A Round-up of Writing (and Layout) Tools

I haven’t written about writing tools for a while. I haven’t written about them all in one place. Here’s a round-up of tools that take me from first draft to publication-ready. (Note for all my International readers — these are all English language programs):

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

Scrivener. This is the program I use to compose my writing. Think of it as a writing environment that organizes your work by chapters, allows a way to outline your work, take notes on it, set goals, and many other things. Even those people who compose using pen and paper will eventually have to transcribe their work on the computer, and this program is the one you want to use. Competitors in this function are programs like Storyist and online services such as Campfire. Skip those; use this full-featured program. You can find Scrivener here; they also have versions for your iOS gadgets.
ProWritingAid. ProWritingAid will point out your misspellings, your poor comma usage, and much more. I have learned many writing habits over sixty years, some of which I didn’t know were bad habits. For example, I sometimes use too many adjectives, rely heavily on adverbs instead of the perfect verb, or write subjects and objects that don’t agree. All of those grammar rules I failed to absorb in grade school come back to haunt me in my writing. ProWritingAid has matured my writing these past couple years, and I don’t regret getting a lifetime membership. You can find ProWritingAid here.
Atticus. Although you can use Atticus for composing your text, that’s not its strength unless you find Scrivener too complicated. Where Atticus shows its strength is in formatting for publication. You can import a Word document from Scrivener into Atticus, and give it proper page size, section breaks, and chapter titles. It takes a Word document and turns it into the look and feel of a proper book. You can find Atticus here.
Photoshop. As an indie author, I design my book covers. I use either stock photos (and pay for them) or original pieces by my talented niece (I pay for those as well). I need to design these into a 5×8 book cover with a front cover, a side spine with book information, and a back cover with a blurb and author information. Adobe Photoshop does this very well. There is a bit of a learning curve, because Photoshop has so many features that are beyond my skill set. But it also does what I need to do. Photoshop is expensive, so maybe you’d be better off hiring someone for cover production, but that adds up after a while. Here’s the link to Photoshop.
Amazon KDP. Publication platforms will depend on what publishing platform you wish your book to be on. I use Amazon KDP, which means I place my books on Amazon and occasionally other platforms. I find their interface pretty easy as long as I have done my due diligence on Atticus and Photoshop. The biggest challenge has always been tweaking my book cover to fit the number of pages/width of the book. Here’s a link to Amazon KDP.

Buying these at once can get expensive; I recommend prioritizing these and deciding based on your budget and needs. Scrivener only costs $60 US and KDP is free; the others are priced with annual fees and, often, lifetime purchases. In the US, these are eligible as work-related tax deductions if you are working to sell your books, so you save roughly 25% of your expenditure in taxes.

After publishing eight books (mostly the Kringle romances), I don’t know where I’d have gotten without these.

The Last Thing I Got Excited About?

Daily writing prompt

Tell us about the last thing you got excited about.

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My answer to this question is going to be disappointing. I don’t get excited about much anymore. I attribute this to my age (60). By now I’ve seen everything; I’m much more mellow. Time passes, and I get to the next item on the calendar.

That being said, I look forward to things. Soon I will get to work on the cover of my next book. I look forward to this weekend and to the first day of classes on Monday. I will go to Starved Rock at Christmas and I look forward to that. I just don’t have the “I can’t wait” feeling I had when I was younger.

It’s not bad being relaxed about life. It’s a good thing, because my life doesn’t resemble a roller coaster between highs and lows, excitement and doldrums. I would guess former excitement levels were an artifact of the bipolar disorder, and the only reason I don’t seem excited now is because I was SOOOO eager before. So maybe my lack of excitement is a relative thing, and I really am excited for Monday and a once-again change to the routine. I’ll see when I get there.

Hopeful Thinking

I have discussed writing as a flow activity often enough that I’ve made the case that writing for the sake of writing is a worthy pursuit. Even so, I like to get recognition for my writing. I want to know that I am an interesting writer and have some skill.

Right now, in society, wanting external validation is a weakness. We call it “attention-seeking”^* and that’s considered bad. However, external validation shapes our self-esteem, according to sociometer theory. When we don’t get it, we shape our behavior in order to get it.

In some ways, I get the validation I need. My friends know to ask me how the writing is going. That’s appropriate and my sociometer registers positive.

What I wish I had, though, is the readers. This is something most indie authors struggle with. There are so many writers out there, and so many books, and some people use traditional publishing as their judge how worthy a book is to read. What traditional publishing signals, in reality, is how well the idea sells. There are good writers in independent publishing. But they’re hard to find, and there’s a catch-22 that dogs indie writers: People read books that are read by others.

How to get readers? I wish I knew. I advertise mine on Facebook and Threads and Instagram. But the ads are not tempting readers to read, and I don’t know what to do about that. It’s hard sometimes, but I persist in hopeful thinking that I will get a following someday.

^*Not all attention-seeking is good, and I can explain this in terms of sociometer theory. The bad form of attention-seeking is that which violates one of the social norms of a group, and that is attention-hogging. We don’t approve of one person getting all the attention, but are often too polite to signal that directly. Wanting positive attention in and of itself is not bad, however; it’s something we’re programmed to do.

My Namesake

Daily writing prompt

Where did your name come from?

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I don’t know why my parents thought I would turn out normal after they named me after my Uncle Larry. My reprobate Uncle Larry, who collected rents at his apartment building with a gun holster strapped to his thigh, the one of endless parties, the one who died when he neglected a perfectly curable skin cancer until it was too late. Why do you name a kid after someone like that?

I turned out a rebel in different ways. I went to college (the first person in my direct line to do so) and didn’t quit until I graduated with a PhD. This doesn’t sound like a rebellion, but I was a late baby boomer, and my mother practically begged me to come home and become a waitress, an acceptable job that could make a lot of money from tips. Mom finally gave up all hope of having a grandchild from me, a wise choice.

I went through these years with untreated bipolar disorder, and I was very sedate for someone with the malady. I didn’t abuse drugs; I gave up partying after a short stint of drinking with roommates; I didn’t get pregnant. I was, however, eccentric, and that hasn’t gone away since the medication.

This is what happens when you name someone after their crazy uncle.

What Motivates Me?

Daily writing prompt

What motivates you?

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I wish I could write an inspirational answer to this question, because it’s ripe for a motivation expert to make money from. Alas, I will not be inspirational, only honest.

I had a very productive summer on both the writing and the work fronts. I paced myself so that my work didn’t fall due at the last minute. From this, I learned what motivates me.

First, boredom motivates me. There’s only so much scrolling on the Internet I can stand without being bored. I don’t like being bored. I could have slept all that time, I suppose, because I don’t find sleep boring; however, day sleeping is not good for me. That left me with needing something to do, and work and writing helped.

Second, flow motivates me. I get flow from productive writing. Not so much from putting together classes; designing course sites and planning lessons doesn’t promote that seamless experience. I want to experience flow, so it’s motivating.

Third, blocking out time motivates me. I had whole days to waste all summer and work that I could do later. Instead, I told myself daily, “I will do three chapters first, then follow that up with writing time.” I put the less motivational classwork first. I scheduled everything in-between my intern visits (which broke up the monotony of having the same classwork daily).

There are some things, however, that I find so unmotivating that I avoid them. Housework is one of these things. I seem so overwhelmed trying to clean a cluttered house that I just break down. Our house is messy and cluttered as a result. Not dirty, just messy and cluttered. I think I will not be motivated for that until my husband and I decide to tackle the clutter together.

We can use the following professionally recommended strategies: 1) Break it down into smaller tasks; 2) Do the hardest stuff first; 3) Reward ourselves; 4) Quit if we’re not into the task after 15 minutes. That last part is the challenging one: I am never into housework. Is anyone?

I am obviously not a motivational expert, because I have not conquered my house. I hate the thought of the house taking away my precious writing time. So I hope my readers got something out of this anyhow.

A Rejection

I got a submission rejected yesterday. I knew I would, because it was a “first chapter” call, and I submitted my obviously genre fiction first chapter to an outfit likely looking for literary fiction. They let me down easy, of course.

Do I feel bad about it? Of course. I had fantasies about at least being longlisted, if not actually winning.

I’ve been rejected a lot. I suspect that much of the time, it’s because I have entered works into the realm of literary journals when I’m a genre writer; my stuff “doesn’t fit”. I’ve been told this. Much of the time, although I don’t like to admit it, my work probably doesn’t fit their quality standards either. I don’t know why I keep trying, except that one of my “doesn’t fit” stories got an honorable mention in a clearly literary contest.

I could take my rejections as not being “good enough”, or I could keep trying. I no longer query agents for my novels, instead choosing to self-publish. My reasons for this are less about rejections and more about the horror stories I’ve heard about traditional publishing these days. I go through periods of submitting on Submittable, and occasionally I get published. I’m not universally rejected, and nobody has begged me never to publish anything else again.

Rejections don’t spoil my flow time, nor do they destroy my inspirations. I do hope I get a major acceptance someday, because external validation is something I crave. But I’m still writing.

At the Risk of Sounding Repititous …

What do you enjoy most about writing?

My favorite thing about writing is getting totally absorbed in the process, a process called “flow”. I am a flow evangelist; I believe that everyone should find a flow activity. Flow contributes through well-being by engaging our brains in something outside ourselves.

Now that I got that out of the way, I will talk about other things I enjoy about writing. One of the biggest is watching my progress. When I was younger, I used a lot of adjectives, and my writing had a lot of “adjective noun, adjective noun” construction. This got a bit sing-songy. Now I write with just enough adjectives to get my point across, and not always paired with a noun directly. I used to use a lot of adverbs, with the same monotony of language. Now I use them sparingly and with more interesting nouns. I think this is an improvement; at least when I read my work over, it sounds better.

I enjoy watching my characters develop. It’s interesting how I have the bare idea of a character at the beginning, and once I start writing, their conversations flesh them out as a real character. I sometimes write conversations with them (which I call interrogations) to develop their characters and help me write.

But all of this comes back to the ability to sit and write, finding the words and going into an altered state where the words flow on the page and I lose track of time. It all goes back to flow.

A New Project!

I think I have a new project to write. I was going mad dealing with no motivation for writing more short stories, having written three this summer.

I will write the sequel to Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Universe, which is a serial novel on Kindle Vella. In Kel and Brother Coyote, the shipper for hire Kel Beemer gets hired by the monk Brother Coyote. She gives him three rules before agreeing to the hire — no passengers, no politics, and no restricted planets. Brother Coyote, however, breaks all three rules within fifteen minutes. They embark on an adventure that involves a plot to conquer a beauty planet, a psychic symbiont, and the two’s pasts intertwined.

The serial can be found here.

I’m not sure where I’m going to go with this, but I’m going on a writing retreat this weekend! I will spend my writing time hashing out the basic plot and other fine points; it looks like Broadway Coffee in Kansas City will be the venue.

Positive Emotions Then and Now

Daily writing prompt

What positive emotion do you feel most often?

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Fifteen years ago, I would have answered the question, “What positive emotion do you feel most often?” with elation. A perpetual high doesn’t make for a sustainable life, and in fact, I wavered between elation and despair (often in the same day). This was life with untreated bipolar disorder, fast cycling version.

Maybe because of the medication, and maybe because of getting older, my most common positive emotion is contentment. When I was younger, I thought of contentment as something inferior, as a curse that the fairy who didn’t get invited to the christening would cast on the poor baby^*.

Now I prefer contentment. It’s nice to not have to feel the extremes all the time. I do not get exhausted with my contentment as I did with my elation. The opposite of contentment on the spectrum is discontent, which is not a crippling feeling like despair.

I would not trade contentment for the overdose of elation ever again. I like small doses of elation, but I treasure the anchor of calm, peaceful emotion that is contentment.

^* This is a common trope in Western fairy tales in which a family presents a royal baby to the court at large in a christening (baptism) ceremony. The family invites all the witches/fairies/aunts save one. The uninvited one shows up anyhow and curses the baby. Sometimes the curse seems innocuous but causes a lot of harm, at times hilarious, to the child (for example, the child who could not tell a lie).

How Do I Plan? How Do You Plan?

Daily writing prompt

How do you plan your goals?

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I teach this topic in my resource management class. So when someone asks “How”, I’m going to have a complex and textbook answer.

The way people in general plan goals is to:

Derive a goal from their values
Clarify the goal (in terms of who, what, where, how, when, etc.)
Assess the resources needed (and whether they’re enough)
Make an auxiliary plan of where to get more resources (sometimes)
Develop standards (in terms of what success looks like)
Set a sequence of actions to guide the actions needed to carry out the implementation of the goal.

Do people really follow these steps? Unless we do everything without thinking, we do. The more complex and important the goal, the more obviously it looks like this. But these steps are more or less happening even if the goal is fixing a quick dinner. Think of following a recipe; the steps in the recipe follow this pattern. The person lays out standards — I need to add these ingredients in the right types and amounts. I have to follow a specific sequence of combining them — there’s my sequence of actions.

Plans at the spur of the moment may go through these steps quickly — think of deciding on the fly to go out to eat at a restaurant you’re passing by. You look at the menu costs; you check your pocket. Then you go in, knowing that the wait person will ask you if you want something to drink as they hand you a menu, then you will look over the menu and decide what you want, then you will tell the waitress. Standards and sequences.

Look at the step where resources are assessed. Not everyone looks at finding the resources if they don’t have them ready. Only people who are comfortable with change do that because it creates a new goal they perhaps haven’t counted on. People who are not comfortable with change stick with the goals they’ve always set, which we could call maintenance goals because they maintain a current way of life.

This is not the answer the prompt asked for. I was supposed to write how I personally set goals. But it answers the question. Other than this, what do you need to know?