to-use interface, helpful tips, and loads of features will inspire you to write and get out of the way when you just need a muse-capturing device.

. . . .

For “Fiction,” you can choose from Novel, Novel (with Parts), or Short Story. Each has its benefits, though for fiction I tend to go with a blank canvas and build out my story’s structure from there.

. . . .

For “Non-Fiction,” you can choose from numerous templates for educational purposes (marked conveniently with a little graduation cap) like Essay (Chicago Style), Paper (APA or MLA), and Research Proposal for the grant-writers out there. Also included are some more general non-fiction templates.

. . . .

The “Notebook” is a really helpful feature, and it’s a dream-come-true for those of us who’ve had to put up with Word’s lack of internal organization within a file structure.

A great example for how to use the Notebook in Scrivener is if you’re writing a novel according to the Scene/Sequel layout . . . the Notebook makes it easy to drag/drop the different sections or chapters around in your book. Try doing that with a word processor.

Rather than creating and managing a different file for each chapter or each scene, Scrivener handles all of that for you.

Link to the rest at LiveHacked

From The New York Times:

Kidnappers used to make ransom notes with letters cut out of magazines. Now, notes simply pop up on your computer screen, except the hostage is your PC.

In the past year, hundreds of thousands of people across the world have switched on their computers to find distressing messages alerting them that they no longer have access to their PCs or any of the files on them.

The messages claim to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some 20 other law enforcement agencies across the globe or, most recently, Anonymous, a shadowy group of hackers. The computer users are told that the only way to get their machines back is to pay a steep fine.

And, curiously, it’s working. The scheme is making more than $5 million a year, according to computer security experts who are tracking them.

. . . .

Essentially online extortion, ransomware involves infecting a user’s computer with a virus that locks it. The attackers demand money before the computer will be unlocked, but once the money is paid, they rarely unlock it.

In the vast majority of cases, victims do not regain access to their computer unless they hire a computer technician to remove the virus manually. And even then, they risk losing all files and data because the best way to remove the virus is to wipe the computer clean.

. . . .

Researchers say criminals now use victims’ Internet addresses to customize ransom notes in their native tongue. Instead of pornographic images, criminals flash messages from local law enforcement agencies accusing them of visiting illegal pornography, gambling or piracy sites and demand they pay a fine to unlock their computer.

Victims in the United States see messages in English purporting to be from the F.B.I. or Justice Department. In the Netherlands, people get a similar message, in Dutch, from the local police. (Some Irish variations even demand money in Gaelic.) The latest variants speak to victims through recorded audio messages that tell users that if they do not pay within 48 hours, they will face criminal charges. Some even show footage from a computer’s webcam to give the illusion that law enforcement is watching.

The messages often demand that victims buy a preloaded debit card that can be purchased at a local drugstore — and enter the PIN. That way it’s impossible for victims to cancel the transaction once it becomes clear that criminals have no intention of unlocking their PC.

Link to the rest at The New York Times

Since the value of the files on an author’s computer can be very high – a manuscript representing months of work – PG advises preventative measures. He is undoubtedly more paranoid than necessary, but here are some suggestions (PG uses them all):

1. Antivirus/Anti-malware software to prevent infections in the first place – Norton is probably the largest-selling program of this type. For Windows users, Microsoft Security Essentials is a high-quality free program.

2. Online backup of your files so you have them even if your computer is hosed – Mozy is easy to use. Install it and the program automatically backs up your files to Mozy servers via your internet connection several times per day. You can try Mozy out free. Prices begin at $5.99 per month for 50 GB. If you have more than 50 GB of data files and don’t want to pay more, you can configure Mozy to back up only the important ones. Dropbox is another excellent program that can be used for backup. If you use more than one computer, in addition to storing your files in the cloud, Dropbox can continuously synchronize files on all your computers so the latest novel draft on your desktop is also on your laptop. If one computer gets zapped by a virus, you can use the files Dropbox has synced on another computer. PG is not your tax advisor, but he expects the cost of Mozy and/or Dropbox service is probably a reasonable business expense for authors who make money from their writing.

3. Local backup of your files as a belt-and-suspenders solution which also lets you restore your files faster than you can with Mozy or Dropbox. You do this by purchasing a cheap large external hard drive like this or this. You plug the hard drive into your computer and install some back-up software. Often hard drives come with their own back-up software. PG has used SyncBack, which comes in free or paid versions, for a long time with good results. If you want two belts-and-suspenders, you can buy two local hard drives and rotate them, giving a friend one drive to keep in a location other than your home or office. You can also use a couple of large-capacity thumb drives like this for more-portable off-site backups.

4. All the backups are not just for protection against viruses and malware, but also cover you if your computer is stolen or if Hurricane Sandy drowns your home or office.