Celebrate the Small Things 5-7-24

 

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things...

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!  And I have nothing much on this week which makes me happy.  I'm planning to go to a movie - something I haven't done for a while - and to write another chapter of  A Stranger to Kindness.

I realised this week that I missed the 10 year anniversary of becoming a published novelist.  It was in January, but because my first publisher went out of business and An Unstill Life was re-published by my current publisher, I didn't have that date at the front of my mind.  It's kind of hard to believe it's been 10 years, but then, I do now have five published novels.

To kind of celebrate that 10 year anniversary, I decided to do something I haven't done before and go back and read those published books (except My Murder Year which only released last year so is still pretty fresh in my mind from editing) which has been interesting.  After finishing each of those books I thought I'd never forget a single word of them because I'd spent so long with each of them, but I was surprised at how much I'd forgotten about them. 

I thought I'd find re-reading some of the older ones a bit cringeworthy - I'm pretty sure I'm a better writer now than I was when I wrote them - but I was pleasantly surprised.  I found a rather embarrassing number of stupid errors in one of them, but I can only blame myself for that...  I've always said Stumped was my favourite of my own books and after re-reading it, it's still true. That one is good!  If it's not tacky for me to say that myself.

There were parts of all the others that I'd probably write differently now, but they're not terrible.  I was surprised at how much I enjoyed re-reading Chasing the Taillights which is probably the oldest of these stories in terms of when I wrote the first draft.  And I was surprised at The Sidewalk's Regrets - there's a lot more of me in that one than I remembered!

So here's to there being more, better books in the next 10 years!

IWSG - July

 

It's the first Wednesday of the month so it's time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group!

The awesome co-hosts for the July 3 posting of the IWSG are JS Pailly, Rebecca Douglass, Pat Garcia, Louise-Fundy Blue, and Natalie Aguirre!

This month's question is a technical one:

What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?

Personally, I'm a Scrivener user for my longer-form work.  I love how easy it is to move scenes and chapters around, something that is really important when you write in the rather chaotic way I tend to write.  I know there are a lot of features of Scrivener I don't use - I've never been taught to use it properly, so probably don't really harness its full potential.  If anyone has any parts of Scrivener they particularly like and want to share, I'd be keen to know what I'm not using...

For short fiction, I tend to just use Word because I don't need to move things around in the same way, and I don't feel like working in Scrivener adds anything to the process.

And that's probably the long and short of it...  I used to like to handwrite first drafts and only move to the computer for editing, but these days I tend to hit the laptop right from the start because it speeds things up a bit for me.

What writing software do you prefer?