There is no story for my photo this week. (And by the way, I’m sure anyone following this will have noticed that I’m hopelessly behind in my weeks, with little chance of ever catching up – and I don’t really care.)

Last Friday, I passed 50K on the second draft of my novel-in-progress, and just about as fast as I crossed that line, I promptly disappeared from the internet. Work-related anyway. I took an impromptu weekend off. I wasn’t supposed to be taking the weekend off, since I still need to plump and polish this draft by about another 18,000 words, and there’s this monumental and looming deadline to finish before my kid finishes school for the summer – self-imposed, but since I’m my own employer, I’m being kind of a hard-ass about it, lol! Oh, and we’re also simultaneously planning a trip to England in these same three weeks.

Yet even with all there is left to do, my brain spit out that 50,000th word, and shut down. It felt called for, felt necessary, and so it happened. (more…)

First of all, if this needs to be said, no piece of software will ever write your story for you. And no program will ever be able to replace a human editor either. A machine cannot tell you if your story works or not. It has no idea. That said, there are some programs available that will make your life a lot easier.

The point of this is not to replace a human editor. Really. But what a machine can do for you is to catch all that lazy writing, the things that slip by your eyes after several thousand passes through the same sentence. The things that might even slip by your critique partners after they’ve read several thousand words of your work and have become similarly accustomed to your lazy mistakes.

But a machine won’t – not the first time, and not after the thousandth time. That’s where machines work best. (more…)

My friend Nina was the one to introduce me to Liquid Story Binder. I’ve been meaning to write something about this program ever since I got it, but I keep coming up blank. It’s very hard for me to put into words exactly how much LOVE I have for this program. (I know, that’s lame, but seriously people!) And it’s also hard for me to explain everything it can do… which is pretty much anything you need it to do!

I will never write anything in a Word document again. Never. Not a blog entry, not a poem, not even a freewrite-background-note. Nothing. It all goes into LSB, somewhere. And what I love about LSB is that there’s a place for everything in it. It’s more than just a word processor – it’s… well, a binder! If a binder could have just the perfect amount of pockets you wanted it to have, in the perfect order and shape, and in all your favorite colors. It can be whatever you want it to be. (more…)

This week’s excerpt is actually a title, from my in-progress collection of stories and poems:

How to Stand on Your Hands

notes: And so I went on a quest for the ultimate mangled dandelion. And I took a damn lot of pictures of them too! (I may or may not have even dreamed about dandelions last night… I know, that’s a bit much, isn’t it?) (more…)