Archive for the ‘Recommended Media’ Category

4 Wonderful Tools for Writers in the Digital Era (That Aren’t Word Processors)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

As a designer, I’m always stum­bling across use­ful resources and tools online, but for what­ever rea­son, I find fewer tools that really exist to help make writ­ers’ lives eas­ier.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.  It just means you have to dig a lit­tle deeper.  Today, I thought I would share some tools that can make cer­tain aspects of the writer’s life a tad easier.

1. Dropbox

If you’re any­thing like me, you don’t always remem­ber to run your back­ups.  With recent com­puter trou­bles, I’ve been mak­ing a much big­ger effort to back­ing up every­thing of impor­tance.  About six months ago, I started using Dropbox and I haven’t looked back.

Dropbox is an online ver­sion­ing and backup sys­tem.  You install drop­box on your win­dows or mac com­puter and every­thing in the folder called “My Dropbox” is con­stantly uploaded to the server.  When you make mod­i­fi­ca­tions, it keeps a record of these changes and you can go to the web inter­face and load older ver­sions.  Accidentally over­write a file?  Dropbox can save your butt.  It has saved me on more than one ocassion.

Even bet­ter, Dropbox can be installed on mul­ti­ple com­put­ers, keep­ing your drop­box folder synced up to all of the machines.  Whether you’re on your office com­puter or your lap­top, you will have access to your files.

Finally, Dropbox users can share fold­ers with one another.  We use this fea­ture exten­sively at Escape Artists to deal with our pro­duc­tion files, con­tracts, and var­i­ous busi­ness doc­u­ments and resources.

My biggest con­cern when I first started using Dropbox was that it would con­stantly be upload­ing my 50+ megabyte pho­to­shop files, and my band­width would be devoured.  It actu­ally tracks the dif­fer­ences, though, and only uploads the changed bits.  I’ve never noticed Dropbox being a hog of my writing.

There’s a free 2 giga­byte account, which should be more than enough to pro­tect your writ­ing doc­u­ments.   I pay for the 50/​gb a year plan for $99 per year because I truck in larger files.    Dropbox is avail­able for Mac, PC, and Linux.

2. Evernote

I work across 3 dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, and keep­ing my research notes in an easy-​​to-​​access for­mat, while main­tain­ing flex­i­b­lity and a vari­ety of for­mats, isn’t easy.  That is, until I dis­cov­ered Evernote.  What I was look­ing for orig­i­nally was pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware to help myself imple­ment the GTD method.  What I found instead was a very use­ful pro­gram for orga­niz­ing all those lit­tle bits and pieces of things that I need to access from time to time.

Evernote works on a very sim­ple sys­tem of note­books and notes.  You can add tags, and just about any kind of media into a note.  You can clip entire web­pages into a note, or just the URL.  You can make screen cap­tures very eas­ily.  And then the real power is, it’s con­stantly back­ing up your notes to the server, and sync­ing them with all machines you run it on.  There’s a usage limit for free accounts based on data trans­fer, but I’ve never even got­ten halfway there.  I don’t tend to use much in the way of mul­ti­me­dia files though.

Not only do I use Evernote for sort­ing and keep­ing track of things like research notes, sto­rynotes, and so on–I often start writ­ing my blog­posts there.  Any kind of doc­u­ment where the for­mat isn’t nec­es­sary, that I want to be able to access from any­where.  You can even record voice notes with the iPhone app and they will be synced to all your machines.  I used this fea­ture to take down some notes on my novel project while I was dri­ving across Kansas alone.  Very use­ful feature.

There are a few things about Evernote I do find lack­ing.  For one, you can’t sort note­books into col­lapsi­ble hier­ar­chies.  I would really like to be orga­nize my notes in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to my email pro­gram.   You can kind of fake this with saved searches for tags and so on, but I don’t really need a more detailed sys­tem of orga­ni­za­tion than notebooks/​folders.

Evernote is avail­able on Mac, PC, and iPhone. It has a very nice web-​​based inter­face as well.  If you have an inter­net con­nec­tion, you can get to your notes.

3. Sonar

I don’t use this one cur­rently, but not because there’s any­thing wrong with it.  I just don’t have enough sto­ries and sub­mis­sions out that I need to keep track of any­thing.  Sonar is a PC-​​only data­base specif­i­cally designed for keep­ing track of your sub­mis­sions.  It’s genre agnos­tic, as far as I remember.

Some fea­tures include:

  • color-​​coding
  • list subs by the work or by market
  • sortable
  • auto­matic daily backups
  • Until the per­fect online solu­tion comes along, Sonar is my pick for track­ing submissions.

When I start writ­ing and sub­mit­ting more actively again, you can bet that Sonar will be my go-​​to track­ing software.

4. Bubbl​.us

Bubbl​.us is a mind-​​mapping web­site.  It has a slick, easy to use inter­face, and you can export your maps out in a vari­ety of image for­mats or even HTML.

My pri­mary use of Bubbl​.us is to cre­ate site maps for free­lance web­site gigs.  However, I do use it from time to time to explore var­i­ous notions in a work in progress story.  I find that the mindmap­ping method really helps me brain­storm when I’m work­ing on things like world­build­ing or plot.

Being browser-​​based, it’s cross-​​platform, and it’s free!  It’s hard to beat that.

A Brief (Spoiler Free) Review of Star Trek

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I have never been a Trekker. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever picked a side in the great “Wars” vs “Trek” debate but I’ve always leaned more toward the “Wars” side due to my expo­sure to that fran­chise at the right age. My father watched the orig­i­nal Trek on Saturday morn­ings when I was very, very young, and my only mem­ory of that series until a cou­ple of years ago was of red­shirts being turned into bul­lion cubes. Then I got my hands on the Original Series and watched it to com­ple­tion and my atti­tude changed. I thought it was very much a prod­uct of its era, but also very thought­ful in ways I hadn’t expected. And the char­ac­ters were won­der­ful, human, and lik­able to a fault.

In the same way,Star Trek (2009)  is very much a prod­uct of our times.  It should come as no sur­prise that it has con­nected with me and with younger audi­ences around the globe like no other Trek before it.  Next Generation is the only other ver­sion I ever had much inter­est in, but the char­ac­ters here are just more iconic.  They have emo­tions and they act on them.

You’re going to read a mil­lion words about this film, and about how the actors embody the roles with­out imi­tat­ing the actors that came before them.  All true.  Here’s the hereti­cal thing I am going to say:   the new actors are bet­ter actors than the orig­i­nal cast, who, hon­estly were mostly work­man­like.  Pine in par­tic­u­lar will be remem­bered more for Kirk than Shatner will be one day.  An excep­tion will be made for Leonard Nemoy  who rocked it in this pic­ture with I think one of the most amaz­ing per­for­mances of his career.   I felt like this was the  very last time we’ll ever see Spock.  And despite not being a Trekker, I felt a loss at that.  But then, Quinto’s Spock comes along and the pain is less­ened.   The char­ac­ter will live on embod­ied in a new vessel.

It’s been tragic to see the orig­i­nal cast pass away one by one.  Such is life.  But the char­ac­ters don’t have to die, and they can still speak to us.  Their mes­sage of an opti­mistic, hope­ful and more impor­tantly human future is one that I think per­haps we need now more than ever.  I hadn’t real­ized just how long I’ve been wait­ing for a movie like this.  Adventure, excite­ment, laughs, nos­tal­gia, and new­ness all rolled into one expe­ri­ence.  I started grin­ning in the first 10 min­utes and I didn’t stop until the cred­its rolled.  Sheer, child­like joy is the only way I can describe it.  Giggles of glee.

Silence in space.  Twice!

Sure, a lot of the sci­ence is wonky, but Star Trek’s never been a hard SF con­cept.  It’s about human­ity, cen­trally.  And this movie has that in spades.

I wanted to dream about it last night because I wanted more of these actors in these roles.  Not two years from now.  I want them every week on my LCD TV.  It’ll never hap­pen, so I will make do with yearly out­ings.  But I was so excited at the end that I wanted more desperately.

I can’t believe it, but this movie has turned me into a Trekker.

Forget Joss. JJ is my Master now.  These guys are the best SF guys in Hollywood.  Between Star Trek, Fringe, and Lost, they are the undis­puted kings.  And they’ve done more to bring SF to the main­stream so far than any­one else in years.

International Science Fiction Collection

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Lavie Tidhar has long been one of my favorite authors, and we fre­quently pub­lished him at the Fortean Bureau.  He’s a fas­ci­nat­ing indi­vid­ual and it shows in his writ­ing, which is very often influ­enced by his grow­ing up in Israel.  I like exotic locales in my fic­tion, and Lavie has a way of mak­ing places on Earth itself seem exotic.

Which brings me to his new anthol­ogy, The Apex Book of World SF.

Lavie has put together a ros­ter of authors you have prob­a­bly never heard of before, and maybe a few that you have.  Writers from India, Thailand, China, Croatia, and more.   Sometimes we in the sci­ence fic­tion lit­er­ary cir­cles fail to real­ize that the genre extends past the bor­ders of the English-​​speaking world.  This book in a per­fect world would get a lot of atten­tion from us.

I often hear peo­ple won­der­ing when the next big move­ment will come along.  We had New Wave, and Cyberpunk.  I have sus­pected for some time that the next move­ment is going to come from sci­ence fic­tion authors for who English is a sec­ond lan­guage, if a lan­guage at all.

I’m look­ing for­ward to read­ing this one.  I hope you check it out. There’s even a World SF Blog that has been run­ning some great con­tent late.
You can order the anthol­ogy at the Apex Book Company Website.

New Story Online: The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad (With Exciting Poster Illustration Action)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Who doesn’t love giant mon­sters ter­ror­iz­ing the land?  Who doesn’t love geeks who love giant mon­sters and crack­ing wise?  If you don’t, then you can skip this story.  If you do… read on.

This is prob­a­bly one of my most pop­u­lar sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries, and for what­ever rea­son, I’ve never got around to get­ting it put online.  With the spare time I have lately to work on my skillset, I decided to do a fun poster illus­tra­tion for the story and a hope­fully easy-​​to-​​read layout.

The story orig­i­nally appeared in the May 2005 issue of Interzone, edited by Andy Cox.   It’s my first print mag­a­zine sale.

So with­out fur­ther blath­er­ing, here’s the story and the illustration:

The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad by Jeremiah Tolbert.

My 5 Minute Review of The Watchmen

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It’s weird, but my non-​​fiction pod­cast debut  is over on Starship Sofa this week (rather than Escape Pod where I now work).  Tony asked me to throw together a review of the film, and I wanted to play with my record­ing equip­ment again, so I did so.  You can check out the episode and hear my thoughts on The Watchmen film on the Starship Sofa pod­cast web­site. There’s also fic­tion in this episode by Kim Newman.

Postmortem: What the hell was #futureJer?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My 3 month long exper­i­ment in 140 char­ac­ter fic­tion posts ended on Sunday.  You can read my ser­ial fic­tion #future­Jer on the Thaumatrope web­site here.  The premise was  pretty sim­ple: I attempted to imag­ine my life 2 years into the future if our econ­omy doesn’t get any bet­ter.  It’s fairly grim, but has a touch of hope to it too.  The cast were barely fic­tional ver­sions of my fam­ily and friends, and it takes place in rural Kansas.

The Genesis of a Twitter Serial

Back before I was actu­ally laid off, but knew the threat was loom­ing, I was expe­ri­enc­ing a lot of anx­i­ety.  On a whim, I decided to imag­ine how bad things could get to exter­nal­ize my fears, and I started twit­ter­ing this in the form of #future­Jer.  Within a cou­ple of days, Nathan Lilly, the edi­tor of Thaumatrope, direct mes­saged me and offered to pay me to do what I was already doing, at pro rates no less.  It was an easy deci­sion to make.

Postmortem

I never had any inten­tion of telling a story when I started out doing this, but once I was offered money, I had to give it an arc.  I intro­duced the ele­ments of the preg­nancy and the grow­ing vio­lence to develop the drama.  I was hap­pi­est about the project when I was sim­ply imag­in­ing our lives as essen­tially sub­sis­tence farmer/​hunters.  I find some­thing deeply com­pelling about a life with­out work, where you sim­ply grow your own food, main­tain your own home, and enjoy life.  I think we’re hard­wired more for the hunter/​gatherer or farmer life more than we are for work­ing in offices.

The tone prob­a­bly got even darker when I was actu­ally laid off at the end of January.  I sat down a few days later and wrote the entire month of February in an after­noon, plot­ting out the remain­der.  I sus­pect the final bit felt slightly more cohe­sive than the bits that led up to it.

Overall, it was an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in writ­ing on the fly, and hope­fully I didn’t screw it up too much.  Also, I hope it doesn’t turn from fic­tion to real­ity, because I don’t actu­ally know how to build or repair wind tur­bines or cas­trate bulls, although I’m will­ing to learn if some­one wants to teach me!

Read: Lamentation by Ken Scholes

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Full dis­claimer:  Ken is a great guy, some­one I con­sider a won­der­ful friend.  One of my regrets about not liv­ing in Portland (despite hav­ing wanted to for about 8 years) is that I don’t get to hang out with him and his wife more often.  Ken’s suc­cess is well-​​earned.  We first met at a Norwescon a few years ago, and Ken was just get­ting started again seri­ously with his writ­ing.  He’d sold a few sto­ries, not many.  We hit it off and I asked him to send along some­thing to the Fortean Bureau, which he did, and we bought it.  And a cou­ple of oth­ers.  I loved Ken’s short sto­ries.  I sup­pose that is to tem­per my com­ments com­ing next.

I enjoyed Lamentation.  However, for me at least, it suf­fers from over­hype.  It’s a good book, but so much energy was poured into call­ing it a great book that  I had unre­al­is­ti­cally high expec­ta­tions.  I don’t mean to damn it with faint praise, and I’ve thought long and hard about whether I wanted to admit that I didn’t froth over the book, because I want noth­ing more than to see Ken suc­ceed.  So lis­ten, I did like the book. I do rec­om­mend that you read it.  You are liable to love it.

Anyway–It’s very inter­est­ing on sev­eral lev­els to me.  Ken’s very good at what he does, so let me expound on how and why.

One aspect that I really like is that it’s a breezy kind of epic fic­tion.  I read the book in 2 days.  I rarely get to cut through a book that fast (although this is the first book that I’ve read since being laid off).  The book rarely dragged which is rare for this kind of fan­tasy for me.

A lot has been said about the world build­ing, which I started out dis­lik­ing and slowly grew to find more inter­est­ing over time.  It felt at first to me that not enough logic and fore­thought went into the com­bi­na­tion of echos of our world’s cul­ture.  As the book devel­ops, I see that more is going on, and I became more inter­est­ing.  I really liked how the his­tory of what had hap­pened echoed through the events of the book.   I think Ken han­dles this excel­lently.  World build­ing can eas­ily bog down this kind of fan­tasy.  Look at Tolkien, who I con­sider an inter­minable bore when it came to all his descrip­tions of land­scapes and Elvish his­tory and singing.  Ken fleshes out his world, but does it deftly, much like every­thing else he does in the book.

I do think the book suf­fers a lit­tle from too many points of view.  I found the con­cept of many of the char­ac­ters inter­est­ing, but their insights rarely struck home with me.  I spent much of the book wait­ing for a char­ac­ter who would sink his teeth into me like Tyrion from Martin’s books.  However–Martin’s books are like 5 times longer and I don’t think this is a mat­ter of skill so much as it is a mat­ter of time.  Ken’s got 4 more books to do this, and I’m def­i­nitely going to give him a chance to develop these char­ac­ters even further.

Okay, I’m enter­ing into spoil­ers ter­ri­tory next.  Behind the cut.

Continue read­ing ›

Similo: An SF Short Film

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This is snurched straight from Irene Gallo’s excel­lent blog Tor​.com.  It starts out a lit­tle slow, but I think the pay­off is worth it.  And fan­tas­tic pro­duc­tion val­ues all around.

Fantasy Magazine: The Men Burned All The Boats by Patricia Russo

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I haven’t been read­ing much short fic­tion lately, but I am sub­scribed to the Fantasy Magazine feed.  I saw the open­ing of this story and the words drew me in.  I had to read it, even so early.

The men burned all the boats, so it is impos­si­ble to leave the island now. Everyone cheered when the pyres were lit. The danc­ing went on for three days, as if for a wed­ding. The men chanted, We are fear­less! Let our ene­mies attack us now. We will slaugh­ter them, and take their boats as war prizes. And if the sea folk come against us, we will crush them, too. Our magic is so strong we will pur­sue those cold ones under the waves, torches blaz­ing. We will burn out their black eyes, tear their sil­ver flesh to strips, and lick up their pale blood. We are mighty. We are invincible.

via Fantasy Magazine » The Men Burned All The Boats.

Patricia Russo is another Fortean Bureau alum.  It makes me so happy to see a new story by her, and one that is so great.  I highly rec­om­mend you give it a read.

My 10 Second Impression of Fringe

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

My super-​​quick impres­sion of the TV show Fringe:

SHOW INTRO

Ridiculous and bad sci­ence premise  results in some­one being gorily mur­dered, often involv­ing slime and/​or blood.

CREDITS roll.

OLIVIA

(stares emo­tion­lessly)

WALTER BISHOP

Something off the wall, either grossly inap­pro­pri­ate or involv­ing food, while exam­ing some grotesque CG crea­ture or corpse.

(The audi­ence laughs and shakes their heads).

PETER BISHOP

(smirks mys­te­ri­ously)

THE END

And yet I love this show.  I want to start a Doctor Walter “Crazy Motherfucker” Bishop fanclub.

Still, the most recent episode had some painfully bad sci­ence.  The cold is caused by a virus.  Viruses are not cells.  Come on, Fringe, that’s first-​​year bio stuff.  Don’t embarass me like that again. Or I might just have to down­load Walter high­light reels instead of actu­ally watch­ing your show.