February 2nd, 2010 / 2:00 pm
Word Spaces
Word Spaces (18): Andrew Ervin
[Andrew Ervin is the author of Extraordinary Renditions, coming this fall from Coffee House Press. He took some time to show us around his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he edits the Southern Review.]
As usual, I have a number of different projects going on and for each I write using different tools.
For short stories, book reviews, and whatever this thing for HTML Giant turns out to be, I use the program OmmWriter, which my friend Nikki recommended. I like it a great deal & encourage everyone with a Mac to download it. For the edits to Extraordinary Renditions, which will be published on Sept. 1, I’m using Word for Mac, which I detest.
The novel I’m writing now, Orwell on Jura, is about a man who attempts (and fails) to get off the grid, so I’m writing that by hand on graph paper. I should have the 2nd draft done in a week or two, after which I’ll send it out to a few friends for feedback. I hope to have it to my agent in March.
English-made Raleigh circa 1974. Some books.
My wife Elivi Varga is a classical flutist who focuses on music by women composers. She’s a total badass and writing with live music in the house is the greatest thing ever. That said, the headphone feature on OmmWriter comes in handy when her students show up for their lessons.
Tags: andrew ervin, extraordinary renditions
That Michael Jack Schmidt road jersey is pretty sweet.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 2:41 pmLee—
Also, other than the Sebald books and TWO differently spined copies of Imperial, note the Harry Kalas (HK) memorial pin. Definitely a Phillies fan . . .
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February 2nd, 2010 / 3:48 pmsasha fletcher—
may the lord bless harry and keep him safe.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 5:45 pmJohn—
That would be the Imperial photo-companion-volume, I’m guessing.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 5:49 pmreynard—
indeed, that’s what it is. i like the photos more than what i’ve read of the book. they’re nice.
Woah. The stem on that bike is insanely tall. The bulge in the lower crates of the milkcrate bookshelf is classic.
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Hurrah for the Phillies and hurrah for alternatives to Word for Mac. I use and love Scrivener, but will be taking a look at Ommwriter out of curiosity.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 3:03 pmMike—
Oh, and hurrah for old hand-cranked pencil sharpeners, too. I had one that I gave away with an old desk it was attached to. I still miss it.
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Ommwriter makes me feel like I exist inside of a Frost poem.
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February 2nd, 2010 / 4:02 pmreynard—
totes, i like writeroom more, just recently started using it, into it
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i like ‘writeroom,’ seems similar to ommwriter. but it’s $25.
http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
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February 2nd, 2010 / 4:38 pmandrew sierra—
going off the website, it seems pretty much like q10 only not free
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February 3rd, 2010 / 1:24 amBen—
Other way around, as I believe WR preceded both q10 and DarkRoom (another clone) but yes, it is.
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This is really a beautiful space.
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I’ve tried Ommwriter, but the ambient sound effects began to freak me out a little. And once you’ve turned them off, there’s not much point to it as far as I can tell.
That’s why I’ve got TextEdit.
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dude! someone rescue that vollmann set from under those buckling milk crates!!
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[...] Kepler, signed by Banville, to the person who can correctly identify the most books in his milk crate posted here. Leave your list as a comment on this post and Andrew will find the winner tomorrow night. Tags: [...]
I want the Banville:
Vollman: Rising Up and Rising Down, Imperial, Expelled from Eden, Argall, The Rifleman; Harry Mathews’s Tlooth; The Book Against God, James Wood; Sebald: The Emigrants, Vertigo, Rings of Saturn; Zak Smith’s Pynchon book; War and Peace (Tolstoy/Pevear, Volohonsky); Richard Powers, In the Time of Our Singing; Chuck Palahniuk, Lullabye; Pynchon: Vineland, Gravity’s Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49. V. Mason & Dixon, that new big one, Inherent Vice; I think maybe an edition of Frank Bidart poems; DFW’s math book; Roth’s I Married a Communist; and that’s about all I can make out. That’s 32, though, counting the multi-volume sets of Vollman.
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(kyle, i took your comment and am email entering it.. realized if we had list as entries, then everyone would share.. so your list is still in consideration)
everybody, please email the htmlgiant addy and we’ll send your entry from there
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February 3rd, 2010 / 1:24 pmTim Ramick—
Great to see the whole run of Javier Marias on the top of that stack of crates…
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two copies of ‘tree of smoke’? is it really that good?
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Hey guys,
Looking for something like Ommwriter that will work for OSX 10.4… any suggestions?
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February 3rd, 2010 / 5:48 pmBen—
The free solution on OSX is to use jDarkRoom, a java-based (and OS-agnostic) clone of the Windows-only DarkRoom which is a clone of WriteRoom.
If you have an intel-based mac, one could install a Windows emulator in OSX called “Wine” and run q10 or DarkRoom via that. That’s obviously a bit more labor intensive but doable.
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[...] and which Publisher's Weekly recently named their "Pick of the Week."] Since February, when this original Word Spaces feature ran, I have decided to move back to Philadelphia. I thought it might be interesting to look at what [...]