Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

Working Hard

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Writing, flying, writing, flying, repeat, repeat, repeat.

I realize that I haven’t been blogging lately. I have a good excuse. I’m unbelievably busy with work.

I have a drop-dead deadline for my Leopard book coming up very quickly now. So whenever I’m at home, I’m in my office with my fat butt planted in the chair in front of my computer, writing about Leopard. The book is coming along very well, but not without some minor problems. Still, if I keep at it, I’ll get it done on time.

Trouble is, I’m not spending much time in my office. After a seriously crappy-to-the-point-of-wasted-time gig in Kingman last weekend, I had to fly up to Page to take some photographers around Lake Powell. For three days in a row.

Confluence of San Juan and Colorado RiversI love Lake Powell. I think it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth. And if you think it looks great from the ground or water, you should see it from the air! But after a 4 hour flight on 4 hours of sleep today, I decided I’d had enough of the Lake. Fortunately, I’m going home tomorrow, after dropping off one of my clients in Phoenix.

I’ve been in the Marriott Courtyard here since Monday night. I’ve had five flights totaling over 10 hours of billable time, with about 3 hours more to come. Great for the Flying M Air bank account, which can always use a good cash inflow — especially after a slow summer in Wickenburg. But not great for the Leopard deadline.

So now I’m sitting here at the desk in my hotel room with two laptops in front of me — my MacBook Pro test mule running the latest Leopard beta and my trusty 12″ PowerBook G4 — revising text and making new screenshots for my Leopard book. I’ll finish Chapter 7 today and, with luck, start Chapter 9. (No, I’m not doing them in order.)

Tomorrow, I’ll check out of here at 7 AM and take my luggage — including my “portable office” — to the airport. By 8 AM, I hope to have my passenger on board for the flight to Phoenix. With cooperative weather (read that, “no headwinds”), I’ll be at my desk again by 1 PM, laying out the chapters I wrote in Page. Friday, I’ll be in my office all day.

Then, on Saturday, I pick up another photographer. He’s from Australia and he’s doing a coffee table book about Robinson helicopters. I’m one of his featured operators. I’ll fly him around for a few days, taking time to work on the Leopard book in early morning hours, before he’s awake. He leaves on Tuesday. Then I have two more days in my office before another helicopter gig at Lake Powell, Monument Valley, and Shiprock.

Anyone who thinks being a freelancer or owning a business is an easy living should walk in my shoes this month. It’s times like these that I think back with a bit of longing for those cubicle days, when I spent more time shooting the bull with co-workers than working long hours to meet deadlines and client needs.

But by mid-October, things should be back to normal. Until then, bear with me. On the priority scale, blogging has slipped behind a few more important tasks.

Grammar Is Important

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Note: Okay, so I’m recycling this one. It first appeared on May 10, 2007. In the past few days, it’s gotten a few comments. And since I’m thinking about writing — being in the middle of a book revision for my 70th book — it’s the kind of thing that I would write now –that is, if I had time to write. But I do have time to recycle, so here it is again. If you’ve already read it, why not read it again? I did and I liked it better this time around. – Maria

Some advice for people who want to make money as a writer.

I’ve been writing for a living since 1990, when I quit my day job to become a freelance writer. Since then, I’ve written 68 books and literally hundreds of articles about using computers and other topics.

One thing that amazes me is the number of people who claim they want to be writers but can’t get something as simple as grammar even close to right.

I’m Not Perfect, But I’m Okay

Okay, so here’s my disclaimer: I never claim to have perfect grammar. On the whole, my grammar is pretty good — certainly better than average — but this isn’t because I study grammar. It’s because I read a lot and always have. I believe that reading teaches good (or decent) grammar simply by example.

I use Microsoft Word with the spelling checker turned on (mostly to catch typos, but I admit my spelling skills have slipped over the years) and the grammar checker turned off. My grammar skills are better than the checker inside Word and I consistently find errors in its preprogrammed logic when it’s turned on.

My opinion: Anyone who must rely on a computerized grammar checker to get grammar right should not pursue a career as a writer.

(Allow me to digress for a moment. Back in the early 90s, when I was struggling to make my writing career work, a friend of mine was working as a temp for a company that hired out people with computer expertise. She encouraged me to check out the temp company and sign up. I went to their office in Manhattan with a copy of my first book in my briefcase. Silly me: I thought being a published author would help me get my foot in the door. They made me fill out a form that had the same exact information as my resumé — I never could figure out the bullsh*t of making a person rewrite his resumé on an application form — and then gave me a grammar test. Yes, a grammar test. They wanted to see if I could write. I guess carrying around a 450 page book with my name on the cover wasn’t enough evidence for them. So I took the test. And can you believe it? I got one of the 20 questions wrong. It was the old who’s vs. whose. To this day, I still struggle with that one. In case you’re wondering, they never called me. And I admit I’m pretty glad about that. The whole experience was completely demeaning.)

An Example of a Wannabe Writer Who Needs Help

A while back, I received a communication from a blog reader who wanted to be a writer. Here’s what she wrote:

Thanks for sharing how you make it as a writer. I have always had the dream of being a writer, but just never seem to get with the program.

This is America so I ask my self why not write. I really don”t have a style of my own yet so it will be easier for me to do things the way that publisher want them done.

I just need a topic, or an area of intrest. I heard it said that after you get a topic you will write. (Hope this is true.)

I draw your attention to the second paragraph’s first sentence. Not only does this wannabe spell myself as my self, but she’s completely screwed up punctuation in the sentence, leaving the reader to figure out what she means. The disagreement between noun (publisher) and verb (want instead of wants) could be a typo, but I can tell you right now that publishers don’t want typos.

The third paragraph (also with a typo in the word intrest which should be interest), also has a grammar problem. Can you spot it? Think about it.

Take My Advice

If you want to be a professional writer — that is, if you want to write and get paid for it — you need to understand the basic rules of grammar.

Here are three tips for improving your grammar:

  • Read. Read a lot. Read good quality writing. There’s plenty of it online, on quality publications such as newspaper Web sites, Slate.com, Salon.com, and numerous others. All of these sites have editors who check the grammar, spelling, and punctuation of the writers. Don’t read just blogs. The average blogger is not a writer and very few blogs are edited. Worse yet, many bloggers have their own “style” that shuns standard grammar and spelling.
  • Elements of StyleIf you still think you need help, read a grammar or style book. Lots of people like the Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. (I prefer the illustrated hardcover version.) But there are lots of other books out there. The Elephants of Style by Bill Walsh is lots of fun and very educational. Go to a bookstore (you know, the place you hope to find your name on the cover of a book) and check the Reference or Writing sections. You’ll find plenty of options.
  • When you finish writing something, read it out loud. Unless the language you’re writing in is not your first language, grammatical errors should jump off the page at you as you read them. Simply said: Your writing should sound good when you read it aloud. That’s not just grammar, either. It’s also the rhythm of your writing, the combination of long and short sentences. That’s something that comes with a lot of experience as a writer.

Don’t worry about developing your own personal writing style. It’ll come to you — if you don’t try to force it. Learn the basics first.

Then just write, write, write — until you get it right.

eZineArticles.com

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Could be hazardous to your good name.

A few months ago, I read a blog post by some A-list pro blogger that briefly discussed eZineArticles.com as a place to publish articles and generate hits for your site. The idea was that the articles contained a byline with links and people who read them would come back to your site to read more. The result: more hits.

I dug deeply into my well of content and found a handful of articles I didn’t mind republishing. I formatted them as required and submitted them to eZineArticles.com, after setting up an account as an author. A bunch of the articles were bounced back because they read like blog posts. But I successfully argued that they did provide useful information in my somewhat conversational and bloggish writing style. All five articles were published on the eZine Articles site.

First Surprise: Anyone Can Republish!

What I didn’t realize at first was that anyone who sets up a publisher relationship with eZineArticles.com could republish my work, as long as it was republished exactly as written and included my byline, bio, and links. I discovered this when an article I wrote about flying at sunrise was picked up by a Web site with content about cruising.

After a few e-mails went back and forth between me and the site owner and eZineArticles support staff, I realized what I’d missed by not reading the fine print — I was basically granting a very broad set of rights to eZineArticles.com. But the site that had used the piece was a high quality site and I didn’t mind my recycled work appearing there. And the eZineArticles folks assured me that publishers had to meet certain requirements to use the work.

Second Surprise: Hot Sex?

But I wasn’t very happy when I traced a link to one of my Antelope Canyon photos article to a Blogger blog with the words “hot-sex” in its domain name. Although the site didn’t appear to contain any porn, I didn’t want my content — or name! — associated with it. So I wrote to eZineArticles support to complain.

Today, I found the same article used on a site with “nurse-fetish” in the domain name. Now I was pissed. I wrote again to the eZineArticles staff.

eZineArticles.com Responds

My new message crossed their response to the first one in the ether. In their response, they told me that if I didn’t want my work on a specific site, it was my responsibility to contact the owner of that site and ask him to remove it.

Ever try to contact the owner of a Blogger blog? It’s not possible if they don’t want to make it possible.

I replied that their response was completely unsatisfactory and that I would be deleting all of my articles from their site.

And then I did.

Lessons Learned

I am certainly not desperate enough to be published or to get hits by releasing my work on a site that allows distribution without prior approval by the author. Frankly, I don’t think any author should be that desperate.

eZineArticles.com obviously doesn’t give a damn about its authors if it won’t work to prevent this kind of activity with an author’s work. Any author who publishes with them deserves whatever shit he gets — including his name spread around on sites of questionable quality and purpose.

From now on, I will publish my work electronically in only three places:

  • Here, on this site, where my work is covered by a copyright notice that helps protect my work from misuse.
  • On the sites of publishers who pay me for my efforts and protect our copyrights.
  • On the sites of other bloggers who have asked me to guest author for them and will protect our copyrights.

I’m angry about this, but I know it’s my own fault. I was conned, first by the pro blogger who pushed eZineArticles.com and then by eZineArticles.com itself. I don’t understand why anyone would allow their work to be reproduced in a way that they cannot control. Could they all be as stupid as I was when I signed up?

As for the “hot-sex” and “nurse-fetish” sites, I wonder how the other female eZineArticles authors feel about their work — and their names — appearing there.

On Revisions

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At the halfway point of my Mac OS X book revision.

Yesterday, as I completed the revisions to Chapter 10, I reached the halfway point in my revision for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide.

No, the book isn’t 20 chapters long. It’s 27 plus an appendix. I’ve revised 14 chapters. I’m not revising in order. I’m revising in the order I think it might be safe to revise in. Some features are still in flux and if I revise based on what I see, I’ll likely have to revise again.

And no, I can’t tell you what I think might be in flux. I’m under non-disclosure and I take that stuff pretty seriously. That’s also why you won’t find Leopard screenshots here (yet). And why I haven’t written any articles about the new features (yet).

This is a Deep Revision

I’ve settled into a pace of about one revised chapter per day. That might seem like a lot. It is, especially since I’m doing what I call a deep revision.

I not only write my Visual QuickStart Guides, but I also do layout for them. This is called packaging — the author provides final files to the publisher, who then (after editing, of course) sends them on to the printer.

I currently use InDesign CS3 for all my layout needs. But that’s not what I was using when I wrote the first edition of this book, which covered Mac OS 8, back in 1997. (I still remember that book’s release at Macworld Expo in Boston. Peachpit sold out on the first day of the show, but UPS was on strike and we couldn’t get any more books in.) In 1997, I was using PageMaker. And that’s what I used to create the original book files.

A revision is a revision. That means you start with something and modify it to bring it up to date. So each year, I’d start with the previous year’s file and modify text, replace screenshots, and make various other changes to bring the content and file up to date.

Every time I switched to a new version of my layout software — PageMaker became InDesign 2 which became InDesign CS which became InDesign CS3 — I can’t justify the expense of updating my software for every release — I’d simply convert the file to the new version at the beginning of the revision process.

Over the years, this led to inconsistently set up files. Sure, the differences were minor, but they were there. And it bugged me that there were tiny differences in the style definitions and that some text included indexing codes from a failed experiment with the indexing feature and that the Zapf Dingbats font applied to bullets wasn’t working right in all files. And that in some chapters, each page was a different InDesign “story” and in others, the stories would go on for several pages.

So this year I decided to clean up the files by recreating them all. I built a brand new template in InDesign CS3, adding the staggered tabs that many other VQS books include but mine never had. I took full advantage of InDesign’s nested style feature to automate bullet and reference formatting. I made my styles intelligent and highly functional.

Then I got an InDesign plugin that enabled me to export the individual stories in a single chapter file as one big story in plain old text. I do this for each chapter. I make sure the text has smart quotes and paste it into my template. I then manually reapply all the styles as I go through the text and edit it to bring it up to date.

Along the way, I reorganized much of the content to remove 2 chapters, add 5 chapters, and move a bunch of content around.

A deep revision.

Other Revisions

Contrast this with the last book revision I did. That was for another publisher which doesn’t allow author packaging. Instead, the book is submitted as a series of Microsoft Word files.

I start with the previous year’s “final” files. I turn on the revision feature so all my changes are marked — supposedly for the benefit of the copy editor, so she doesn’t re-edit the whole thing — and go at it. The result is a mess that only gets messier as the book goes through the editing process. In the end, it’s all cleaned up, laid out and sent to me as proofs so I can make any final corrections to it.

If the software I’m revising the book for hasn’t changed much, this can be incredibly quick — I can sometimes turn out 3-4 chapters in a day, with plenty of time for my morning coffee, blog entry, e-mail processing, and even a little Web surfing. My record was 2 weeks for the entire 400+ page book.

Time Is Not on my Side

But for a deep revision, things go much more slowly. If I’m lucky, I can turn out a chapter a day. That’s a complete 20-40 page chapter, laid out with dozens of screenshots — I’m averaging about 80 per chapter right now — and captions and even a few callouts.

I just did the math. If I can keep up a chapter a day as my production rate, I should have the whole thing done by September 20. Right?

Well, unfortunately, I don’t have the next 13 days to work on this book. Next Friday, I’m flying my helicopter at the Mohave County Fair, giving rides for the whole weekend. On Monday, I fly directly to Page for two separate flying gigs over Lake Powell. I should be back by Thursday afternoon. Then the Saturday right after that, I’m hosting a photographer/writer and pilot from Australia who are preparing a coffee table book about Robinson Helicopters, featuring about 20 operators all over the world. (Can you imagine that they picked me?) When they leave, I have a few days before I head back up to Lake Powell, Monument Valley, and Shiprock with the helicopter for a group of Russian photographers for a big photo excursion.

What does this tell me?

It’s 6:26 AM on a Friday morning. I’d better get to work.

Racing with Deadlines

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I prepare to buckle down and finish up a book.

After a nice, relaxing weekend at Howard Mesa, I’m back home looking at a calendar that has a deadline on it. It’s not a “drop-dead” deadline, but it is one tied in with additional financial reward. In other words, if I meet it, I’ll see more money than if I don’t. Since I’m on the downhill slide of a less-than-perfect writing year, having a few extra bucks between royalty statements would be very nice.

What makes this deadline extra important is the stuff scheduled right after it: a bunch of extremely lucrative flights for Flying M Air. In fact, I have every single weekend in October booked for an event. I also have three photo flights in northern Arizona — one of which will last 6 days.

So if I don’t finish the book on time, I won’t have much time to work on it after the deadline.

Why am I telling you this? Just so that you understand when the number of new posts drops significantly over the next two weeks. Although I’m hoping to continue to post at least one short entry a day, I might not have time to. I work best in the morning and may have to give up my coffee/blogging time to work on the book.

And, if you haven’t figured it out yet, the book in question is my Mac OS X book revision, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide. I’m about 1/3 finished with the 744-page book. I’m extremely pleased with what I’ve done so far, but I’ll be even more pleased when it’s done.

Wish me luck!