I’m on the move

I’ve been busy setting up my new blog site which will be under my own domain:

www.gordonwoolf.com

Please update any bookmarks you have made.

The new site is already in place but there will be additional pages and other features in the next few days.

You’ll also be able make comments more easily and there’s a search function that will provide searches on the blog, on my sites or the web.

Software for novel writers and others

An Australian novelist and programmer, Simon Haynes, has put together the kind of software he needed for his own writing needs. You can find it at http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html and it is free.

I suspect it will also meet the needs of others who, like novelists, need to move text around and to keep track of facts and descriptions in what they are writing. I use an outliner, but have never been happy with the outliners built in to Word and OpenOffice. They just let you give an item a subheading and then open and close the subheads to add and edit the text under them. If you move a subheading then all the associated text moves with it, and is surprising how often an idea which you thought was best in one section or chapter needs to go somewhere else.

The advantage of Ywriter is that you can make separate notes of where you think your ideas are going. In use by a novelist this will include sections of facts about characters and places etc so that you do not change a character’s eye colour or have them change venues impossibly fast.  and installs quickly.

I don’t think I’ll ever write the great Australian novel. It’s been said that inside every journalist is a novel and that with any luck that’s where it will stay. But this could be useful in helping keep track for what I do write. I’ll certainly be playing round with it a but more, and will also have to check the library for Simon’s Hal Spacejock comedy scifi books — there are four of them, distributed by Penguin.

The software will not replace your word processor, but it may help more than novelists in organising ideas into words before they make their way to the word processor, just as they then eventually make their way to a page layout program.

Problems in a Word file? Maggie it!

I know I don’t use Word, but I know a lot of Word users, and therefore it may be worth mentioning that the cure for a lot of Word problems that do not respond to more obvious solutions is to "Maggie" the file. This method has been promoted by a lot of Word and Windows newsletters including Brian Livingston’s Windows Secrets and Office Watch and is deceptively simple:

If you are having problems with a Word file, try Maggie-ing it, which is to set up a new file, then copy all the text from the old file, except for the final paragraph return.

The final return is the key to a lot of the formatting, and therefore to a lot of formatting problems.

The Maggie process is named after Maggie Secara, a copyeditor in the USA, and a very good editor that I’m pleased to have among my contacts for those seemingly unanswerable questions which every editor faces at some time. She is also an author of a major work on life in Elizabethan England – see http://compendium.elizabethan.org

Indented paragraphs and period spaces

A recent Tweet about the pilcrow, that backward-P mark to indicate the end of paragraphs, reminded me of a piece I wrote a while ago answering someone who wanted to know why people used indented paragraphs with no space between lines and two spaces after a period, suggesting it was all due to newspapers.

Indented paras with no space between, yes that’s newspaper style, but two spaces after a period? Only in very amateurish newspapers which do not realize that in most fonts the extra space is built in with the actual dot at the left hand end of the glyph.

Spacing between paragraphs is quite common in newspapers when text is set ragged right, either as a style or for special features. And paragraph spacing is a common ploy to make stories fit.

How the paragraph came to be

According to Jan Tschichold, in an essay titled “Why the beginnings of Paragraphs Must be Indented” …The medieval paragraph symbol ¶ originally could also appear in the middle of running lines and was colored. It signified the beginning of a new group of sentences.

During the late Middle Ages such groups of sentences were introduced with a new line, but the habit remained of beginning the new group with the symbol for paragraphs, usually written in red. Some of the early printers even cut it as a type sort and printed it in black.

Previously, though, it was inserted by hand in red by the rubricator (whose job description stems from the color: rubrum = red). The space for the symbol had to be left blank by the typesetter. But rubrication often did not take place, and it was found that the em quad indention or indent, as we call this empty space today, was sufficient by itself to define a new group of sentences, even without the red symbol.

See his books for advice on using paragraphs, and lots more.

What words are bad?

I’ve long used opportunities to point to the diminuation of language by too much “bad language” and have quoted before the following true tale which makes the point:

I overheard several teenagers talking. One was upset at what had happened at a party in the previous day or so. Apparently his girlfriend had been at the party and his report on how she had got friendly with someone else included the f***ing word multiple times in every phrase.

Until he reached the point where he had opened the door of a bedroom and there was his friend and someone else. He needed to say what they were doing, but he was lost for words: “They were… er….. er…. er…. … having intercourse”.

Somehow he’d lost the real word because it no longer had the meaning he wanted.

An editor has his say

Five rules of thumb for editors which should also be read by writers:

http://grammar.about.com/b/2009/04/24/editors-on-editing-botsfords-five-rules-of-thumb.htm?nl=1

or http://snipurl.com/gvszg

Richard Botsford was an editor at The New Yorker for close to 40 years.