Deborah Woehr

I finally got a CMS to work on my husband’s website, Lord have mercy! What’s it been, two weeks?? The header is positioned correctly; I figured out how to remove the search form; and I’ve uploaded some images and entered some text. My husband will have to help me with the content because I have rudimentary knowledge of the things that he does.

As for the NaNo project, I have no outline, but character sketches and some questions that I’d written down. I’m getting closer to the mystery and have decided that I need to plan a bit. Yesterday, I started comparing wiki software when I read The Scribe’s post about outlining a novel with a wiki.

I spent half of yesterday and most of today researching, installing, uninstalling (when things didn’t work out), and hunting for alternatives. I found two outlining programs that I’m testing right now: NoteBook and Omni Outliner. So far, Notebook has a more intuitive interface. I’ll review both in later posts.

For now, I have some serious catching up to do. Although I don’t have high expectations of reaching the finish line, my goal is to surpass last year’s wordcount. I’m a hair’s breath away from that right now.

Theft is the Number One reason why writers haven’t jumped on the ebook publishing bandwagon. Below is an example of blatant plagiarism/book theft, along with some solutions as to how Joe and his friends are tracking down the original thief.

The Rip-off of Joe Sugarman’s Triggers

I went out yesterday and casted my vote for and against Schwarzenegger’s propositions. The one I was hoping to see pass was Proposition 74, which would extend the probationary period for our teachers. My youngest son has really lucked out with his teachers, but my oldest had the same misfortune as I did in that he got stuck with teachers who didn’t know how to teach and/or didn’t care.

It’s all about getting their tenure and their union retirement. I was hoping that this measure would pass because I’d really like to see the crappy teachers get booted so the good ones can come in and take their place. I’d like to see an improvement in California’s educational system for once. But it didn’t pass, which means that these crappy teachers will get to keep their jobs despite the fact that over half of their class is failing, which means that our kids will continue to get a bum deal.

My husband confided in me that he almost didn’t go vote because he knew that it would do no good. He then went on to say that the abortion consent measure (for minors) and the prescription disount measures would most likely get overturned in court. So why did we do this yesterday? Sure we have the privilege of having our say, but has it really gotten us anywhere?

All of the money that was spent on boths sides of this campaign could have been better spent to fix our disintegrating freeways, retrofitting old schools, hiring more police and fire fighters, etc. Things that we need, not what the politicians and unions want for themselves and only for themselves. My rant is over because that’s also a waste of time.

Every now and then I find the need to declutter this blog. For instance, I’ve deleted the blogs that I don’t have time to maintain. That was something I’ve needed to do for at least a month.

I got quite a bit done yesterday, as my hands will tell you. Because of my years in Admin, I suffer from Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, which flares up when I type or crochet too much. The last bad flare up had me totally incapacitated for a day.

Last night, I sat next to my husband and watched TV. My hands and forearms started that all-too-familiar ache. This morning, my wrist is complaining as I’m typing this post. So, I’d better listen to my body today because I want to finish Chapter Five tomorrow.

This was the best day yet of this race. The survivors have blown off some steam, although Sawyer is ready to start some more with Sayid. I’m leaving them on the mountainside for the night (it’s daytime for them). And Jack is getting ready to try and save the doomed Marshal.

This is a culmination of last night’s and this morning’s work. Most of this was done last night, as I was trying to wind down from yesterday’s frustration with the website. I’m going to stop for the evening and work on Prosperity.

As for the wordcount, I copied my story into Nisus and then verified the wordcount with WordCounter 1.5. Both wordcounts matched. From this point on, I’ve decided to post my wordcounts on Sundays. I know I said that I wouldn’t obsess over this, but the competitive side in me won’t let it go.

9,364 / 50,000 (18.7%)

If this weren’t so true, I’d find this funny. As you know, the price of gas shot up before hurricane Rita hit, based on predictions of the damage she might do.

When I reached another milestone in this NaNoWri project this morning, I decided to upgrade my profile on their website. I’d heard about the problem with Word’s wordcount from somewhere, but was reminded when I went to the NaNo site. For some reason, Word beefs up the wordcount up to 30%.

This isn’t an issue if you’re writing simple business letters or reports. But it’s a major issue for writers, who rely too heavily (like me) on the program’s wordcount feature. Accuracy is key when submitting short stories and manuscripts to editors and publishers.

There is a manual formula for determining your story’s wordcount, but I avoid math as much as possible. Plus, I’m lazy. I’d much rather have the word processor do it so I can write.

The best word processing program I ever owned was WordPerfect. It ran great on my Mac Performa (long gone now). I stopped using it when my oldest son joined Cub Scouts, and I needed Word to read the documents that the committe emailed to me. Corel has since discontinued WordPerfect for the Mac, which forced me to use Word.

Although I haven’t had the problems others have had with Word, I’m tired of it. I don’t use it for anything other than a typewriter because the graphics and interface suck (especially the Help section). The best thing I can say about Word is that it is able to handle long documents.

I tried a cheaper program called Nisus way back in 1998, but it didn’t take too well to my large manuscript. That was why I bought WordPerfect. Just today, I was surfing the Internet and found a newer version called Nisus Writer Express 2.5.

I love the floating palette interface. Everything is very straightforward. However, when I tried to copy and paste the first eight chapters of Prosperity into one file, the double-spaced formatting changed to single for no apparent reason. I’ll have to investigate this later.

Another program I found was Mellel. What impressed me was a testimonial from an author who said that he was able to type an 80,000-word manuscript with this program. So, now the trial version of that is now sitting on my desktop.
The interface is a bit more elaborate than Nisus but very clean. They also have good user documentation, which is rare. I’ll be testing that one out this week as well.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

I accomplished two things today: finishing Chapter One and designing the home page for my husband’s website. Without going into great, boring detail, it looks as if I’m going to have to hand-code his site. Looking on the bright side, this will give me some much-needed experience in webdesign.

As for my writing, I’ll continue with it after dinner and a good soak in the hottub. I’ll see what the rest of the evening will produce. Then tomorrow, I will push everything HTML and CMS-related aside and plow into this story. Tomorrow is my day.