Literary Agent Janet Reid posts an annual breakdown of the reasons why she rejected incoming manuscripts from wannabe authors in the previous year. Though her populist roster may not be pertinent to many (or any) reading this – it makes interesting reading: Statistics to torture yourself with in 2010 Some of her older posts are [...]
How do you break into the literary world? In an interview with Wired, Paolo Bacigalupi, tells us it’s 85% graft, 5% inspiration, and 10% reading lots of fantasy and SF magazines… sort of. Here’s the relevant bit: “Pocketful of Dharma” was the first story that I sold, and that was really my first attempt at writing [...]
Microsoft are heavily discounting MS Office and the new Windows 7. Any UK student can buy Windows 7 Home Premium online for £30 (it’s normally about £150) and/or MS Office Ultimate 2007 (with Word, Access, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher and Outlook) for £38.95 (which can retail anywhere between £250-£380). To get the software, you have to [...]
I’ve briefly reviewed the Mac-only writing tool Scrivener a couple of times for Macworld. This post is based on those two pieces: Most of the stuff I review goes straight in the trash afterwards. Some programs stay on my machine for a little while. A very few apps become part of my toolkit; the software [...]
I recently reviewed Bean 2.4 – a brilliant, free and very lightweight Mac word processor – for Macworld. Here’s my redux version of that review: My quest for the ultimate writing tool continues with Bean, a stripped down and superfast word processor. Most of the applications Apple bundles with OS X are great – but [...]