We are into the last days of the Smashwords Summer Sale where you can get all my books at a substantial discount. Don’t miss out and check out https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/
Month: July 2024
Over this past weekend, I was browsing the DepositPhotos web site looking for images I can license for book covers. I have a couple of projects currently in their early stages, but I have a fairly clear vision of how I want the covers to look to fit into that genre.
One of those visions is to have a New York image as a background with the characters in the foreground.
Easy enough you’d think, except there are several hundred thousand images of New York on DepositPhotos. They range from instantly recognizable landmarks like Central Park or the Empire State Building to street and alleyway scenes you’d only recognize if you lived close by.
I’m getting better and refining the searches and quite quickly found an image I liked that fit what I was looking for. When I clicked on the image for more details, it came up, and there was a white callout box above the image that said Editorial Use Only. Interesting, I thought. What does that mean? Fortunately, there was a pop-up box along with the callout to explain Editorial Use Only.
Essentially these images can only be used for non-commercial purposes and their use in any published work that involves the payment or receipt of a fee is prohibited.
Bummer, but as I said with several hundred thousand images it just took another few minutes to find something I could use without the Editorial Use Only restriction. The cover mockup looked good as well.
Before finishing a quick recap on Pro-Writing Aid Everywhere. I am getting to better grips with it. There are still some areas that feel a little clunky, but overall it has removed a step from my editing workflow.
This past weekend, I finally finished the read through and edit of my latest novel and began putting the changes into the Scrivener project.
My normal workflow once a story is finished, is to run it through Pro-Writing Aid to catch grammar, punctuation, and spelling issues. Then I print out and do the read through mentioned above.
I use Pro-Writing Aid as a desktop app, and when I opened it there was the message – upgrade available. So I upgraded. The desktop app is still there but in addition, I now have ProWriting Aid Everywhere.
I left Everywhere alone for a week or two because my guess was this upgrade required a learning curve. And boy was I right.
Being able to pull up ProWriting Aid without leaving my Scrivener document was a huge plus. Potentially, it lets me combine two steps into one – make the edits, check with ProWriting Aid. Done!
Except not exactly.
The integration works well in Word and Obsidian. Not so well in Scrivener. The first thing I noticed was all the spellings I added to the ProWriting Aid dictionary were gone and there didn’t seem to be a way to recreate them. Perhaps not much of an issue when writing a contemporary story, but a real pain with all those Babylonian names and places.
I finally found the dictionary in my online profile and added the words, but I used to be able to do that directly from within the app.
I can absolutely see the advantages of having ProWriting Aid available without having to leave the application you’re writing with. It’s just going to get longer to get used to, and understand the nuances, than I thought.
Late last week, I took a pause in my current work-in-progress to look for a piece of writing that fit in with the work, and which I was sure I had scribbled down at some point in the past.
I have two Scrivener projects I use for notes. One is called Thoughts, and the other is Writing Projects. Thoughts really is for random jottings, notes and ideas. Writing Projects was originally conceived as a placeholder for new story ideas. Some things still get in there but not quite in the way I envisioned initially. I find it easier now to set up a complete Scrivener project and drop all the thoughts in there as they occur to me.
As you’re probably gathering, I didn’t find what I was looking for in those Scrivener projects. Where else to look?
Quite often I’ll take a scene or situation from a larger story idea and write a sort story covering that incident. I didn’t think I’d done that in this case, but worth a look inside the Scrivener project that stores all my short stories.
I still didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find a completed three-thousand word short story that, according to the timestamp, I wrote about four years ago. The characters have appeared in other stories so they were familiar. The story itself not so much. I looked through my submissions log, and found I had never submitted the story to an editor, which made sense as I couldn’t find a proper manuscript document anywhere.
The piece of writing I was looking for remains elusive, but it was a nice surprise to discover something from the past – something I wrote and forgot about.
I’m wondering how many other stories I have that are like that.
All of my books are available as part of the Smashwords Annual Summer/Winter sale. You can find Jacob and Miriam and all my other books, and many more at https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/ all month!
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