AC Blog

Now and then, when I’m writing (or when I’m thinking about the creative process), I realize that in the final analysis I have no idea how I actually do it. Writing (like any creative activity) involves a marvelous paradox — how to direct the process while at the same time staying out of the way.

Why do we need to stay out of the way? Mainly because the process itself, at its basis somewhere outside the conscious mind, seems to operate from a place of complete silence — even emptiness. This is not to say that we create out of nothing, of course, but the creations do seem to come from a place where things are simply not found. And by things, I must inevitably include thoughts.

I’ll be returning to this delightful mystery a lot, but for the present, try this experiment:
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If NoteTab doesn’t float your boat because it’s just too wonderfully simple and quick, then perhaps you’ll find Scrivener as useful as I do. (Although I use both, and InDesign as well.)

Scrivener can be thought of as an idea manager, although it’s designed for writers and provides most of the common features of a text editor. Its main value, however, comes from the way it handles lots (and lots) of fragments — this makes it indispensable for large or complex writing projects. Continue reading →

A few readers have requested that I post some of my poems here, presumably because they found something they liked in Cave Paintings (see Books button at top of page). I thought I’d comply every now and then to placate the hordes of poetry lovers who have swarmed Amazon to buy copies of the collection. There are just so many voracious poetry lovers out there, it’s hard to keep them at bay.

So, for starters, here’s “Maine Song,” one of my more tightly structured pieces, with lots of internal rhymes and imagery inspired by my father, whose favorite poem was John Masefield’s “Sea Fever.” Continue reading →

One of the most useful writing tools I know of is NoteTab (std or pro), which is a “plain ASCII” editor. That is, it lets you enter printable standard characters, without any invisible formatting codes and other technical kaka that so often ends up polluting a manuscript when design time rolls around.

I design books in Adobe InDesign, which means that all the formatting for body text, chapter titles, headings, etc., are managed there. Importing text from some other formatting word processor (Word, Pages, etc.) always involves cleaning out the other apps’ formatting so it doesn’t conflict with my new design. For this reason alone, it’s worth considering doing all one’s original writing—the text generation effort—in a simple, non-formatting editor.

In other words, write and edit in an editor app, and design and format in a design app.

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Due to a proliferation of inquiries off-line, it seems worth mentioning that the black critter in the banner photo on this page is a dog. It’s not a horse. The dog is Caliph (pronounced kay-liff) and was a fine, friendly, brilliantly intelligent Dobe, son of Yamel, a Canadian Grand National Best of Breed. He usually looked more dignified than he does in this photo, galumphing through crusty snow in central Vermont. He preferred to flex and strut his stuff like a little Muscle Beach denizen. I’ll post a story about him sooner or later; there were a lot of stories, but few made it into print. Caliph was wise beyond his genetics, and shed his mortal coil around 1975, no doubt to re-emerge as a First Timer real soon now.

Allen

When a newly constructed telescope is completed and finally put into use, this initial observation session of the night sky is called “first light.”

I set up this blog in the hope that it can become a telescope to my readers (a bi-directional one), on whatever topics or writings may seem interesting to them or to myself.

This post is AC Blog‘s first light.

I welcome all comments on Cave Paintings (collected poems) and The Rules (a novel), or on any subject I might be able to shed light on. My interests are rather wide…

Allen