In which I investigate

On November 17, 2015November 17, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Reviews5 Comments

Huty1913428 I’m issuing a qualified thumbs-up to the new text editor, guys, and I’m surprising myself by doing so, believe me. The only thing I’ve found that doesn’t work like I want it to is moving images around, and that feels more like a temporary bug than a deliberate decision someone made. It’s also pretty easy to fix in HTML if the image won’t slide around properly in the WYSIWYG editor.

One thing I’d like to see is a way to copy posts straight from the new editor; I actually use that feature quite a lot what with the various hashtagged posts I do every week, and it’s kind of annoying to have to go through the My Sites menu to copy a post or to just hope the original (as in, the black-and-white one from three years ago) editor pops up. However, now that I’ve typed enough that I don’t want to cancel out, I do seen an “All Posts” arrow in the upper-right hand corner, so maybe that’s where I’d go before I start writing if I wanted to copy a post. (EDIT: Nope. As of right now, you need the admin page to copy posts, which is unchanged from the last version of the editor.)

Another minor annoyance: Choosing a category does not unclick “Uncategorized” automatically like it used to. They should fix that.

Continue reading “In which I investigate” →

A #Scrivener help beg

On August 30, 2015August 30, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

The internet isn’t cooperating. I love the hell out of Scrivener’s Compile feature, especially the way it builds the Table of Contents for me without me having to carefully hyperlink everything. But:

Does anyone know how to prevent it from actually adding the “Chapter Seventy” part in front of the chapter title? Because it’s doing that throughout and I’d prefer that it not do that. I’ve been fiddling and haven’t figured out what the problem is yet.

(EDIT: Figured it out, naturally. Leaving the post up so you can get a gander at some chapter titles.)

On the learning curve

On August 30, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

One of the fun things about learning a new piece of software is that you can completely screw yourself if you do things wrong and not learn about it until it is deeply obnoxious to fix what you did.

I have committed myself to writing Searching for Malumba and Starlight in Scrivener, and I intend to keep to that.

Searching for Malumba has, at present, about 140 individual essays.

I have just discovered that each of those essays, which are technically each chapters, needs to be in its own folder in order to compile properly. And I keep accidentally clicking the wrong things while trying to create those folders.

You may fire when ready.

Okay, this is some bullshit

On March 14, 2015March 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

I am– once again– trying to get a clean manuscript of The Benevolence Archives uploaded to Amazon. The version on Smashwords hasn’t been touched, because that’s the one I actually get movement from and I’m not fixing it until this is ironed out.

If I look at my document in Word, it looks like this:

(“Queris” is yellow because I used the search function to find this particular spot.)

Note that there are spaces between all the words.

Now look at one happens in Amazon’s online previewer after it converts the file for Kindle:

Note that the space between “to” and “the” has been arbitrarily removed.

Note also that this happens all over the damn place. And it appears to not only be arbitrary and random, but unfixable– and Amazon’s spellcheck isn’t even finding those mistakes any longer, as it reported this manuscript to be free of typos, ignoring not only the spacing errors it introduced but also words like “Queris.”

I am angryified at the moment.

EDIT: I think I’ve got it. There are still a couple of spots of wonkiness but at least it doesn’t look like it’s filled with typographical errors any longer. God, that was annoying.

In which I need a nerd

On January 18, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek5 Comments

Hire engineers I need y’all to understand something: when most people say they need a nerd, they’re looking for me. And I am vastly unqualified to perform this task on my own, so when I say I need a nerd, I need a nerd. Like, nerdery is how you make your living.

Gotta be a couple of y’all out there somewhere, right?

Here’s what I want, and I can already think of three ways it’s complicated without knowing anything, so basically what I’m expecting is that the first person with any experience in app development who reads this will leave a comment telling me why it’s impossible. I am fairly obsessive about monitoring my sales numbers, right? I’m sure I’m not the only one. But as of right now that means monitoring three different websites several times a day.

(“Be less obsessive” is not the answer I’m looking for. I want a nerd, not a psychologist.)

I want a mobile app that monitors those websites for me, sends me a notification whenever I get a sale somewhere, and aggregates everything together in a bunch of lovely graphs and charts and other things. If it can monitor royalties and ping me when I get a review, too, that would be superb. Also an awesome bonus: exporting to Excel.

You can have all the credit for this awesome idea, which will surely make you a multimillionaire. Go go go!

So here’s a fun thing that I hate

On November 18, 2014November 18, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

When you open a file in Excel that someone has sent you through Outlook, hitting “save” doesn’t actually do anything unless you’ve first saved a copy locally using the Save As function. It doesn’t warn you that it’s not doing anything, either; it just assumes that button is there because it’s pretty and that you’re hitting it because you’re bored.

An hour of formatting and data collection, saved THREE TIMES during the process, lost, with no temp file to go back to. Fucking idiotic way to design software.

Word-makin’ talk

On April 28, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing10 Comments

Writerpeople: what software do y’all generally use? I know I’ve got some fans of Scrivener out there, which despite several tries I’ve never really been able to get into; anybody use anything else that I need to know about? I came across this article on Lifehacker the other day that led to me downloading a bunch of new programs to try out (including Fade In, a screenwriting program– I have a secret desire to write a screenplay for some reason; maybe that can be a side project this summer) and I have completely fallen in love with FocusWriter.

Dudes, I wrote four thousand words of fiction today, and it wasn’t even difficult. That’s not unprecedented– I did nearly twelve thousand during the closing days of NaNoWriMo several years ago while under deadline pressure, and once wrote a thirty-page paper in three hours flat in grad school– but to get four thousand words done in a single day when there is no pressure whatsoever to perform is so unlike me as to be faintly alarming. Other apps do the same main thing FocusWriter does; it blacks out the entire screen, letting you choose a theme (I have basic white text on a black background; you can choose other colors or even use an image as the background) and hides its entire UI so that all you can see is your text on the screen. Awesomely, it also has a setting to make freaking typewriter sounds when you hit keys, which– for me, at least, which may be a sign that I’m moderately nuts– is weirdly, insanely rewarding.

Anyway: point is, BA 7 is done, meaning that all I have to do is finish BA 6 and do one last edit/polish/clean-up run on the entire thing and then The Benevolence Archives, Volume 1 is ready to be unleashed unto the world. Which is awesome and terrifying all at the same time. Hell, I’m on such a roll I may see if I can finish 6 tonight. Why not, y’know?

I love productive days. ISTEP starts tomorrow so the rest of the week is going to be obnoxious and stressful; I’m glad today wasn’t. How are y’all?