Tag Archives: writing

The Book has [Finally] Arrived!

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I get my author copies of WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide — only about three weeks after they were expected.

When I got home from work yesterday, a case of books was waiting on my doorstep. That alone was kind of odd. Where I live in Wickenburg is quite a bit off the beaten path, down an unpaved, bumpy, steep, unmaintained road. The UPS and FedEx guys know where my office is. Since that’s a lot easier to get to — especially with a big truck — they normally deliver things there, even if the address on the box is my home address. In fact, the UPS guy came by the office yesterday to drop off an envelope for Mike — even thought it had our house address on it. And they dropped off the new ground handling wheels for my helicopter there, even though there was no one there to sign for the box. (The old UPS guy used to just throw packages into my Jeep if he saw it parked somewhere in town. I’d come out of the post office or supermarket and there would be a box on my passenger seat. Things are a little different here in Wickenburg.)

So I didn’t expect the books to arrive yesterday. Yet there they were. Horray!

WordPress Book Cover.I opened the box to remove my “shelf copy.” I have a kind of weird superstition. I have a bookshelf with five shelves where I keep a single author copy of every book I’ve ever written, along with the translations I’ve been sent. Three shelves are completely full; this book will start the fourth shelf. The books are placed on the shelf in order of publication, with their translations placed to their right. The English-language book that goes on the shelf is always the first one I get. Normally, for Peachpit Press books, I get a single advance author copy directly from the printer when the book is done. That’s the book that goes on the shelf. The box of author copies that comes later goes into storage for giveaways, etc. For other publishers’ books, the book that goes on the shelf is the first one I pull out of the box.

I usually refer to my author copies (on the shelf) when I’m writing a revision or if a reader has a question (submitted to the Q & A system on this Web site, please). The book will come off its place on the shelf, spend some time on my desk, and be returned to its place when I’m done with it. The other day, I pulled out my very first book’s author copy just to scan the cover of it for a blog entry. I don’t lend out author copies — people are terrible about returning books. To me, for some reason, it’s important that the book be placed on the shelf in its proper place.

Anyway, I need to confirm what Miraz’s first impression was when she saw the book for the first time: it’s shiny. Sometime last year, Peachpit redesigned the covers for books in the Visual QuickStart Guide series. I think they just wanted to freshen them up. The design is similar, as the two illustrations in this entry show, but the new design is also coated with something that makes it very shiny.

QuickBooks Book CoverMy QuickBooks 2006 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, which was published last fall, was probably the very last book Peachpit published with the old cover style. I recall seeing other VQS titles on Peachpit’s Web site and talking to my editor about the new design. But this is my first book with the new design. I like it. It’s a little “cleaner” looking — whatever that means. Maybe more modern. The color scheme always changed from one book to the next, so that’s not the difference. It’s the extra white on the cover, I think. And less text in all those boxes. It looks good. And shiny.

Anyway, I’m glad the books have arrived and anxious to put the shelf copy onto the shelf.

Now let me update this site to show the right cover on the WordPress book support pages.

On First Books

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It’s probably a lot like seeing your first child for the first time.

Peachpit screwed up. Somehow, they managed to forget to send the authors of WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide (yours truly and Miraz Jordan in New Zealand) author copies of the book. The book is in retail and online bookstores. But not in our hot little hands.

Heck, screw-ups happen. It isn’t a huge deal to me — I’ve seen 60+ books with my name on the cover — but I would like to see the book one of these days.

It’s really a shame for Miraz — this is her very first book and she’s been waiting nearly a month so far to see it. So she ordered a copy from Amazon.com. (Heaven knows when her author copies will get down to where she lives.) And reading her blog post about how holding it made her feel brought back memories.

Flashback…

August 1992 at Macworld Expo in Boston. I’d been using a Macintosh since 1989 and was a relative newbie. Completely self-taught. I was hooked on Macs.

That spring, I’d been working on a book with Bernard J. David that was eventually titled The Mac Shareware Emporium. It was my first book; my only previous book experience was ghostwriting four chapters for a John Dvorak book the year before. (That’s how I’d met Bernard.)

imageMy editor had told me that the book would be at the show and I’d do a book signing. I made my way to the Brady Publishing booth. And there, on the shelf, was the ugliest book cover I’d ever seen — with my name on it!

When I tell you that holding it in my hands brought tears to my eyes, I am not exaggerating. I got all emotional. Even though it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, it was also the most beautiful. It was a symbol of an achievement, of a dream realized.

And that’s what Miraz went through today.

Congratulations, Miraz!

You know, in looking at the cover again today for the first time in years (so I could scan it), it really isn’t that ugly after all.

Why Write?

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Money.

Author Mickey Spillane died last week at age 88. He was the creator of hard boiled detective Mike Hammer.

I don’t recall reading any Mickey Spillane, but I must have. I’m a huge fan of hard boiled detective fiction — a la Chandler and Hammett. But reviewers don’t usually use the names Spillane, Chandler, and Hammett in the same sentence unless it is to comment on how Spillane fails to stack up to the two masters of the genre.

Spillane’s writing has been called “hard boiled boilerplate,” full of cliches and odd visualizations. The critics were not kind to him. But he didn’t write to please the critics. He wrote to make money, as CNN’s obituary piece confirms:

Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith Corona, always claimed he didn’t care about reviews. He considered himself a “writer” as opposed to an “author,” defining a writer as someone whose books sell.

“This is an income-generating job,” he told The Associated Press during a 2001 interview. “Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood.”

Which got me thinking.

I’ve often been criticized by writing acquaintances — you know, the folks who want to be authors and are always working on short stories and novels but never actually publishing them — for “selling out.” In their eyes, writing non-fiction (computer how-to books, of all things) isn’t quite as impressive as creating art by writing fiction.

But they obviously don’t understand why I write computer books. It isn’t because I love composing sentences like: “Choose File > Open. The Open dialog appears. Locate and select the file you want to open. Click Open.” It’s because I like to eat, have a roof over my head, and buy cool toys like helicopters.

Yes, it’s true. I write computer books for the same reason most people go to the office every day. The same reason Mickey Spillane wrote books with titles like The Erection Set.

As Spillane once said,

“I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.”

Ah, if only I could have as many friends like that.

On the Intelligence of Quotes

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Maria Speaks Episode 27: On the Intelligence of Quotes.

This short podcast is a reading from a recent article I wrote on my book support site for Microsoft Word users. It explains the difference between smart and straight quotes and tells you how to work with them in Microsoft Word. You can read the transcript of this podcast and see the accompanying screenshots at www.aneclecticmind.com

Transcripts:

Curly or “smart” quotes are single and double quote marks that curve in toward what they surround. This blog, if viewed in the intended font, displays all quotes as smart quotes. Smart quotes are also often referred to as “typographers” quotes because they’re common in printed work like books, magazine articles, and other documents.

You may not realize it, but a smart quote character is actually a different character than its corresponding straight quote. Think about it: it has to be. After all, it looks different, doesn’t it? That means it has to be a different character.

These characters are easy to type on a Macintosh. For example, to get the “ character, type Option-[. to get the ’ character, type Shift-Option-]. (Although there must be some way to type these in on a Windows computer, I don’t know how to do it; perhaps a reader can use the Comments link to share the keystrokes?)

Special CharactersIn Word, you can also use the Special Characters pane of the Symbols dialog. Choose Insert > Symbol to display the dialog and click the Special Characters tab or button. Scroll down to find the character you want (they’re listed at the bottom of the list) and double-click the one you want to insert it. This is a rather cumbersome way to get the job done, but it does work.

AutoFormat as You TypeFortunately, Word offers a better, automated way. You can set an option in the AutoFormat as you Type pane of the AutoCorrect dialog that will automatically convert every straight quote you type to the corresponding smart quote. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat as You Type tab or button in the dialog that appears. Then turn on the “Straight quotes” with “Smart quotes” check box. (As you can see, that’s the only feature I have enabled in this pane on my copy of Word; I don’t like Word messing with the formatting of what I type, as I discuss in “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) Click OK to save your setting.

From that point on, every time you type a single or double quote, Word will convert it to a smart quote. If your computer isn’t very fast, you might actually be able to see the conversion happen. And, if you use Word’s Undo feature, you can undo the conversion to revert the character back to the regular quote you typed.

I should mention here that this feature is enabled by default, so if you never changed this setting and you want smart quotes, you don’t have to do a thing to get them.

Now suppose you have a document that was typed without smart quotes. Perhaps a passage of text copied from a Web site or a document someone wrote with a plain old text editor. You want to dress up the document for printing and smart quotes are important to you. Do you have to retype all those quotes to “educate” them? Heck no! Just use Find and Replace.

Find and ReplaceFirst double check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” feature is enabled as discussed above. Then choose Edit > Replace to display the Find and Replace window. Type the same plain old double quote character in the Find What and Replace With boxes. Then click Replace All. Word will replace the dumb double quotes with the correct smart quotes and tell you how many it replaced. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog. Then type the same plain old single quote character in the Find What and Replace with boxes and click Replace All. Word replaces all the dumb single quotes with smart single quotes. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog and close the Find and Replace window.

If you do this a lot, you might consider writing a macro that does the job for you. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

What if you have a document with smart quotes and you need to turn them into straight quotes? Easy enough. Follow the same process, but before you use the Find and Replace window, check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” option is turned off. Find and Replace should dumb up the quotes.

Now that you know the tricks, there’s no reason why your Word documents shouldn’t have the smartest quotes around.

Microsoft, Word, smart quotes

The Sleeping Tiger Stirs

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I get pretty fed up about what’s going on in Wickenburg…and start to do something about it.

Small town politics sucks. There’s no doubt about it. And it sucks even more when the politicians are fighting over a desert crossroads town with a weak economy and a part-time population.

When I moved to Wickenburg ten years ago, it was a small western town with a year-round population of about 4,000 people. Just enough shopping and services to make life convenient. Lots of space between the homes on the outskirts of town where I live. Privacy. Quiet. Clean air. Little crime. Slow pace of living. Just the thing a pair of New Yorkers needed to get a grip on their own lives.

One of the things we liked best about Wickenburg is that it didn’t have a lot of high density housing. Sure, it had some condos and apartments and the homes in the older downtown area were small and on small lots. But the rest of the town was zoned for one house per acre (or more) and the outskirts of town were zoned for one house per five acres. (We have 2-1/2.)

Fast forward to 2004. A developer proposes a high density housing development at the 9-hole golf course known as Wickenburg Country Club. He promises to expand the golf course to 18 holes. All the golfers want it. But the people who will soon have condo roofs in their back yards don’t. And neither do the people who see that one high-density development will open the floodgates to others.

Voters put together a referendum to get the issue on the ballot. Proposition 421 was the result. And the voters voted the development down.

Let me make sure you understand what I just wrote. The majority of voters who voted on Prop 421 voted against it. They were saying that they did not want the development to proceed.

Fast forward to 2006. The Mayor and Council voted in favor of allowing a virtually identical development on the same site by the same developer.

Huh?

Silly me. I thought we lived in a democracy.

But it gets worse.

Another group of voters put together another referendum to stop the development again. It was submitted the same way as the first one and should have been accepted. But they Mayor decided that because an attachment was made with a staple rather than a paper clip, it was not properly submitted. He directed the Town Clerk to reject it.

What?

I’ve been sitting back watching all this bullshit unfold for the past three years. Occasionally, I’d write an article or a letter to state my point of view. But I pretty much kept out of things — there were other people writing for my Web site, wickenburg-az.com who were saying pretty much what I would have said anyway.

But now I’m pissed. This little twerp who was voted in as Mayor — I couldn’t vote because I live outside of town limits, but I never would have voted for him — is making decisions that are not only beyond his authority, but they’re clearly against the will of the people.

This is wrong.

And I’m not going to sleep through this one. I’ve already made my first contribution to the voters efforts by writing an article about the paper clip rejection. More to come.

I promise.