11.22.16 - Tools of the Writing Trade (with links!)

I spend a lot of time with my tools every day, and I often field questions from both writers and readers about what I use to make my business hum. I am an inveterate first adopter, so my tools have tended to change from year to year. Now, I have settled into a few very comfortable habits and tools that I use daily and weekly.
 

ACCOUNTABILITY: I use daily word trackers (i.e. Excel spreadsheets) from graphic artist Svenja Gosen. I love to track my progress, and using these gorgeous Excel spreadsheets has become a must for me. I use one for Fiction and one for Non-Fiction, and fill them in nightly. It makes my annual reviews so much easier to calculate!

WRITING ON THE LAPTOP: Scrivener is my go-to writing program. Highly scalable, easy to use, it's the finest writing software available. Plus, their Project Target tools allow me to set a deadline and see exactly what my daily word count needs to be. Every book and treatment has their own Scrivener file, as well as a massive Tao of JT file for all the blogs. And a bonus, they're now mobile!

WRITING ON THE GO: Scrivener for iPad - The best app invention ever, hands down. I love that I can write on the go without dragging my laptop and chargers along. It’s streamlined my process and lightened my purse!

ZONING OUT FOR SAID WRITING: Freedom. Oh, how I love Freedom. I use Freedom to turn off my access to social media, news sites, and other Internet worm holes so I can turn my brain on. I've written over a dozen books with Freedom in my life, and I hope it's by my side as I write dozens more.

JOURNALING: Day One, which I use for a number of things, including journaling, keeping track of major events and minor triumphs, and capturing ideas. It’s beautiful and easy to use, plus syncs across all devices. It's a great tool for remembering, too.

WEBSITE HOSTING: Squarespace - my web platform, where I host this blog, The Wine Vixen, and Two Tales Press.

TO DO LIST: Wunderlist is, pound for pound, the very best online To Do list and capture system. I spend half my day here. There is some redundancy with my calendar, but that's fine by me, as I live in fear of forgetting an event of deadline.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Asana - for major project management/workflows that won't fit within the Wunderlist construct. I am a relative newcomer to Asana, but my assistant and I use it for the many workflows we have for book releases and major project development. 

ONLINE TOOLS FOR READING, RESEARCH, and SHARING (this is my actual workflow)

Feedly, my favorite RSS feeder, pulls in stories from my favorite blogs
Instapaper, I capture online stories here, then share to...
Evernote, where my research files live; or to...  
Buffer, to share posts firsthand on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
Dlvr.it, which shares just-posted content to my other Facebook and Twitter accounts
Emma, to send newsletters with fun recipes and book recommendations

CALENDAR: iCal (I have both online and paper calendars. I don’t like carrying a day planner, so I use my phone when I'm out and traveling) run through Google calendar. I use the Outlook app calendar, too.

PLANNER: Quo Vadis Habana, used as a Bullet Journal

Interestingly, two years ago, I switched to a daily calendar instead of weekly. It took a while, but I finally realized I was totally stressed by this daily accountability, and have switched back to weekly. My stress levels dropped immediately. I feel so much more settled! Crazy, right? The Habana is the perfect size — larger than a regular Moleskine, it fits my hand perfectly, can capture a few more lines per page, and the paper is fantastic — smooth, easy to write on, never bleeds through, and beautiful. I like paper you can pet.

NOTETAKING:

Clairfontaine A5 spiral bound - idea capture, notes, book notebooks, research, planning — each book gets a notebook.

-And-

Midori Travelers Notebook - A lovely back-to-the-earth choice, I love throwing this in my bag when I’m heading out. The leather is stroke-able, the paper is smooth, and I always get compliments on it. When I’m traveling, there’s no sense taking five notebooks along, so it doubles as my writing notebook and my planner. 

COMPUTER: iMac in the office, currently a 2013 13” MacBook Air laptop for writing, soon to be a 2016 13” MacBook—the all-day battery life is essential to my well-being.

PHONE: iPhone 6S in a Twelve South BookBook case

TABLET: iPad Air 2 in a Moshi origami case

EREADER: Kindle Voyage

HANDWRITING TOOLS:

Pilot Knight Fountain pen - beautiful, sturdy, a real workhorse
Sharpie Fine Point Pens - I especially like the blue
Pilot Precise v5 Pens - I prefer black
Blackwing Pencils in Pearl

It seems like a lot, but each tool has its purpose. Collectively, they make my life easier. I hope you find some of them useful.

Do you have any favorite tools? I'd love to hear about them!

11.20.16 - Sunday Smatterings

Hello, chickens. How are you today? Ready for turkey? It's been a whirlwind around here, to say the least: edits (LIE TO ME is in production!) and family and Emmy® nomination parties (more on that below!) and pie-making and early Thanksgiving. Which was delicious! 

Whew!

It's officially time for the holiday bustle. Pace yourself, dear ones. Like The Kerr says, you can do anything, but not everything. Remember that for the next six weeks. Or forever.

Here's what happened on the Internets this week:

I'm still heartbroken over the loss of longtime excellent reporter and human, Gwen Ifill. She's going to be impossible to replace.

Our newest Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, Bob Dylan, can't make it to the awards ceremony. Like so many of us during the holiday season, he had a prior commitment. Hmm....

Are you looking to join a book club? I've got one for you: Modern Mrs. Darcy's online bookclub! I spoke to them this week, and they are a fun, sharp group of bookworms. Check them out! 

My favorite productivity app turned 1 this week! Happy Birthday, Freedom! 🎉

Jane. Austen. Mugs. Need I say more?

And closer to home:

I love writing. I love my job. But make no mistake: this is not a glamorous one by any means. Some days I wish I could snatch the Muse right out of the air so I could listen to her... but sometimes she has other plans. And I just have to deal. This week, I had one of those days.

I also nerded out over pencils.

Psst... the December newsletter comes out Thursday! Are you signed up? If you aren't, plug in your email, and get yourself a FREE ebook!

Best for last. Y'all. You know the literary TV show I co-host, A WORD ON WORDS? Well. WE GOT NOMINATED FOR AN EMMY® THIS WEEK!!! I am verklempt. Hats off to our brilliant crew led by our intrepid producer, Linda Wei, and of course my lovely co-host, Mary Laura Philpott. Wanna see what the fuss is all about? Go watch some episodes!

That's it from me! American chickens, have a blessed Thanksgiving, enjoy your turkey and loved ones, read a good book, drink some tea, pet a kitty, and I'll talk to you again soon.

xo,
J.T.

12.10.15 - Building a Publishing House with Vellum

I have a quick suggestion for those of you planning to indie publish your work. It’s a fantastic little app called Vellum.

My friend Alethea Kontis turned me on to Vellum when she was staying with us a few months ago. I saw her working on one of her books in it, and she showed me the app and raved about it. I downloaded it from the app store, and within 5 minutes I’d imported a short story and started to play.

It took me a grand total of one afternoon to learn the quirks of the system. I imported one novel and three short stories, did their formatting, inserted backmatter, built the links, and tied my accounts into the system.

I immediately saw the possibilities. I could make an ebook and upload it with literally a few clicks.

There are books written on how to do this. People specialize in it. I’ve paid for it before – hundreds of dollars.

Vellum is the professional book formatter’s worst nightmare.

It doesn’t take any special skills to make it work. It is intuitive, simple, and straightforward. It shows you what your ebook will look like on all the devices, too, which is one of the biggest bugaboos formatters have faced before.

When I realized what I could do with this program, I immediately decided to move forward on a project that’s long been on my back burner: re-editing, rebranding, and republishing a bevy of short stories, and finally getting myself positioned to release several new stories that hadn’t been uploaded yet.

I taught my assistant Amy how to use the program and set her free to do what she would with the interiors. While we were in Florida for the NINC conference, Vellum training was front and center, and she learned some of the super-cool internal tricks, like evergreening links and how to import backmatter across all titles so you don’t have to recreate the wheel with every book. The ease of uploading ebooks is the real secret here – anytime you need to make a change, all you do is fix the file and reupload – a service Vellum provides at an additional cost.

While the app itself is free, if you plan on using it for your publishing ventures, I highly recommend you purchase their unlimited program. I’m telling you, you’ll spend less on that than a single formatting job by a professional.

When Vellum asked Amy and I to dish on their product, this is what we said:

“I’ve never seen a program more intuitive, flexible, and easy to use than Vellum. The end results are elegant and stunning, and the program is helping my business run smoothly. What more could you ask for?”
–New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison

“As a former Big 5 publishing professional, I thought only XML-fluent designers were capable of creating an ebook. Vellum empowers any author or content creator to make a beautiful, commercially viable product in just minutes. I’ve never been so glad to be wrong.”
–Amy Kerr, Publisher, Two Tales Press

I could go on and on and on about how great I think Vellum is, but it would be easier to just show you. You can see the results of Vellum’s gorgeous interface at my publishing house, Two Tales Press.

P.S. The good people of Vellum didn't pay me to say this. I just love their product!

_______

If you like what you read today, please consider leaving a tip on the way out. No pressure. But unicorns wearing roses might show up if you do! 

My Writing Tools

In response to Donna Fobert's Facebook question about what writing program I use, and a great post by John Scalzi on his technological makeup, I thought I'd run through all my writing tools. 

Laptop: I write on a MacBook Pro that just celebrated it's third birthday. It's my first Mac, and I am a total convert. But it's full - I'm talking barely 8 GB left. So I've just bought a Mac Mini, which hasn't arrived yet, to be my desktop. It will be a back up, a surfing computer, and I'll be eliminating the Internet as much as possible from this laptop. When this one goes, I'll get a MacAir, though I'm debating between the 13' and the 11"

Browser: I used to be a complete Firefox evangelist, but something happened and they've really crashed and burned. I spent some time on Chrome, which is great, but I use Safari 99% of the time. My quibble is it won't show the favicons for websites in the toolbar, but that's not a biggie. It's quick and reliable.

Mail: Gmail, and Sparrow. I'm a Gmail fanatic, love how organized I can be on it. Sparrow is lovely too, so easy to categorize and file my stuff.  

RSS Reader: Reeder for Mac on the laptop, Mr. Reader on the iPad. Both can be found in the app store.

Website and Blog: Squarespace - I love the CMS here - it's straightforward and easy to use, and I'm not a fan of Wordpress, because it's just too complicated. Squarespace is great for people who are tech savvy but don't have programming skills.

Twitter: I use Hootsuite for the analytics, posting to multiple accounts, scheduling etc., and use it to check my Facebook pages, but for a quick surf of Twitter, Tweetbot is my go to across all my devices. Elegant and simple.

Facebook: Hootsuite and web version, I'm not a fan of the Facebook app. I have two accounts and five pages I manage, so I try to keep it as simple as possible.

Tablet: iPad 2 - I use it for everything - mail, web, movies, music and reading. I'm surprised by how much I like reading on it. I use Barnes and Noble Nook Store for my ebook buying needs, and the Nook app on iPad is great. I also write on it - using Documents To Go, which allows me online cloud access to my files in Word. They sync together with my Dropbox perfectly, making my work ultra portable. I just pair a wireless Apple keyboard and boom goes the dynamite.

EReader: Nook Glowlight - mostly for outside reading that the iPad isn't good for.

Phone: Currently an iPhone 4s, about to be upgraded to a 5. I debated long and hard about doing away with a smartphone entirely, but it's too useful for travel, so I guess I'm stuck. It's in airplane mode a lot.

Online To Do List and Project Management: Wunderlist. I love being able to dump all my projects in one place and add steps to each. Gets it all out of my head.

Note Taker: Evernote. I've been using it for years, and I'm especially excited about their new integration with Moleskine.

Distraction Blocker: Freedom. Turns off my Internet for as long as I need to focus. I'm a Pomodoro, writing in long chunks of time with breaks - usually 120 minutes at a go, so Freedom makes that process very simple. 

Backups: I use Cloud support for everything (hence the Mac Mini winging its way to me - I want something hard and local). Dropbox resides on my computer and I write everything out of it instead of out of My Documents. I have Carbonite, which backs up my Dropbox, I email my working manuscript to myself at the end of every work day, copy it into Scrivener, add the file to a thumb drive, and print every 50 pages. I'm paranoid about losing my work.

Word Tracker: I like metrics, and this is the way I track my fiction word counts.

Paper: I use Clairefontaine spiral bound notebooks for each book - so I can capture all the ideas, outline, whatever I need. A Circa organizer gathers all my research, and I prefer Moleskines for journaling and idea capture. But I always have a stack of 8"x11" yellow legal pads nearby - they're handy and cheap, and I have a weird tic about ruining good paper, so often the lovely notebooks I buy sit unused whilst I scribble all over the cheap stuff. Weird, I know.

Day Runner: I use Google Calendar synced to iCal for everything, but I also have a Quo Vadis Space 24 in red leather that I use as a backup, plus its great for yearly and monthly planning. I like being able to see my year in one place, and I love the week on the left side and notes on the right. My To Do list goes there.

And now to the Writing Software:

I use both Word for Mac 2011 and Scrivener. Word is a throwback from my PC days, one I can't seem to shake. I wrote 9 books in it, and it's still my go to. Now, Scrivener is the newcomer to my system. It took three tries to figure it out, and I finally wrote an entire book in it last year. I've never been a sectional writer, instead looking at the whole. If you write in chapters, or scenes, Scrivener is the way to go. Also, it makes it brilliantly easy to move stuff around. Word's copy and paste function is a handicap when you see how easy it is to restructure chapters and scenes in Scrivener.

For a great series of essays about the practical usage and applications of Scrivener for storytelling, I highly recommend reading David Hewson's blog. He's done a great job demystifying the hows of this awesome software.

When I start a book, I open a Scrivener file. I accumulate research, journal the book, build characters - all the things I used to do on my yellow legal pads. And it's awesome to have it all in one place. But....

I also find myself getting bogged down when I use Scrivener. I think more about structure and less about story. I think about the pieces, and that makes my story suffer. The book I'm writing now, with Catherine Coulter, JEWEL OF THE LION, has moved back and forth between the two programs about 8 times, and now I've given up and am writing in Word again. 

Word's got the new distraction free view which I like a lot. I can shut everything out and just write, which is the point of all this anyway, right?

I still feel like I have too many tools. I'd love to get everything down to just one notebook. But in happy making news, I've managed to actual move into my office, where I'm leaving all these tool (minus the iPad) at night so I can try to shut some of this off! It's strange how attached I've become to my office at last - the creative energy is flowing and it's cozy, so I'm pleased with this big transition upstairs instead of spreading everything out across the living room. 

So that's it, folks. How about you - anything you're absolutely in love with tool wise? And if I forgot anything, feel free to ask. 

(Also, a question. I spent 6 years blogging on Fridays, but have - for some unknown reason - tried to move this blog to Thursdays. I'm debating moving it back - tell me which you prefer, okay? Thursday or Friday?)