Howto.co.uk/writing lists nine writing books online for you to read (currently). These are –

• How to Publish Your Own Book by Anna Crosbie
• Writing for Magazines by Adele Ramet
• Improve Your Written English by Marion Field
• Producing Successful Magazines and Newsletters by Carol Harris
• Write Your Life Story by Michael Oke
• Creative Writing by Adele Ramet
• How to Write for Television by William Smethurst
• Times of Our Lives by Michael Oke
• Spell Well by Marion Field.

Each is broken up into an index of chapters online and each chapter is broken up into web pages, with bookmarked links to sub-sections, and convenient arrow keys to move through the text. Links to purchase on amazon are available, plus some advertising, but this does not break up the reading experience, and the usability is done well on each book.

Howto also has a range of categorised other books available electronically as online reads. Of particular interest to writers, perhaps, you may find several holistic self-improvement books of various themes in the well-being category, there are some excellent howto research and howto read faster books in the Learning category, interviewing techniques howtos found in the careers category, and for the professional writer, a business category also.

If you happen to be about to give a speech at a wedding, check out the family category also. There is also an excellent child carers book available in there, as part of my own occupational interest.

Although some books at HowTo are obviously more U.K. based, the writing book selection contains many books as relevant to international readers naturally. For me, I immediately started reading through Adele Ramet’s Creative Writing title.

LinkMe : HowTo/Writing

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Whilst all the problems were going on, I still had enough to think about in simply reading out my short story. Asking me to read in the first place was one huge thing. Asking it for my first public appearance should have been a big thing also.

Here, in my real life – the life where I am writing, and plotting out stories, and a writing career, I have no public audience. Locally, there isn’t even a writing club – or even a reading club. Everything for me is virtual.

For some time in Second Life, I couldn’t work out the emphasis behind writers ‘speaking’ out their work in public or group workshops. I could understand adding voice to an event which included a published author reading out an excerpt of their work – after all you would either have this, or simply have a bunch of virtual avatars to look at. Voice added some personalisation to the events. Over the past few weeks I have tried to attend as many reading events as possible, to get an understanding for this.

But I’ve shirked away from all the group messages asking me to come prepared with work to read out to a group. Me? My voice? Now, when we were talking about my own self, the whole thing took on a much less appealing factor. I didn’t want to read out my stuff, why would anyone else want to listen to it?

With the Storyquest awards ceremony I was forced into my own first voice attempts. And into reading out – in it’s entirety, a piece of my writing. Whilst I was dealing with the large problems occuring inworld at the time, and juggling my story on-screen, scrolling through it, reading out loud, and holding buttons and mouse down, I had little time to think about it all.

However now I do. I know the story I was reading had areas within it, that on re-reading I am less than happy about. If given the chance I would not like that story to go to publication – but as part of the prize and contest itself, it will do so. And the story was written in a day’s timeframe, and less edited than I would like. But it’s also a darned good story, and certainly a good start to the fictional side of my writing life.

But to the point – if given the chance, I would rewrite large passages of that story, and some of that comes from having had to read it out.

Reading out a story is an oddity in itself. My own short story has three female characters, including the un-named female protaganist. This made it hard, in certain passages, to tell who was speaking. Particularly as I use a lot of dialogue. Was it the hero, or another bit character with a female voice?

This became particularly challenging when reading it out.

Acting it out, with different voices for different parts would have made the world of difference, but one person’s voice just couldn’t cut it in places. Even as I read it, I found myself trying to take on more of a persona in voice for different female characters, hoping that would help people listening to understand. I seriously doubt I succeeded.

I see that now, having read it out. I see the places where I should have gone back and clarified the voices within, perhaps by even adding character names to differentiate some.

Authors are always told to read their stories out loud. In my case, I randomly do this, passage by passage, thinking that the reading voices inside my head will surely suffice. But my lazy approach has now caught me out. So I’ll give myself a B for effort, and a Needs Improvement on this particular learning lesson for my own work.

I’m still not confident in doing this publically – for me the only option is an online writing event such as those found in Writer’s groups within a virtual world such as Second Life. But those events still involve participation and critique, and that’s not something I can, as yet, accept within my own boundaries. I don’t want to do it for others, and I don’t want to hear the results for mine. Perhaps this is because I still find that I am learning, in my own way, how to improve my own writing (and what I am happy in seeing in my own writing), and am still quite new at this.

Does voice and reading out loud matter to you as a writer? Do you do it?

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1. A good title allows the reader to predict the content.
2. A good title catches the reader’s interest
3. A good title reflects the slant or tone of the writing.
4. A good title contains keywords that will make it easy to find via a computer (or internet) search.

Notice my keywords in the title chosen above – functions, good, title. And it couldn’t be any more reflective of what this little piece is about, could it now?

So saying that, I always go off and break the rules. Don’t you? But if I really want the article found – particularly if publishing on the internet, then I’ll stick to the functions.

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MindMaps for Documenting Some Writing Notes

1. Character Notes and Relationships

Although there are excellent facilities within Liquid Story Binder (my writing base) for character dossiers, for more minor characters I often don’t bother to document these as I create them. And then two weeks later, I go to use the same character briefly, and either have forgotten his name, or the fact that he speaks with an odd accent, or likes tigers or something.

The Character Notes and Relationships Mindmap is a working document. Within the one page I can quickly add a new topic onto the correct linked character, add the character’s name and important notes which I may want to remember for later. I’ve started off my MindMap already, with the Main Character (oh yes – she’s still nameless) and some others I know I will need to use. The names may well change, as I write, as will some of the details. But by having this mindmap available to me all the time, as I write – well, it’s easy to update at the time (or during a caffiene fix).

The split-story-arch Main Character in this one is linked to another mindmap. This other map is the Main Character mindmap which I created earlier on, and which can be seen in Part I of this three part series. It may well change as she develops into a real person also. I’ve so far stuck in the images I gathered for her yesterday. Aside from that there are no changes as yet.

2. Structure and Themes

This is my second MindMap developed as a work in progress. I started off nutting out the basic story structure – which had already been developed partially with the Scenes Cards within Writer’s Blocks. It’s a very basic structure – beginning, middle and end, with the climax set obviously at the end. But as the story moves from past diary entries to the present, it has a multitude of possible themes which can also run through the story-arc.

I’ve put some of the basic action points and some of the major diary themes in a timeline across the story structure (the chapters and dates of the diary entries). Below this are also some bigger possible themes which I want to include within the story. Whether I use all of these – well, probably not. But by putting them across here in a mindmap, I at least have a full record of them.

With Mindjet MindManager Pro 7, I can simply go into the topic information on each and check it off as completed if I do develop the theme within the story writing. Or I could just delete them. Or work more in linking some together.

3. Location or Setting

This is an obvious mindmap if ever there was one. I didn’t want to bother with over-planning settings at all. In fact, at this point most of these will be barely mentioned. However I realised that a lot of the action would be based in one particular location and I would work better if I could initially visualise it. I spent about five minutes looking for images off the internet, and have plugged them into here. The same images will go into my Image Gallery within my writing application also.

4. The Master MindMap

Finally, with all these mindmaps, and other documents and programs lying around on my hard-drive, I developed a very simple Master mindmap to act as my first base every writing day. Here it is -

On the right you will see my main story elements – some are not expanded in this view. All of my individual mindmaps – the Themes / Structure one, the Main Character one, the Character Notes mindmap and the Locations mindmap can be opened with one click on the MindMap html link found on the Master as an icon.

On the left is my Master toolbox, using the linking functions of Mindjet MindManager Pro 7. There are links here to my two important directory folders – click on these and the folders will open for access. There are links here to my Liquid Story Binder writing space also – clicking on the exe icon will open it, ready to write. Links to open the Scenes Cards in the Writer’s Blocks software, and to two excel spreadsheets also – my statistics and research notes.

From this central or master mindmap I can open and access all the files or applications I need. This is a true project-central mindmap. I’ve even included a URL link to my NaNoWriMo profile for updating my wordcount each day.

Setup for Writing in my Writing Tools

Aside from the MindMaps, as previously discussed, my actual writing will be done in two systems (three, if you count the wordcount excel spreadsheet I use also).

1. Liquid Story Binder Writing Workspace

I previously showed you the start of this workspace, with the character dossiers and image gallery. That has been saved as one workspace in my book project. This is the actual writing environment, saved as a working workspace.

At the top left there are two smaller modules open – under the main writing module. I have the Image Gallery itself, in case I want to look quickly at an image – for inspiration. And my Ideas Builder, used as a simple notepad, or for development of ideas or research notes if need-be.

Overtop of this is my main writing module – I use a builder module – this one is entitled Chapter 1 – in readiness, with the first scene blank and ready to go. I’ve input the writing goal of 2000 words into the scene item also.

To the right you will see my normal file listing underneath (this shows all files created in the book itself, so is often handy to have available). Over this sits my created Writing Listing, showing my methodology in manuscript creation. The builders (there will be one for each chapter) will sit here. And once the three scenes are created for each chapter I will build these into a real chapter module which will sit in the list for chapters. Once all chapters are completed, I can create a Planner, import in those chapters, and from there build a full manuscript. However that’s far away…

Below these file listings sits a simple Note element where I’ve quickly jotted some word count notes. I use this to add up the wordcounts – although LSB has a global statistics function anyway. But it’s a nice way to see the whole thing progress, and as the days go by, seeing the words ramp up provides some inspiration.

2. Scenes in Writer’s Blocks Workspace

In my entry of yesterday I showed you my Writer’s Block scene cards. These will be played with, added to, possibly deleted, but certainly updated on a daily basis as I go. The scene cards work as both a planner and outliner.

3. Statistics and Research in an Excel Spreadsheet

Statistics Spreadsheet

Finally, at the end of a writing day, I found using this excel spreadsheet the most inspirational of all. Given that NaNoWriMo has it’s own wordcount facility and all the widgets to gloat with, perhaps using a spreadsheet like this one isn’t really needed. However inserting in the number of words you’ve written during the day – with the time, and your morale and comments helps me, anyway.

The above Writing Marathon worksheet is available for download from Zohutou.co.uk, and was based originally on Eric Benson’s NaNoWriMo excel report card.

Research Spreadsheet

I also have a large spreadsheet containing my timelines research. A spreadsheet was the best tool to use for this – years across the top, and notes for categories across as rows. I have various categories of interest, from music hits for that year, to important world history and country events, and others. If I had time I would put this into a proper timeline – perhaps with some images. But I don’t, and the spreadsheet is enough to work from, certainly for the NaNoWriMo effort about to commence in one day’s time.

Next Up…

Actually, I’m READY-TO-GO, with one day to spare. Which is a good thing, as I’m scheduled to go and see High School Musical 3 with my daughter tomorrow, as it’s the last day of mid-term school holiday breaks here in the U.K. So I will be celebrating my preparedness for NaNoWriMo by screaming at a cinema screen along with hundreds of other young girls.

I possibly need to go into LSB and use the new character name generator to find a name for my main character, but maybe I will save that for another day. On November 1st I intend spending a few hours coming up with that first 2000 words and first scene and joining in with the many thousands of other NaNoWriMo official participants. Good luck to all of you!

Links from this Article:

• Me at NaNoWriMo (please buddy me)
• Liquid Story Binder (affiliate link)
• Mindjet MindManager Pro 7 software – for PC Windows users. Also available for Mac.
• Writer’s Blocks software
• Part 1 : MindMapping to Prepare for a Novel
• Part 2 : Stage 2 of Preparing for a Novel
• NaNoWriMo marathon report spreadsheet at Zohutou

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1. LSB Next Version – Moving Builder Items for Scene Writers For those interested in using (or currently use) Liquid Story...

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I’ve admired graphic novels for a long time, but Alex’s post showed me something different. He calls them Visual Novels, but they are more than that – they are also interactive.

The best way to explain them is to show you them. Alex links to two of his novels, brought about by NaNoRenO (National Novel Ren’ai Game Writing Month) and it is through Ren’ai Games that the novels can be downloaded from.

The Ren’Ai archive defines a Visual Novel as “multi-path games that use text and pictures to present a story.” The archive also has Kinetic Novels – “single-path games that use text and pictures to present a story” which are similar to a graphic novel.

Other definitions of the genre are available from the web. There appears an association with the gaming world, and also anime-style art which you will see in the Ren’Ai examples. In fact, many of the Ren’Ai novels held in archive also include other forms and icons from the anime-art world.

There are several downloadable Visual Novels in the Ren’Ai archives, and although I was not successful at running Alex’s example, I downloaded several which I was able to watch. The archives contain differently formatted novels, so watch out for those which fit your platform. Most are provided in zip format. Once downloaded extract all the files to your desktop or similar, then play the exe.

One of the Visual Novels I downloaded and watched had a couple of tracks of background music, but no interactive slant. It was more a graphic novel with audio – including a character voice at one point, and some animation of the graphics.  I also watched two other short novels, both of which had interactivity in giving me options to choose from, taking me along different storylines.

There are several examples, some run at 10 minutes long, others up to one hour, all dependent on which options you take when given a question in the text. Multiple-path storylines (or story arcs) are an interesting format, as is the graphic nature of these novels, particularly if you come from a designer or graphical background. And although primarily sitting within the gaming and anime-art worlds, the format is an interesting one for other genres and art styles also.

More web research took me to Blade Engine, software which allows you to create these visual novels. Ren’Ai Games also has it’s own engine called Ren’Py. There is also a Visual Novel database website, listing over 1000 VNs.

Now all you need is the story, and the graphics (although Blade Engine provides some packs of these in anime-style, or you can find others via stock photography sites or websites such as Deviant Art). Visual Novels are certainly a genre which will give your muse a great outing.

Definition :

Visual Novels – A digital novel which consists of text accompanied by mostly static images, but can include animation and audio components also. Visual Novels can also provide reader interaction via choices which determine the story path and outcome of the novel. Such novels can be found in the gaming and anime-art worlds.

Links:

• Ren’Ai Visual Novel Archives
• Ren’Py Engine
• Blade Engine
• Visual Novel Database

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From my mostly reading viewpoint, I don’t really care – but I do start off reading a book if I can at least recognise the genre from the jacket-cover or author. And if somebody like Stephen King suddenly wrote a chick-lit modern-day romance, then I would hope he published it under a different name, else I might find myself sadly disappointed on reading my expected horror.

So, does it matter? To me – yes, a little bit. But I don’t mind other genres and sub-genres mixing into a book, provided I can recognise enough of the book’s main genre to know what I’m buying. I would suggest the same goes for my writing in fiction – I would tend to write in the genres I am most comfortable reading in, and can therefore understand the elements which make up the genre. And as a creative, if you give me a defined set of rules, the muse in me is always going to want to test those drawn-lines and see which ones I can hop over. Genres are like that, aren’t they? But to our peril, if we consider how others may be looking at them.

Catergorisation via genre selection, and following the expected patterns probably does matter a lot. Publishers and book-sellers alike care about genre. Even libraries categorise, strangely enough. And our schools still dish out reading prescriptions and exercises based on genres. Teachers choose books by genre. So, if we want our books to be read – even published really – then we’ve got to, as authors, understand at least some of the rules of genre, and which ones we can hop over and break.

Here’s a video from a Neal Stephenson 40-minute talk that he gave to Gresham College in London last May. The lecture focuses on whether genres do matter anymore, specifically around the SF genre – “SF” for speculative fiction in an attempt to disassociate the science fiction genre and its links with fantasy in many people’s minds.

In this he describes Harry Potter as being SF or speculative fiction, however the HP books are filed under Childrens – Series now in best-selling lists in America. I would have personally always seen the Harry Potter series as fantasy, or a modern day fairy tale. Whether it’s young adult with a cross-over into adult best-seller status is above and beyond my own ability to understand what is science and what is fantasy in that particular equation of genres. I just read it because I like wizards and coming of age stories.

However, the Guardian UK newspaper published an essay in February 2000 which lists at least three genres which Harry Potter falls under (including a Freudian-inspired Family Romance genre), and those genres are suggested to be one secret to the Harry Potter overall success.

So do Genres matter? Feel free to give me your own take on this one via the comments here on Juiced on Writing.

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But it’s the How to Be Creative report which initially intrigued me, relevant as it is to both my interests in creativity and writing, and in writing eBooks also. The report, written as a free giveaway from an initial blog article on the Gaping Void blog (you can still find this full article in the archives for the blog), is now available (still free) from the wonderful Change This website, where you can find many other manifestos with some quality content, all free, and on a large range of topics.

Here’s my two perspectives on the manifesto :

1. On a creativity / inspiration front – read it.
2. On an eBook perspective, it’s a good example of using a free info product built from a popular blog article to market your blog and work further afield. Read it.

Read : How to Be Creative (Manifesto at Change This)

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Darren Rowse, on the must-read Problogger blog, is running a contest this week – a contest that asks us to write a “Killer Title“.

It’s what he calls a group writing project. The winner – selected randomly (so no great shakes if I’m not creative or killer enough) gets a $2000 logo design. But anyone participating in this writing project, is encouraged to surf around the list of participating blogs, and therefore possibly increase traffic to those blogs, and discover some more blogs to add to your reading list (I use Google Reader – it’s list function makes reading quicker and easier).

Problogger has been running a series of blogs on what makes a killer title recently, the main one (for me) being How to Craft Post Titles that Draw Readers into Your Blog. Writing for me, isn’t just about learning how to craft a novel (let’s face it, it’s easy to come up with a chapter name if you’re just sticking to chapter numbers – Chapter 1, Chapter 2…) but I’ve become very aware of titles lately in online writing work.

Last night I downloaded some packages I bought a couple of days ago. In fact, the downloads took several days to get through, and many will probably go unused. But in the packaged info products and software came a package of 100 PLR articles (Private Label Rites, where people author articles normally on the high hit internet marketing topics and you get to use them unreservedly, rewrite them, publish them as your own – the whole she-bang).

What did I want with 100 PLR articles? Well, for 75 of them, nothing – I don’t want to learn golf by an e-article, nor yachting or even 25 on summer vacations. But the last 25 – on time management – well, those might be useful, I thought.

Time Management is one of the bigger niches in internet marketing. Ways to make or save money are number one, but you can do a little with self-improvement needs if looking for areas to make a bit of money. So they say, anyway. But I was just interested in reading some copy on how to improve my own time management skills.

Until I opened the package, that is. Problogger suggests using keywords in titles is a good thing. I’ve done the same for this blog entry – notice the “Writing” in the title. And I managed to get in “Creative” also. But that was me being more mindful that the title wasn’t actually creative at all. I like the irony really.

But these 25 PLR articles on time-management took the whole keyword thing to such a degree that I was left not wanting to open them up at all, all twenty five seriously look to me as an exploitation of the keyword title concept, and similar in content (ie monotonous) as well. “How to Improve Your Time Management”, “The Importance of Time Management”, “How to [Play, Buy, Improve, Learn, Teach, Focus...fill in here] Time Management [Games, Skills, Processes] for your [Own Good, Employee's Benefit, Job Retention, Children, Kids, Workplace, Relationship]“.

You get the gist. But really, what else might I expect from a package marketed to internet marketers in the first place, and one which is PLR? The titles use all the keywords someone searching for such information may use. Optimized for search engines via keywords.

But there must be a slight difference when actually writing fresh content for a blog or online zine. Fresh being the operative word. In the Crafting Titles article at Problogger, eight tips are given for blog titles which are (abbreviated) -

1. Communicate a benefit
2. Create controversy or debate
3. Ask a question
4. Personalize titles
5. Use keywords
6. Use power words (stunning, free, easy, secrets…)
7. Big claims or promises
8. Humor

So, have I managed some of that within this title? I’d like a pass on number 2, 3, 5 and a um, maybe on number 8, thanks.

But mainly, the group writing project has opened up my eyes to some of those blog titles out there. I read a lot of my virtual friends blogs out there (as I would hope that they read mine) and I must admit a lot of my first reading decisions is based on a glance at the title.

Remembering that this blog post will, within a couple of hours, appear as a title and link in twitter, and later in friendfeed, the art of writing killer titles which draw in further readership is a good one for me to learn. Plus – it’s fun, isn’t it, and it enhances our writing skills at the same time.

(Edited 2 days later thanks to a comment pointing out I’d mispelled a name.)

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