Work In Progress
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Jan
15
If you’re like me, sometimes you have problems coming up with ideas for blog entries or articles. Here are a some tips to help you:
1. Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds on various subjects you are most interested in. Scan through the feeds every morning or at night and select a few articles for thorough reading. After reading the articles, tag them using your own classification system.
Classifying articles in different categories helps locate them quickly. Use Google’s RSS reader for reading and tagging the RSS feeds. You will have access to your categorized articles from any computers connected to the Internet.
2. Subscribe to a few print magazines and read them regularly. (I subscribe to Smithsonian, Saveur, This Old House and several others.) If you can’t afford to, or simply don’t want to, go to your local public library. After you finish reading an article, record the main points of the article in a Google note. You will have access to these notes anywhere in the World.
3. Use a PDA and carry it with you wherever you go. Better yet, get a PDA with a camera and cell phone. You will only carry one gadget for all your communication, organization, and content generation needs.
Take pictures of interesting places, events, and moments you come across in your daily life. Use the voice recorder of the PDA to record whenever an idea hits you. Every night, transfer the ideas from your PDA to Google notes and upload your pictures to flickr.
4. Scan through the comments posted by others on the online articles you read regularly. Record interesting ideas, pros and cons of an issue, and strong opinions posted by others in your Google notes. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
5. Have lunch with friends at least once a week. Bounce ideas off them on any topic. Mix ideas from divergent topics to create new ideas in you own subjects.
6. Use the time like driving, watching TV while exercising in a treadmill, etc. to think about your favorite topics and try to relate to things you observe on the road and on the TV. When you get an idea, record it in your PDA.
7. Go through all the ideas and articles you have recorded in Google notes and your RSS reader to create new ideas by giving new twists to the old ideas. Combine two or more ideas and change or improve an existing idea to come up with your own idea.
8. Use a variety of online tools like Technorati, Digg, Delicious, etc. for writing inspiration. Every hour, hundreds of new articles and news stories are posted in these sites. Check Yahoo’s buzz log to find out what people are talking about and searching for. Quickly scan them to hit a few gold nuggets that can serve as springboards for new ideas.
9. Using on-line tools discussed earlier, select an issue and jot down all the pros and cons. Search Google to enhance the idea by adding more pros and cons. Once you have collected a dozen diverse opinions, you will be able to write an article based on those facts in a pro-con format.
10. If you are good at using data for analysis and comfortable in the use of a spreadsheet, draw charts in the spreadsheet and look for patterns in the data. Provide you own interpretation to the data. Illustrate your articles with charts and graphs.
11. To generate topics for your article, use overture keyword selector. Select a single keyword and run it through the overture. You will see a dozen or more keywords based on the search popularity. Copy a few selected keywords to a notepad. Now, take each keyword and do a search in online sites like Digg, Technorati, etc. You will see a number of articles. Read them to generate ideas.
12. Ask yourself what if, what else, and why not questions on an issue and search the Internet to find answers from different sources. Create new ideas generated from existing materials, provide step-by-step guide for somebody to practice an obvious idea, or offer benefits of practicing an old idea.
Dec
1
For those of you who celebrated it, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. We had a nice mini vacation – got to go out on a date with Matt, did some Christmas shopping, plus did some writing.
I’m slowly but surely approaching the halfway point of TMA, and I’ve started thinking about how to market the book. Specifically, what genre to say it’s a part of. It’s obviously (at least to me) urban fantasy – a modern setting with fantastical elements. But what else could it be? Paranormal romance? No, the story isn’t about the relationship between Alex and Jarred (or is it Jared – I need to decide on how to spell his name soon 
). The romance is a subplot.
Putting the supernatural stuff aside, what kind of novel is it? Is it a mystery or a thriller? Probably thriller, as it’s a lot more action oriented and not someone trying to solve a mystery. I’ve got several books on how to write mysteries, but they don’t cover thrillers all that well. I’ve picked up the book How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery & the Roller Coaster of Suspense
A member of my writing group suggested chick lit, of all things. I was surprised, but in reading through it with an eye towards the genre, Alex has the right snarky attitude and, well, shoes are mentioned. In browsing through deals on Amazon, I discovered Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel
And, in the interest if full disclosure, if you click on any of the links, and purchase the book, you’ll be supporting my writing habit.
Nov
20
I’m pleased to announce the first in a series of free downloads I’m creating to help writers in their research. A Place to Start is just that – a list of books and articles to give you a place to start your research. Each book entry has the book or manuscript name, author (or translator) and a summary of the contents of the book.
The first APtS is Medieval Cooking & Food References, and lists 11 books to get you started.
All of the APtS mini-books are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
So go ahead. Click on the link below to grab it for yourself!
If you find APtS: Medieval Cook & Food helpful or otherwise liked it, please leave me a comment and let me know!
Mar
4
What’s up For Tomorrow
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In my last blog entry, I talked about research. Specifically, how to deal with the realization you need to do some more research when you’re in the middle of writing. I was going to look at how to organize your research today, but I’ve got too many things on my plate. Check back here tomorrow for that discussion.
Feb
28
Research, or not to research.
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That’s the question, isn’t it.
When you’re getting ready to write, you’ve done a bunch of world building. For the most part, your research should be done. Of course, things always pop up while you’re working on a chapter that you didn’t expect. So what do you do? Do you stop writing and research, or keep moving ahead, leaving yourself a note for when you do your revisions.
In almost all situations, I would recommend forging ahead, and doing the research later. You don’t want to get bogged down and distracted by all the neat things you’ll discover, and the tangents you’ll end up following. It’d be nice if I could follow my own advice, isn’t it.
In working on the script for the Domino Girls, the ghost of a Confederate Army Colonel is being added to the mix. He’s about to introduce himself to the twins, and I suddenly realized I know next to nothing about manners and etiquette from that time period. This is one situation, though, where I can’t just forge ahead. This information will affect everything have this character do from now on, so I can’t avoid it. I have to stop working on the script and do some research.
This is where my old habit of buying reference books for the sake of buying them usually comes in handy. I have a copy of Everyday Life During the Civil War, so I go grab it off the shelf and start looking through it. Lots of info about prices, clothing, and everyday life, but nothing about manners and etiquette.
My Google-Fu is with me tonight, and I find a number of useful links. One of them has links to a site that has scanned in copies of manuscripts in the collections of Robarts library at the University of Toronto. I manage to stop myself after downloading half a dozen etiquette primers (and believe me, that’s quite a feat – having broadband makes it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy to feed my research material addiction). Now I have to read through them all and hopefully find what I need.
Still, there is a point where I will have to draw the line, stop researching and start writing again. If I haven’t found what I need, I’ll just fake it, saying he’s been watching what’s going on for the past two hundred years and had learned the changes in manners, and that will explain why it’s not 100% accurate.
What do you do when you discover while writing that you need to do more research?