Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Category: Craft (Page 1 of 2)

iPad Revisited

April 8, 2024 / / 0 Comments

It’s nearly two years since I wrote about my iPad purchase in the Brave New World post (May 2022 – Richard Freeborn).

In that post I talked about the keyboard, and how, without email I was able to be quite productive. I am still using the iPad for writing, usually with Scrivener because that’s where my fiction lives these days, but there are a few differences.

About six months ago, I bought a Macally bluetooth keyboard. It’s a full size keyboard with a separate numeric keypad. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that numeric keypad until I had it back again. Another feature of the Macally keyboard is the ability to connect up to three devices and switch between them seamlessly, with just a quick hoy-key combination.

It was very easy to connect the keyboard to the iPad, and much as I still liked the Magic keyboard, being able to sit and type with the correct posture was wonderful. It’s on these occasions that I make use of the separate iPad mouse, which to be honest doesn’t get much other use.

What I haven’t managed yet on the iPad is a heavy editing session where I have two or three or more chapters open in panes on the screen so I can make updates and corrections – like putting consistency into hair or eye color. that’s pretty easy to do on the Mac Mini with a 20+ inch monitor. Not so easy on the iPad where you don’t have the ability to pop out and rearrange documents. To be fair, when I get into those big editing sessions, there’s usually a pile of papers strewn across the desk as well!

Overall though, I’m still very pleased with using the iPad as a dedicated writing device for places away from my office. And I’ve still avoided configuring email!

A Quick Update

March 4, 2024 /

For those of you who supported the Thrill Ride kickstarter, a big thank you from me, and implied from everyone else with stories in this year’s issues. The kickstarter funded, so expect to see the first issue – Sisters in Arms – within the next few weeks. This issue includes my story A Cousin’s Outing.

It’s been a while since I submitted anything to the top science fiction magazines, but I have stories under consideration at Asimov’s and Analog. Unfortunately at the moment Fantasy and Science Fiction isn’t accepting submissions, but when they open again, there will be several stories in the queue for them.

Elsewhere, I’m making good progress on the third Jacob and Miriam story, and that’s on track for publication at some time in the second quarter of 2024. More news on that closer to the publication date.

A New Approach

February 19, 2024 /

This past week my writing study and reading intersected in a way I didn’t expect.

I’m coming to the end of a nine-week class on dialog, and wow, has it been illuminating. In parallel, one of the fiction books I was reading was Beyond – the first of Mercedes Lackey’s trilogy about the founding of Valdemar.

I enjoyed the book but something felt off, and not quite right. I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Not then, but later when I finished working through the lectures on the dialog class, I had a glimmer of an idea.

This week’s topic was narration, and how a writer can use it to give the reader information, and to paraphrase, there’s light narration, heavy narration, journal narration, and whole book narration. The assignment was to find examples of each type.

And there was my answer. Beyond isn’t just heavy narration, the whole book is mostly narration, and that was what disturbed me.

The thing with whole book narration is it tends to keep the reader at a distance, and I wasn’t expecting that from Mercedes Lackey. When you read the other Valdemar books you are deep inside the character’s head feeling their thoughts and emotions, and I kept waiting for that in Beyond.

I read the book almost in one sitting and know I’ll go back and read it again, so although I wasn’t expecting this approach, I suspect the next book in the series – Into the West – will have the same style.

This time I’ll be ready for it. And probably read the book in one session.

All in the Mind

January 23, 2024 /

Over the past week I’ve written two short stories with the intent of exploring a new science fiction world. I was reasonably happy with the first one, but something didn’t feel right about the second one.

That second story was a murder mystery and I laid out the death, the suspects, and the resolution. The story ended up being a little shorter than I expected, but that wasn’t what bothered me. If I’ve learned one big thing in the past few years, it’s that a story will be as long as it needs to be. There have been multiple occasions where a story I thought would be about 3,500 words ended up being nearly 5,000. And some I thought would be 6,000 words ended up at 3,000!

I had someone read the story, Someone with much much more experience thanI have, and whose opinion I respect. Good writing they said, but you lost me when I realized there was no setting.

Wham! Nailed it in one!

When I reread the story, I knew exactly what they meant, and I realized why the story ended up that way. I had a vision for the location and setting – a tropical beach on a planet somewhere in the Milky Way – but I didn’t see it. For example, as I was writing, I didn’t have a feel for what the restaurant looked like, how the tables were set, the attitude of the wait staff, the views from the windows, the smells coming out of the kitchen. All those little things that make the story real for the reader.

I thought about the story a lot during my walks this past weekend. I still like the premise of the mystery, and the implied potential for other stories in that same world. I’m thinking I’ll write the story again, from a different character viewpoint, and see what happens to it. It will be a month or two as first, I have a novel to finish.

Back to Basics

January 15, 2024 /

A week or so ago I was catching up on some motivational videos that covered reviewing 2023 and planning for 2024 when the presenter talked about time in the chair and the correct position.

Time in the chair made complete sense. If I write on average 1,000 words an hour, then if I spend three hours “in the chair,” that’s 3,000 words. Of course that shouldn’t be a single three hour block. I’ve tried that and everything gets stiff, my eyes start to cross, and to be honest, I can’t focus on a story for that long. I know, I’ve tried and my brain turns to mush just as I start the third hour.

The key in this instance is to take a break every hour or so. I tried that this month and it really makes a difference. Even five minutes away from the desk helps reset your thoughts and lets you sit down again with fresh ideas.

It was the second comment – correct position – that initially confused me. Then, I listened and understood. Get a chair the right height for your desk. Sit straight, feet on the floor, knees at ninety degrees. Use a keyboard, don’t try and work across the trackpad on a laptop.

Full disclosure. I’m a bit of a sloucher in a chair, and no surprise, it makes my back sore. After listening to the video a second time, I changed how I sit at my desk. It felt strange at first, but after fifteen minutes or so, it felt more natural, and I seem to be getting more words written as well.

Sometimes we have to return to basics to move forward.

2023 So Far

July 6, 2023 /

It seems hard to believe we are already half way through 2023. It doesn’t seem that long ago since we were coming down from the New Year festivities, and wondering when it wold warm up. Now we’re into those hot, heavy, humid summer days and wondering when it will cool down.

Back in December, I had six writing projects in mind, and no surprise I’m still working on the first one. There are some reasons for that – multiple day-job projects that only really calmed down in April, and if I’m honest, no real planning to accommodate those projects and the writing. The result has been the lowest six month word count in a long time, which I wasn’t happy about, especially when I looked at a “completed” chapter and found a series of annotations that reminded me the chapter wasn’t as completed as I thought.

Yesterday I took a hard look at the manuscript and found some more not quite completed chapters. Mapping that tidy up, and the chapters still to write to a calendar for the next quarter gave me a schedule. The schedule also includes the first part of the trilogy I mentioned back in December and some short stories that got started and ground to a halt. I added those in so I could at least acknowledge Heinlein’s second rule for writers (You must finish what you write).

I’ll keep you posted.

He said. She asked

February 1, 2023 /

Last night I was part-way through a book, racing to the end, when suddenly I was out of the story, looking at the room around me, and wondering what happened.

When I looked back at the story, the actual words on the page, the author had written one of those dialog statements that reads like a question and tagged it at the end with “she asked.”

Back when I was a newer writer, I added all manner of tags at the end of dialog. You know the sort of thing – Mark demanded, she whispered – I’m fairly certain I never wrote he ejaculated. Even to my novice mind, that never seemed quite right.

And then I discovered Elmore Leonard.

Pick up any of his books and open it to a random page. The chances are you’ll find whole blocks of dialog – sometimes pages – where the speech attribution, if any, reads: Chili said, or she said. I’ve read and studied Elmore Leonard’s books and never in those blocks of dialog are you in any doubt as to who is speaking. I learned a huge amount from that study.

It took a while, but I did get back into that story, and it ended as I hoped. I just wish she’d said instead of asked!

Meeting a Book Club

October 5, 2022 /

A few months ago, a friend asked if I’d come to her book club and talk about Thieves in the Temple.

Of course, I said yes, and last night (October 4th), arrived with a bottle of Pinot Noir and a certain level of nervousness as the six members of the book club congregated with more copies of the book than I’ve ever seen in the same place.

I wasn’t sure what to expect but the first question put me at ease – how did the Judeans get to Babylon? After that I relaxed, and everything flowed until one lady asked: We know who took the fall, but who was really behind it?

What?

It’s a while since I really looked at Thieves in the Temple, but as we talked further, I realized she was right. The people in the climax were pawns, not the people really behind what happened. As I drove away later, the thought wouldn’t go away, and a glimmer of an idea came to me.

It was still there this morning.

I don’t think it’s a Jacob story, but it does fit in with some other ideas I’ve been fleshing out, and it actually brought some of them more into focus. I’ve tentatively slotted it in my head for after Death at a Wedding and Murder of a Dead Man, but who knows what bright shiny object might come up before then.

And a huge thank you to the Pine Nuts Book Club for inviting me.

Harvest Time

August 26, 2022 /

Two years ago, I grew a pair of habanero pepper plants as an experiment to see what happened. To say it was a success would be an understatement. I still have three quart storage bags in my freezer. After all, there’s only so much marinade and pepper jelly you can make and give away at any one time.

Since then, my nephew has caught the agricultural bug, and he has much more space for his crops. This year we’ve been getting regularly deliveries of corn, okra, and several varieties of hot peppers including a wicked item called the ghost chili.

On the Scoville Heat Unit rating jalapenos are 2,500 to 8,000, habaneros about 100,000 and the ghost chili about a million! Even with an unbroken skin on the pepper, they’re the peppers you handle with gloves – or a full bio-hazard suit. My sister-in-law claims to like her pepper jelly hot, but I suspect these may be too much for her, We’ll see.

On a total change of subject, the current edition of Asimov’s has the first part of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s new Diving novel – The Court Martial of the Renegat Renegades. Everything in the house stopped while I binge read that first installment, and now I have to wait until the November/December issue of Asimov’s for the next part. If you’ve read any of Kris’s Diving series, especially The Renegat, you’ll want to grab this, both in Asimov’s, and when the actual book becomes available. I know I will

A Brave New World

May 13, 2022 /

Just over a week ago, I finally took the plunge, and ordered myself a new iPad, even though there wasn’t much wrong with the one I was using. It’s an iPad Air with 128GB of storage.

Even with Scrivener, and a whole bunch of other apps loaded, that iPad never quite made it as a secondary writing device. However, the iPad has done sterling service as a surfing and reading device. As time has progressed even that became suspect. Over the past few months, an increasing number of apps have failed updates because they need more recent versions of iOS. My iPad was running 12.5.5, and the latest is 15.4!

So I ordered a new iPad PRO with the Magic keyboard. When it arrived, I fired it up, started the side-by-side synchronization, and waited less than a minute before it failed! iOS 12.5.5 is too old to automatically sync with 15.4.

Well, the air was pretty blue for a few minutes as I wrestled with how to synchronize manually. The biggest time-sink was manually syncing Music, Books, and Kindle, but once that was done, and Dropbox and iCloud were configured, I realized one benefit of manual synchronization.

Over the years I’ve downloaded and tried several dozen apps. Some of them are no longer supported, and some I discarded after a few weeks. Clearing those out has certainly kept my home screen less cluttered, and helped me focus on the apps I use most frequently. That list has turned out to be Scrivener, Obsidian, Aeon Timeline, and the Office 365 Mobile apps. Plus of course Music, Books, and Kindle! I haven’t configured email, which was a deliberate decision.

The keyboard has also been a revelation. Over the years, I’ve experimented with several keyboards with various iPads, and they’ve never quite worked for me.

The Magic keyboard took a while to get used to, but once I did, it’s turned out to be all I could ask for. I’ve already written two stories mostly on the iPad, both in my office, and at various other locations.

Not having email or any messaging apps immediately available, has really helped reduce distractions, and my iPad is finally realizing the vision I had for it several years ago.

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