Erich T. Wade

I recently came to one of those realizations that can only be described as a “duh” moment. I’m a huge fan of software gadgets. I used to think that my obsession with finding and trying out new bits and pieces of writing-related software was a problem that was hindering me actually getting work done, but I no longer think that’s the case. I think that finding new and interesting pieces of writing software actually helps keep me creative. Plus, many of the tools I use constantly were – obviously – discovered by my tendency to tinker around with new software.

In some ways, I’m the software equivalent of that guy with a shop in his garage full of half-finished projects. I’m not an especially good programmer, mainly because I haven’t focused on it much in the past few years, but I really enjoy programming. And when I have something I want to work on I can find out how to do what I want pretty easily. I <3 the Internet.

Regardless of my actual programming skill, I like the process of putting something together myself. I endured merciless mocking when writing a quick program to generate random ASCII for a scene in my NaNo novel took me the better part of three hours*, because it was more fun to write it myself than to use online tools. By the same token, I have about a third of a bare-bones word processor sitting pitifully in the bottom of one of my source directories. Every once in a while I hear it pitifully mewing at me, like a kitten at the bottom of a well.

This feels like a good time to mention the software I’m using most right now. I’m just going to talk about the stuff I directly write in for now, because the rest is probably worth a post in and of itself.

When I’m writing my books, I use yWriter, which I’ve talked about before. I don’t use its built-in metadata handling any more: I don’t really want to track info about my characters, locations, etcetera in it. Instead, I use Wikidpad for that. I also use Wikidpad to organize everything from characters to session notes on campaigns I run.

When I’m working on Zosias, I use Google Docs: I don’t consider it to be an especially good word processor, but it’s unquestionably a fantastic piece of collaboration software. I often wish it had features like columns, redefining the formatting for styles, and handling large documents gracefully, and I suspect it has a gradual memory leak somewhere, but the ability to work together with other people on a document in real time is priceless.

I recently discovered 750 Words, which I daresay has revolutionized my daily writing schedule. I’ve been using it a whopping five days. The basic idea of it is that writing three unfiltered pages a day is nicely therapeutic and helps prime the writing pumps, and I have to say it works very well. It’s basically cloud-based journaling software that applies gamification to the process of daily writing – the point system rewards you for writing every day and finishing your 750 words without getting distracted, and it has tons of achievements (called “badges”) for things like long writing streaks and consistently finishing under 20 minutes. Instead of counting against the total amount of writing I can get done in a day, 750 Words actually seems to increase it; I get all the other stuff that’s on my mind written out, and then I’m good to go.

Finally, and perhaps oddly, I use Wordpad constantly. I prefer the older Windows XP version of it to the one with Win7 on my laptop, because I don’t like the spacing that the new one applies automatically; luckily, my desktop still runs XP, so it all works out. I’ve been laughed at for using Wordpad as recently as just the other day, and there’s no doubt that there are many superior word processors to Wordpad, but it has a few good things going for it:

• It’s stable. Very, very stable. I’ve used Wordpad constantly for about seven years, sometimes with hilariously large documents, and I’ve never had it crash on me. Never.
• It’s lightweight. Wordpad does what I need it to: it gives me a great big writing canvas and the ability to bold, italicize, underline, and occasionally change the font and size of my text. It doesn’t try to do much else. If I need to get a wordcount on something, it’s pretty easy to open it in OpenOffice or something, but for most of what I do in Wordpad I don’t need word counts.
• Because it is lightweight, it’s fast. When I have a quick idea I want to jot down, I do it in Wordpad, because I don’t want to wait for something else to load. I can run a dozen Wordpad documents at once with no performance hit.
• Its documents are portable. Wordpad saves in .rtf format, which isn’t perfect, but it’s supported by approximately every word processor ever.
• It’s familiar. I’ve been using Wordpad for various things since I got my first modern computer in 2004, right before going to ASMSA.

This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t consider switching. Things like word count and tabs would be nice, but it’s surprisingly hard to find minimalistic Wordpad-like word processors; most free word processors I run across prefer to try to emulate Word, even when they’re trying to be lightweight. The closest I’ve found is Jarte, which is very good and actually built on the WordPad engine; Jarte is to Wordpad as Notepad++ is to Notepad. And the truth is, I’ll probably switch to Jarte eventually. I had a bad initial experience with it a few years ago, when I was quite annoyed that it seemed to be trying to completely replace menu names with icons – I’ve since found that it’s possible to turn on a menu bar with actual words on it. But I haven’t switched yet, because it still fails the familiarity test. Kind of an odd reason after the point of this post, I know. Every once in a while I switch it to my default rtf editor to see if I can force myself to switch. I think I’ll do that now.

Current Music: A Pandora station based on The Offspring’s You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid. Right now it’s playing Re-Education (Through Labor) by Rise Against. Ooh, no, now it’s playing Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked by Cage the Elephant. I love all of these songs.

*The actual code took about five minutes, but I ended up having to reinstall the JDK for reasons that are too lengthy for me to want to go into here. I didn’t have the latest version of Java installed, anyway. And then I had to figure out why the reinstalled JDK was still trying to use an older version that I had uninstalled a while back, which turned out to be because there were old java.exe’s in my system32 and SysWow64 folders, but I spent about an hour and a half trying to track down what I thought was a registry issue . . .

Today begins NaNoWriMo, which I have decided to participate in this year. Crazy, I know. I’ve been working a lot on Zosias lately, mainly with my friend Pip (more on that later). I’m also still working on Derelict, though I’ve moved it to the back burner for now; most of my daily writing has been on Zosias, with adjustments made for the fact that word count is a really bad way to track game design. Kat and I are also looking into buying a house, and we’ve collectively decided that I should look into a part-time/night-shift job for a while. So tentatively November looks like this:

• *Write about 1667 words per day on a new project. This conveniently takes care of my “write 1000 words/day” goal quite conveniently, as well as my daily task to write 500 words of prose, anywhere, on anything (which is strictly speaking part of the word goal anyway). I’ve got about four different ideas for this book, and will hopefully have settled on one by the time I start writing later today. Regardless of which one I pick, the working title is “This Novel Will Fail,” because it amuses me to attempt to employ reverse psychology. The reason I find reverse psychology so funny is probably because I learned about it from Bugs Bunny.
• Write about 500 words or one chunk of game design, story background, campaign notes/plans, or whatever. This is a complete non-issue. As far as I can tell, I don’t get writer’s block on game design. This is probably at least partially due to the fact that the Zosias design team consists of four people, we have several fantastic friends who regularly playtest, and I’m involved in about two and a half Zosias campaigns right now. (One I run for my wife, one my wife runs for me, and one I’m in the planning stages of.) It’s hard to sit through an entire gaming session without running across three or four parts of the rules that could do with addition, expansion, or change.
• Read a book every 2 days. I haven’t blogged about this goal, and it’s not a super-important one, but the reasoning goes something like this: I like to read. I set myself a goal, roughly via Shelfari, of reading a hundred books this year. I’m way behind. If I read a book every two days until the end of the year, I’ll be almost caught up*.
• Obtain a house. Or continue the process thereof.
• Look for/work at a job. We’ve decided that it would be a good idea for me to get at least a part-time job for a while, not least because we anticipate unexpected expenses once we have a house. Plus: We’re making it pretty well on Kat’s income, which means that whatever I bring in is pretty much extra. This will likely go toward frivolous expenses such as savings and paying off old medical debts. There are at least half a dozen ways the schedule could play out here, but one thing’s for sure: I’m probably going to have to adjust my sleep schedule again. Silly me.
• Continue being Summer’s dad. Obviously I won’t be an entirely stay-at-home dad any more, but I’ll still be the primary go-to parent. See, I can put some of my stuff aside for awhile if I need to. If I miss a week on the novel, well, it’s nothing  that hasn’t happened before. Kat’s going to school online right now, and I gather they’re a little less understanding about missing weeks.

Luckily, being Summer’s dad isn’t usually all that grueling. Sure, sometimes it involves convincing her to sleep when she’s convinced the bed is made of hot needles. But sometimes it only involves reading her one of her favorite books twenty-seven times over the course of an hour. And sometimes, we sit down and watch the 90s Spider-Man cartoons together. She loves those**.

*It’s a good thing this is a self-imposed goal, because I can define “book” however makes me happy, and sometimes when I’m busy it makes me happy to count each book of a manga or something. I’ve been meaning to read the Rozen Maiden manga, and I wouldn’t mind rereading the Megatokyo books and/or the Chrno Crusade manga.

**So do I.