Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 3 of 12)

A Licensing Wrinkle

July 22, 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.

Another Upgrade

July 16, 2024 /

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.

A Pleasant Surprise

July 8, 2024 /

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.

Road Trip

June 24, 2024 /

Last week I made a business trip to visit a client in Seattle.

No big thing, you’d think. A direct flight from Atlanta into Seattle and back again with hotel and meetings in between.

There was a time when I made a trip like this two or three times a month – sometimes leaving on Sunday and not getting home until late Friday. It’s a pretty rootless existence but you get used to it – the packing, assessing who in the terminal you don’t want as your seat mate, and consoling with other travelers when the inevitable flight delays occur.

I mention this because last week was the first business trip I’ve taken since 2019, and packing for business is very different from packing for vacation. In some senses, business packing is easier. Even with business casual there’s a more limited set of clothes to pack, and unlike vacation where I pack three or four times as many books as I can reasonably read, I cut right back for business trips. However, let’s not forget the Kindle, Apple, and Kobo libraries on my iPad, so maybe I’m not cutting back as much as I thought.

I had some issues with my boarding pass not showing my Pre-Check status on the outbound leg, but overall it couldn’t have gone much better. The flights were on time, the Seattle weather was unexpectedly clear, dry, and warm, and the client was a pleasure to work with.

Overall this was a good re-introduction to traveling for business. I know it won’t always be like this. On-time flights, an aisle seat both ways, and writing over two thousand words in my downtime is a win I’m happy to take.

Thrill Ride – Gadgets

June 10, 2024 /

If you didn’t support the kickstarter for Thrill Ride, the latest issue Gadgets, is arriving on June 21st. I don’t have anything in this issue, but I’ve seen some of the stories and it’s another great anthology.

I can’t tell you to hurry before all copies are gone, because it’s an eBook! However you can get it here where you can avoid the rush: Thrill Ride.

You’ll be glad you did.

Heallreaf 5 is Here

June 3, 2024 /

I’ve written before about my sister, Margaret, and what a talented weaver she is.

As well as winning many awards, and allowing me to use her work The Alchemist’s Dream as the cover for my book Mageweaver, Margaret is also the driving force behind the conception and continued success of the Heallreaf exhibitions.

Heallreaf started as a small affair at West Dean College in 2015 and has grown each time to Heallreaf 5 with showings in three locations in the UK starting on June 29th at Weston Park in Shropshire. I won’t make it to the Weston Park location, but I am looking at one of the other two – Morley Gallery in London in December 2024 or Farfield Mill in Cumbria from January to April 2025.

Morley Gallery will be easier for me from a travel perspective, but Farfield Mill is just a stone’s throw from the English Lake District. The Lakes have some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and it’s a very, very long time since I’ve seen them so that may be the tie-breaker.

If you get the chance, take the time to visit Heallreaf 5 and the creations of some of the best weaver’s working today. You won’t be disappointed.

So Bad It’s Compelling

May 28, 2024 /

Have you ever sat down to watch a TV show or movie, or picked up a book, and in the first few minutes said: this is terrible, but you persist anyway?

This happened to me recently. I was surfing the dozens of channels on my subscription and complaining about how there was nothing to watch.
Not quite true, but I’ve never been into a dozen home shopping channels or following the exploits of housewives in this week’s target city. It was also that time of the evening when movies I might be interested in are well under way, and my cable provider is very unpredictable on which shows get the restart option.

I never thought I’d say it out loud, but there are times when I miss Comcast and Xfinity. Anyway, after the third cycle through the channel guide, I settled on a movie called Trailer Park Shark which was just starting.

Yes, you did read that correctly, and a couple of minutes in, it was about what I expected. “This is awful,” I said more than once. Despite that, an hour later, I was still watching. I may even watch the movie again because there must have been something in the way the story was told that kept me in front of the screen.

I’m sure there’s a learning opportunity there, and techniques I can use in my own writing once I figure them out.

Tentative Steps into AI

May 20, 2024 /

A few weeks ago I mentioned starting a new project and the first night nerves associated with that experience.

The nerves have mostly settled down now, but spiked a little when I had a new application make its appearance on my desktop this week. Microsoft Co-Pilot!

To say there’s a huge amount of noise around AI, and how it will impact our lives in all areas is likely an equally huge understatement. I am not anti-AI, I just haven’t prioritized the time to really dive in and understand the implications.

I’m the type of person who learns best by doing something rather than reading about it, so I tend to prioritize time when I have something specific for that application. I didn’t think I’d reached that point with AI until I had to review several meeting recordings relevant to the projects I’m working on.

Each meeting was about an hour long and it promised to take me nearly two days to go through all of them. And then a colleague suggested using Co-Pilot. It took a while to work out how to use the interface, and request a summary of the first meeting.

There was a slight delay – maybe ten seconds – before a window popped up with a half-page of text that not only outlined the discussion, but also highlighted the action items. I listened to the first meeting all the way through and didn’t find anything Co-Pilot had missed. After that, it took less than an hour to get summaries of the other meetings.

I’m still not sure about AI and fiction writing, but I am very sure that if an application of AI saves me nearly two days of listening to meetings I didn’t attend, then sign me up for more!

About Labyrinths

May 13, 2024 /

I first learned about labyrinths when I lived in San Francisco, and walked the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral. It was a difficult time in my life, and the slow measured pace as you wend and weave along the paths to the center was calming, and helped put some issues into perspective.

After I moved back to the east coast, I lost the habit of labyrinth walking until this past weekend. I’m not sure what motivated me to do a search, but I found an outdoor labyrinth here in Auburn at Village Christian Church, and decided to pay a visit.

Around ten on a Saturday morning, I was the only person walking through the trees to the clearing where the labyrinth is constructed. Stone walkways lined with brick to mark the way. It was surprisingly quiet given the busy road on one side and housing on the other side. I cleared my mind and decided to focus on one thought as I walked – something never easy for me at the best of times.

It worked, in a way, and for the first few minutes, I found myself having to forcibly slow done. None of the quick walk I usually have when going from one place to another. For me getting the most from the labyrinth experience is a slow measured pace with just the birdsong, the soft rustle of leaves in the light wind, and the occasional bark of a dog.

On the return circuit back to the entrance. I realized the sun dappled patches of light and shade were very much like our lives. We cycle from the good times in the sun to the darker times in the shade, and then back again. In my own life I’m feeling that transition from a dark time to good.

It’s wonderful to feel the sun again.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Richard Freeborn

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑