The Storymatic
Writing is easy!
Writer & Marlboro writing professor Brian Mooney just launched this website where you can buy (or just learn about) his writing aid/ game/ teaching aid/ toy The Storymatic. Here’s how it works:
“The Storymatic consists of 250 ivory cards and 250 silver cards. Each ivory card contains a character trait or occupation. Each silver card contains a situation or object. Wild Cards contain instructions about where and when your story takes place, and how it must be told.
“…First, draw two ivory cards. Then combine the information on these two cards to create your main character. For example, if you draw “surgeon” and “amateur boxer,” your character is a surgeon who is also a boxer.
“Next, draw one or two silver cards. Let the information on the cards lead you into a story. If, for example, your cards say “box of teeth” and “pair of pants that don’t fit right,” then perhaps after a night in the ring Dr. Boxer always scans the floor of the ring for the teeth of his opponents, but maybe Dr. Boxer has put on some extra weight due to his long days at the hospital, causing him to slow down in the ring, and then…”
This Post Should Be Meaner: Authors BookShop
One time I asked this musician named Joe Nolan — who is cool, who is awesome, who knows what he’s doing, here’s a song — how come he didn’t hook up with some indie label, and he said an indie label was just a kid with a book of stamps.
You can self-publish your fuckin’ CD, but not your stupid book.
To see what the people who self-publish their books are doing, check out the Authors BookShop.
Especially check out the list of publishers — how many do you recognize? For me, not a lot (though there a good few, for sure). I did a few clicks and it seems like many of these are them least-fancy self-publishing services. Oh man, they’re lousy.
But the Authors BookShop is okay. ABS is providing a necessary service at a far better deal than Amazon. It has a bad name and most of the publishers who use the service are, to put it nicely, different than what most HTML Giant readers care about — but Brad Grochowski (President, Founder and author of The Secret Weakness of Dragons) is doing something that should be done, can be done, and — he’s opened it up to everyone.
Here’s why Grochowski started the thing: READ MORE >
I Was Wondering Which Programs Other People Use to Write Their Shitty Poetry
For years I just used TextEdit. It’s free, simple, and takes a second to load on even the slowest computer. I own Word, but Word takes like five minutes to load on my three-year old computer, and is sans Clippy these days, which was one of my only reasons for opening Word. I’ve tried various ‘serious MFA literature’ text editors, stuff like Ulysses and WriteRoom, but beyond their really great full screen modes, they didn’t really give me positive emotions.
I started using Pages this year, and I have been pretty happy. It has full screen mode, and I got turned-on to the typeface BiauKai, which doesn’t have bold or italic versions, but I use on everything I write anyway because I don’t like bolds or italics. Also, I’m hoping to make a sweet family newsletter sometime in the near future, and Pages looks like a real winner for that kind of thing. *fingers crossed*