Thursday thoughts

03 Nov 2011 2 Comments

by Kay Hudson in Books, Reading, Writing Tags: , , ,

Nothing special to write about tonight, but I thought I’d post a few random bits and pieces.  I’m on Day 117 (once I write at least one hundred words tonight) of my current writing challenge, trying to finish my work in progress by the end of the month.  My deadline has nothing to do with NaNoWriMo, and I don’t have a whole novel to write in that time, but the idea is the same.

I’m reading a new book by my friend Cheryl Bolen, With His Lady’s Assistance, the first in a planned series of Regency-set mysteries.  It’s a delightful book, and should be available shortly on Amazon and other reputable ebook shops.  I’ll post a review and a link when it’s up.  [Here’s the link, review coming soon.]

I’ve now read three of the six John Wyndham books I ordered a couple of months ago.  The Midwich Cuckoos was filmed (twice) as Village of the Damned, but Cuckoos is much the better title.  Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes (Out of the Deeps in U.S. editions) included a lot of action, but Cuckoos is a philosophical book for the most part, with a great deal of rather academic dialog and a first person narrator who warns the reader from the beginning that he will be telling the story as it happened, not as he learned of it.  I enjoyed the book, remembered most of it from long-ago readings, but I was struck by what now seems a very old-fashioned style and pace.  One of those classic books that makes one wonder if it would ever be published today.

The lastest version (3.4) of Action Outline has added graphic support.  Now you can tuck pictures into the text portion of your outline, which should be useful for research notes.

A friend (Hi, Margie!) sent me this picture in one of those email collections that circulates endlessly around the universe.  I hadn’t seen this little guy before.  I would happily give credit where credit is due, but I have no idea where the photo came from.

Software revisited: Action Outline

02 Oct 2011 Leave a comment

by Kay Hudson in Technology, Writing Tags: ,

A couple of months ago, a software offer turned up in my email box for a program called Action Outline.  I remembered using an earlier version two or three computers (and Windows versions) ago, but I no longer had a copy.  I followed the email link back to the home page of Green Parrots Software and took a look.

At the time, I was in the midst of plotting the second half of Bathtub Jinn.  I’m usually more pantser than plotter, but I wanted to enter a couple of contests that required a synopsis, so I was doing my best to organize the rest of the book.  Action Outline looked like it might help with that, and it was on sale, so I pulled out my writing-only credit card, paid for and downloaded the program in a matter of minutes.  Talk about instant gratification!  I remember when software came in the mail.  And we made storage copies on big black floppy diskettes before we installed anything.

The latest version of Action Outline has been all dolled up for Windows 7 (it runs on XP and up).  It’s faster, cleaner, and more versatile than I remembered, and it turned out to be very suitable for my purposes.  As soon as I had it running, I set up a file for the chapters I’d already written, breaking each into scenes, with time, location, POV character, other characters, and a line or two covering the general action.  I used colored flags on the scene labels, visible at a glance, to indicate point of view.  The program allows you to expand any, all, or none of the branches at any time, so you can see whichever sections you choose.

Action Outline can keep several files open at once.  Currently I have open both of my working Bathtub Jinn files (chapters and scenes already written in one and plot material for the rest of the book  in another), as well as one with notes on a possible future book.  As I write, I fill in the new chapters in the first outline and remove that material from the other, which is not nearly as neat:

I’ve been using Action Outline on this project for two months now, and I think it’s a keeper.  I still track an abbreviated outline on Excel, but I’m beginning to think that’s overkill.  I’m also beginning to think writing with a rough synopsis rocks, although I doubt if I could write one from scratch, before any of the book was written.  The program also does a good, and flexible, job of printing, from the entire file down to one item.

The current price on Action Outline is about $40, but you can download a somewhat limited free version to try it out.  The investment has definitely been worthwhile for me.