Word-Whores: Excel

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Essential Writing Tools

Thanks to KAK for posting on Sunday, while I was off at Daytona Beach watching ripped young men from the Embry Riddle Air Force ROTC do crunches. Oh, and being on panels, etc., at the Coastal Magic Convention. Damn, I love my job!

One question - why are my hats all out of order??

I'm going to weigh in on what KAK said, as she rounded things up nicely on our topic this week of our favorite writing apps. It's interesting where she and I do and don't overlap.

Before that, however, I want to address the overall topic, particularly as Jim and Linda have already indicated that they have little to nothing to say on the subject. They use Word and that's it. You'll also note that KAK listed Word first in her post. So did I.

It's important to remember that's because we are all established writers with habits and routines we've formed over years of work. Of course this is kind of a "duh" answer to us. But, it's worth pointing out that this is a question I see A LOT from newbie writers. I think the question arises partly from wanting to do things the best way and partly out of cultural conditioning, particularly in the U.S.

The man and I have a running joke, in fact, about how Americans love to "gear up" for new enterprises. Like the person who takes up biking and has to buy not only the bicycle, but all the color-coordinated gear, from socks to helmet. Or the one who decides to learn to paint and acquires the full-studio set of artistic supplies.

I think we're really inured into thinking that we need special tools to launch new enterprises. So, what are the essential writing tools?

Imma let you in on the secret!

YOU NEED TO HAVE: something to write on and something to write with.

Seriously. I'm not oversimplifying here. The beauty of being a writer is that we can get away with virtually zero overhead. A stubby pencil and scrap paper will get you by. Oh sure, eventually you're going to want to put those words into some sort of word-processing tool, because that's what everyone uses - whether you'll digitally format to self-pub or send to agents and editors.

Given those considerations, my five favorite ACCESSORY tools are:

1) MS Word:
I write in Word, edit, read for crit partners, etc. It's the industry standard and works just great for me.

2) MS Excel:
Me too on tracking All The Things. Submissions, sales, word count, project plans, P&Ls, etc.

3) Dropbox*:
Also on KAK on this one. I write all my manuscripts in Dropbox. It's a great relief to know I can rescue them from anywhere, should I need to.

Now she and I part ways.

4) Alarms and Clock --Windows 365:
I keep this window open for various timed events - 15, 20, 30, 45, 60 and 90 minutes. This lets me limit my social media time and pace my writing sprints throughout the day.

5) Calibre:
Terrific for converting, organizing and backing up my ebook library - including my own books. This is what I use to send manuscripts to CPs and beta readers, to send giveaway books to readers and reviewers, and to track what I have. Highly recommend!

Jeffe Kennedy

Jeffe Kennedy is a multi-award-winning and best-selling author of romantic fantasy. She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and is a member of Novelists, Inc. (NINC). She is best known for her RITA® Award-winning novel, The Pages of the Mind, the recent trilogy, The Forgotten Empires, and the wildly popular, Dark Wizard. Jeffe lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is represented by Sarah Younger of Nancy Yost Literary Agency.

Friday, September 11, 2015

Remembering and Keeping Track of the Crazy

Former SQL Database Administrator and Developer here. So you'd imagine that I have a bullet-proof structured system for data input and retrieval. Indexed. Primary keys. I never lose anything.

HA HA No.

Somehow, there's a stigma attached to bring techie solutions into creative endeavors. Maybe because databases are their own rabbit hole that can and will suck your writing time right out of you. However. There are a few useful lessons that came from the database trenches. They do actually dictate how I maintain series data.

1. Never build a database when a flat file will do - this has nothing to do with how much data you have to store and everything to do with how you access that data. Spreadsheets and most text files are searchable, so unless you need to connect data across files or across series, you aren't likely to need the kind of storage and search functionality a database offers. DISCLOSURE: My series bibles are in Excel.

2. One copy is no copy - unless you're saving your files to a striped, mirrored hard drive array, you are one truly crappy day away from having no books, no series bibles, and no hope of escaping a nervous breakdown. Case in point: day before my very first phone call with the lovely lady who would become my editor, this guy decided to reformat my hard drive.

A rare photo of computer literate cat doing literate things at the computer keyboard.

Gods love modern technology, modern cloud storage solutions make it so you don't have to turn your garage into a refrigerated server farm in order to protect your work. I use Dropbox, but it could be any cloud based storage. These services offer version control as well as remote access to your data and a modicum of protection from catastrophic hardware (or feline) disaster. HOWEVER. In no way is this an adequate substitute for a solid backup plan. It can be a part of a backup and recovery plan, but a backup service that does automated, time-stamped snapshots of your hard drive reduces your chances of crying, face down, in a bottle of vodka. It isn't ideal, I admit. My back up plan isn't as robust as it should be. Because I work between two computers, they operate as backups of one another. It's great. Until the boat sinks. So this is a case of please don't do as I do. I aspire to having a better back up solution in place. Working on the details.

3. Structure your files - If you organize your file tree, half of your organizational work is done for you. I prefer to keep all of my writing related files under one home file folder. This is for ease of back up. I can designate one target file folder and know that all of the subfolders (which encompass every single WIP ever) will be backed up. It also makes it far easier to move vital data from one machine to another when the inevitable happens and you have to replace a machine. Having to hunt through every last file folder to make sure I have every story tidbit makes me cranky. Did it once. Learned my lesson. It's simple stuff. A typical WIP file structure will have couple of elements. I name the file folder whatever the working title is going to be. There's a history subfolder and business subfolder. If the WIP is a series, the file is named for the series. Each book within the series gets its own working title subfolder, then history and business (for each book). The Excel spreadsheet that holds the series bible goes into the file folder for the entire series, as do any other tidbits of data accumulated for the series.

This is all pretty basic stuff. The true issue is this: It doesn't matter how brilliant your organization is. If you don't consistently and methodically keep your data entry up to the minute, all the structures and naming conventions in the world will not help you. A series bible that is just a bunch of stuff dumping into a document but that's updated every second a new THING turns up in your series is vastly superior to the elegant database that only gets updated once in a great while - usually after you've forgotten half of what you'd meant to record.