The original, so to speak anyways. What WriteRoom does is simple, your screen goes completely black and you are faced with a solitary, blinking green box. All you can do is type and you are alone with your writing. Immersive and distraction free, the simplicity of WriteRoom recreates the minimalist, early twentieth century writer's bare walled apartment, barren desk and loan type writer in the cluttered digital world of e-mail, web-surfing and font book. Whether you're a professional fiction writer or a student trying to get a paper in on time, write room is an arm sweeping across your cluttered desktop.

If you haven't tried full screen writing, I'd suggest you download the free trial of WriteRoom and give it a shot and see if it is something you like. It is certainly worth at least that. But as form follows function, the minimalism of the program extends to its every corner and you may find that you'll miss much of what MS Word has to offer. While WriteRoom is customizable, allowing you to change that blank black screen to white or a nice shade of purple and the same goes for the font color and style, having to go to preferences to fiddle with all that, for me, quickly got tiresome. You could argue that's the point, leave it alone and just write (which I did at length during the course of trying it out, penning an entire short story in an afternoon), but don't expect anything besides the matrix-like interface and the same nagging feeling you get from a blank page.

The program does offer some amenities. Spelling errors will still be underlined in red, if you move your mouse to the bottom left corner you get a word count, the screen automatically adjusts so that you don't end up typing on the bottom of your computer screen and it saves to .txt files so there's no worries when it comes to open that same document in other word processor when you're done so that you can play with the fonts and get your work ready for printing.

While we all have WriteRoom's creator to thank for this great idea, especially if full screen is something you really dig, the present price, existence of other similar programs, and the incorporation of a full screen feature into more heavy duty programs such as Story Mill and Scrivener has put the original out of business in the opinion of this humble blogger. Those two other programs may be more expensive but they come packed with so many more features that can help you with your writing that they might be more worth buying, even if you only intend to use the full screen feature and ignore all those other bells and whistles.

WriteRoom may accomplish what it set out to do but it fails to reach beyond that in any way and has been overtaken by other writing softwares. I would recommend trying it to anyone, but I doubt more than a few will care to buy it, even if they enjoy the immersive writing experience. I give WriteRoom 3 out of 5 pens.

Until next time, I'm Eric and I'm an unpublished writer.

118 days to deadline, four chapters complete.

by DMI | with no comments

Filed under: Software Reviews, WriteRoom

To some, it might seem lofty for me to try and write so many chapters and essentially pen an entire book in four months, but I think I can do this for a variety of reasons. For one, I've been working on this project for a long time. I thought up the very broad, most basic part of the story in my ninth grade biology class (not that it has anything at all to do with biology) and I've been thinking about it since, slowly building on it and writing ideas down. About a nine months ago I actually tried writing a few chapters, the chapters I edited or rewrote the last two weeks, so I've started already. And more than just a hand full of chapters, I've developed large quantities of background information and sketched out several of the characters as well as making outlines and maps and so on.

All that said, it's difficult to just assign yourself a deadline though. I know, I've done it before. What's different this time is that I'm announcing it to all of you here, in this public forum so all of you can hold me to that promise. Plus a little incentive helps. In addition to the incentive of making my dreams come true and getting a novel published before more of my grandparents pass on I've set the date around the time a friend of my finishes an internship that is taking up all of his time. With that behind him and hopefully this enormous undertaken behind me, we'll both be in for a break. If I complete the project on deadline, JC and I are going to spend a few days relaxing and playing Zelda.

Until next time, I'm Eric and I'm an unpublished writer.

120 days until deadline, three chapters complete.

by DMI | with no comments

Filed under: deadline, goals, incentive, Novel

With these things in mind I'd like to point out a flow chart method of sorts that I won't fully take credit for "inventing" but I didn't learn it in writing school. I'm just convinced that there is nothing new under the sun and in the plethora of books about writing someone expounded on a similar technique. Regardless, this is something I do. Instead of drawing an up-side-down check mark or creating an outline (I do but of those sometimes too) I will write on a piece of paper or my white board three words as underlined headers of columns, "Problems," "Complications," and finally "Resolutions." Then I write all the stuff that happens in the story with arrows pointing to show how one event complicates one problem and then how it leads to the prescribed resolution. Hey, I didn't say I reinvented the wheel here, it's just a simple way of keeping things straight if you can't do it in your head. I find it particularly helpful in organizing stories with multiple plot lines and problems.

A quick update on how the week went. Two more rejections, two more chapters written in the book! Plugging away at another short story and I deployed another handful of submissions. I'm feeling pretty good, over all.

Until next time, I'm Eric and I'm an unpublished writer.

by DMI | with no comments

Filed under: flow chart, Heinlein, Joan d' Arc, Novel

I digress. The basic point of the article, which no one should take too seriously, is that you should wake up, write 1,000 words and then walk down the road picking up cans. The next day you do the same thing. The walking will help you lose weight, the picking up cans will clean up the environment and then you can sell them to buy postage to mail your stories out. By the end of the week you've got a couple bucks worth of aluminum and one short story. Skip ahead a few years and you might be published in a few magazines. After twenty you'll be a successful writer.

Singleton doesn't fail to point out that if you have a job or a spouse this plan might not work but the real point behind his humor is clear. No one gets to be a writer overnight and if you aren't willing to deal with that and put in a lot of work, "then, don't write."

by DMI | with no comments

Filed under: George Singleton, Perseverance

Earlier this week, just after I opened the web browser and navigated here to find my shiny new blog, I decided to pick up an old story. Not that old, I wrote it last summer and my then fiancee gave me some great criticism but I struggled in the revision process. I had a professor tell me once to give it some time between writing and revising but I usually take that to mean a few days or a week. Well, half a year later I started reading through my wife's comments and looking at the draft that just wasn't where I wanted it to be and with time's gift of a new perspective, I fixed the damn thing. I won't be so bold to say, look for it in a fiction magazine near you, but I can warn editors, look for it in a submission box near you.

There is a great deal of joy when you complete the task of turning vision to reality and on that high note I'd like to mention the success of this week as a whole. Besides the redemption of an old failure and the brand spanking new blog, I broke ground on a promising new story (to which I will return following this entry) and I scribed another chapter in the novel. Add in a few more stories I moved along in the submission process, I'd call that a pretty successful week. Maybe one of the most productive in quite awhile.

Until next time, I'm Eric and I'm an unpublished fiction writer.

by DMI | with no comments

Filed under: Editing, Novel, Revising, Week

A change like this one can often bring reinvigoration to an endeavor, shaking up the normal goings-on and providing a rush of air into idle lungs. And it can be the same with writing. I began reading a book recently that I'd been meaning to get to for some time. "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," by Joseph Campbell is a study of the archetypal hero's journey through classic myths and legends from around the world. I heard about the book in college through a friend taking a course in mythology and even read some of the handouts he got on Campbell's studies that laid out the archetypal story lines of a hero's journey. In fact, I did everything but attend the class, as I read the material and helped him write papers. Recently, I was reminded of the book while watching a documentary on Star Wars where George Lucas said he began writing his famous story while taking Campbell's class. My wife bought the book for me (the latest edition has Luke Skywalker on the cover, though Campbell doesn't talk about the trilogy in the book) and now as I've begun reading it I have attacked my novel with renewed vigor. I never stopped working on it, but in the last few weeks my efforts have been split and the time I spent on the book was in writing about the fictional world in which it was set, pre-writing in other words. A necessary task, to be sure, but now I find myself giving that first chapter a facelift and having written quite a lot just in this morning as my hero encounters what Campbell deems, "The Call to Adventure."

Until next time, I'm Eric and I'm an unpublished fiction writer.

by DMI | 1 comment(s)

Filed under: Change, Facelift, Joseph Campbell, Novel, pre-writing, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

What magnificent magazine deserves credit for this fine feat of rejection? "Mindflights." http://mindflights.com/

You see, normally what you get back from a magazine is a form rejection. These under staffed institutions are so swamped with submissions that they don't have time to write a letter to the writer about why they aren't accepting their work and make suggestions to fix it. It's sad but understandable. Out of these form rejections I expect only simples niceties and platitudes such as "thank you for submitting your story," "unfortunately, we're going to pass on your work," "good luck placing your work elsewhere," and "tastes vary by market." I haven't gotten a form rejection that really made me mad, although it's nice when it comes with some cool letterhead. Esquire's was neat though, it included a lengthy list of tips on submitting specifically to them, such as what exactly they are and are not looking for.

The worst thing of course, is to never hear back and, unfortunately, sometimes that happens. It's even worse than that time I got my story back with a green post-it note that said, "Sorry, we are no longer accepting fiction." Hey, they at least sent me back my story. I suppose the only thing that could have improved Mindflight's rejection would have been some cool letterhead. Or an acceptance.

Until next time, I'm Eric and I'm still writing and submitting.

by DMI | 1 comment(s)

Filed under: Rejection, Submissions

So I gave it up. I didn't delete it or anything and maybe I'll come back to it later if the mood strikes me, but it until then, there is no sense wasting my precious writing time doing something I don't enjoy and generally slows me down. Sulphur Springs may have failed (or did I fail it?) but the week was not a total loss. Actually, I wouldn't call it a loss at all. I did a significant amount of work on the novel and churned out out two scifi flash fiction pieces. To round out this little progress report, I sent two stories off to mags and did some research into submitting to others. Mostly that includes low to no pay, small operation online stuff, but if I can't get a story taken by the major mags I might as well try it there and see if it helps get my name out.

Definitely planning to keep up the work on the novel next week but I'm still up in there about what short story project I want to try and tackle. I've got a huge bag of ideas to pull from and more than a few stories I started and never finished. I don't even know if I want to try mainstream literary or more science fiction. Whatever I decide I just hope I have better luck than I did with Sulphur Springs.

Until next time, I'm Eric and I'm a hard working amateur fiction writer.

by DMI | with no comments