11-06-2014

A Little Art, Writing, Spirit

The Artist . . .

Here is a watercolor of the main character in my latest print book, The Shape Of Magic,
Syllyn Chandry Yadro Bay, who is headed to Beacon Manor thinking it is a staid place. Will he be surprised!

The Writer Me

Keyboards aren't made for writers--especially fiction writers.  We use lots of quotation marks. All that extra shift-jab with our poor overworked little fingers. Ow, how time consuming.

Eventually my mind boinked up a suggestion. So I looked at my  keyboard and asked myself: "What key do I never use in my writing  that doesn't use a shift key?"

The options I found were mostly still  little finger keys: the accent key, the brackets keys, the equals  sign, the slash keys, the number keys. Sometimes I use numbers in my  writing; I decided the equals sign would work best for me.

Zip, my writing speeded right up.

Of course, at the end, you have to search and replace those non-quotation marks. (I don't use Word (R) normally, but I tested the  handy: turn-this-into-that option, which worked, so, in Word (R) you can have the weird key magically teleport into quotation marks as you go.)

So, if you want to speed your writing up, ask yourself the same  question; give yourself an answer, and try that key instead of  quotation marks a week or so, until you get used to it, and see how  much faster you can write.

I noticed.

Although, of course, it isn't about saving time, it's about:  when I'm writing, the faster I can get ideas down before they  disappear, the less I lose ideas to the cats wanting in, out, tuna, snuggies, in, tuna, out . . .

A (sorry, low res) Halloween type photo of my girl kitty, SugarDancer . . .