Whenever I show my Kindle to people, I inevitably get a few “oohs” and “aaahs” as they flip the unit around in their hands and try to use it as if it were a laptop or a touchscreen smartphone. They may bemoan the fact that there is no backlight which is EXACTLY what makes the Kindle so easy on the eyes; it doesn’t glow. They flip it around in their hands, lose my page in about 5 books and then hand it back to me with a conclusive “I prefer the feel of real paper.” Oh, OK. That totally sums it up. Thank you.

Here is what I have said in the past and want another chance to say it again. To the people who prefer the feel of real paper (as if I prefer the feel of plastic and electronics) I ask a simple question: Do you enjoy the sound of live music? Do you get excited when U2 is coming to your town or your local symphony orchestra will include a Mahler repertoire that you have been dying to hear? If they have answered yes to this question, then I simply ask them if this love of live music stops them in any way from purchasing a CD or an MP3 from ITunes. If it hasn’t, then why eschew a digital book because you prefer real paper?

Don’t get me wrong, I know the analogy is not precise. I understand that the commitment to attend a concert is typically greater than purchasing a novel. I own 300 CDs (I have a feeling I will have to explain what a CD is one day soon) and yet I have not seen 300 concerts in my life. A concert is much for of an event than picking a book off a shelf. Not to mention the cost differential. It costs about the same to purchase a digital book vs a “real” book but it usually costs substantially more to attend a concert than it does to order a song off Itunes.

But the point stays the same; The fact that I TOO prefer the feel of a paper book (as well as attending live concerts) should not prevent me from opportunities of the digital age. What are those advantages?

A. I currently have about 30 books on my Kindle and a subscription to the New Yorker (shamefully unread) all taking up the same physical space as a single paperback novel.
B. I will always be able to select a book based on mood. How many times have you had a book in your hand and thought to yourself that this was not the book you were “in the mood for?”
C. I can be completely spontaneous. If I want a book, I connect to the Kindle’s whispernet and shop Amazon.com and download a book in about 60 seconds. This is perfect if I am at the airport and pass a Borders and something catches my eye.
D. I own 1000 books and 95% of them I will never open again. Not EVERY book needs to exist beyond the timeframe in which I am reading them. Of course, there are many sentimental books that I want to have a hard copy of (ie collectibles, gifts, sentimental books, etc), but those are far and few between. I just finished a trashy corporate espionage novel. Why would I want to keep a copy of that book around?
E. I really can’t say which is “greener;” a Kindle or a paperback, but I can confidently state that a Kindle uses less paper…lol.
F. As a side benefit, I can easily use the Kindle on the treadmill at the gym. I can adjust the font size and not have to worry about how to hold the book or magazine open. This has helped me immensely with my motivation to run.

So there it is. My justification for welcoming and embracing the digital book age. If this means that publishing houses go out of business (not sure that it does), then so be it. Blacksmiths are also out of business too.

Basically, yWriter works best in the basic unit of the scene. Up until now, I was working chapter by chapter. So, in order to import my writing into yWriter, I had to read my story and break it out into scenes. I worked a lot on that last night. But as I was reading, a painful realization came over me: I really hate about 40% of my words. This isn’t a phishing expedition; I am not looking for people to tell me they like what I write. This is just a sincere assessment of my writing. Don’t get me wrong, I REALLY like many of the scenes (interestingly, those scenes are the ones that have been edited many times especially following the critiques by my Grub Street writer’s group, and therefore I still have hope). But the 40% that I hated, I DESPISED! They were poorly-structured, self-serving and ultimately irrelevant.

Then I began looking for a metaphor in my real life and I thought about my father. Here was a man that could do anything in the house. It was not unusual to come home from school and see him starting a new project that would normally take three or four men to accomplish. He was truly a jack of all trades and master of none, to perpetuate the cliche. Whether he was working on plumbing, electricity, carpentry or the garden, he never doubted his ability to get the job done and it always got done. But the reality was, his handiwork was always less than perfect. He took his resourcefulness to an extreme. Instead of buying a new can of paint, he would mix together near empty cans until everything in the house became various shades of brown. He never bought clean lumber, so the garden shed he built was patched together with wood paneling leftover from refinishing my bedroom, to 4X8′s split to make 2@2X4′s for the wall studs. He unbent rusty nails and painted the basement floor with wall paint. He used coat hangers to hang a drop ceiling and removed one side off an old shopping car to make a grill rack for the BBQ pit.

But, the garden shed has stood there for 40 years without a leak and we have been grilling on the improvised grate for 25 years. To this day, we see his handiwork. Anyone could have done it better, but it would not look like my dad’s. I see him in everything I touch in the house.

He simply got it done. He wasn’t proud or not proud. He just knew that it had to get done. He didn’t beat himself up when corners did not meet at right angles. He worked around it. So, as I became really discouraged last night that “all” I have created are corners that don’t meet, I stopped to think of my dad. He got it done and so can I.

Thanks for listening.

Posted via email from Dan’s posterous

The first event was a self-diagnosed adult onset attention-deficit disorder (which merely replaced the self-diagnosed child-onset A.D.D when I became an adult at 38). The second event was the realization that I actually enjoy putting words on virtual paper. Sometimes, yes, SOMETIMES, I even enjoy stringing those words together into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs back into sentences because I scare easily. You can think of it as “literal” rock-climbing where the higher I climb, the scaredier I get.

This first event has made it nearly impossible to stay focused on the task of writing. When I open Microsoft Word (or for your Mac users, the Mac-Touch, Better-Than-Breathing, Bill-Gates-Sucks, Write-a- Novel-While-Sleeping, Pretty-Artsy-Bubbly-Interface, I-Don’t-Care-If-It-Costs-Seven-Hundred-Dollars, Edition software), I am faced with so many distractions like the ever-annoying Clippy and deciding what font to use today (I write in Wingdings).

Not to mention that the internet is always seducing me by whispering mesmerizingly in my ear “Ohhhh Dan, I need you to run your fingers over my series of tubes…” and I happily succumb. Then I feel guilty and dirty and used…but sated. So, I am quick to Alt-Tab (or just think about it for you Mac-o-philes) my way through life (How I wish I could Alt-Tab people in much the same way I do screens).

Both of my readers (BoMR) are unfortunate witnesses to this internal conflict. You may have noticed some of it in the previous 8 million words of this post just to say what I am about to say in the following 150 words.

One of the tools that I really enjoy using is called JDarkRoom. This is a full-screen text editor and offers NONE of the distractions that the fully-loaded Word does. With this editor, you do not choose fonts, underlines, paragraphs or any other formatting. In fact, the screen is simply a black screen that takes up your entire monitor’s real estate. You do not see the Task Bar, System Tray, Menu Bar, Desktop or anything else. Just a black screen with green text (You can also change the color of the screen and text if green-on-black is not your thing).

JDarkRoom has many other distraction-free features. From their website:

* Change your colour preferences, font and font size – via the settings screen (F6)
* JDarkRoom remembers the file that you were working on last time
* Support for central-european character sets
* JDarkRoom notifies you if you might have forgotten to save your changes
* Word/line/character count (Ctrl-L)
* Specify a file on the command-line for JDarkRoom to open it at startup
* Text antialiasing (where possible)
* Mouse-wheel scrolling
* Adjustable margins to fit any screen resolution (F9 to reset)
* Auto-save backups – so you never lose your work again
* Text search (F7 / Ctrl-F)
* A command-reminder strip can be displayed at the bottom of the screen

Of course, I am not sure what anti-aliasing is, but I think they are building a wall along the Mexican border and a plastic bubble over Califronia which should help with that. Honestly, I do not believe I can live without the Central European Character Set! I don’t even know where Central Europe is!

JDarkRoom is shareware, which simply means that donations are gladly and deservedly accepted. I, too, am shareware, which simply means that I am shareable.

It is unfortunate, but I look a lot better in ASCII! I just downloaded this cool (and open source!) app called ascgen2. You can download it here: http://ascgendotnet.jmsoftware.co.uk/

What this does is converts a digital image into text using only the ascii character set. The ascii characters are only about 128 printable characters including capital and lowercase letters, numbers, special characters like the pound, asterisk, ampersand and the space character.

With this application, you can change some variables such as brightness etc. Download it….if you are a geek like me.

Have fun!

The problem I have found with commenting is that I have to remember where I commented in order to see if there is any follow-up to my pithy observation. Just two weeks ago, I commented on a random blog about the Scooter Libby pardon and for the life of me, I cannot remember where I put that comment and I know the blogger would have a reply that I was sincerely interested in.

Well fret no more. Your blogging prayers [brayers] have been answered. I recently came across a service called CoComment and this website allows you to track all your comments in a centralized location online. From here, you can track both the comments you have made and all subsequent comments. Better yet, you can discover where some of the more active commenters are leaving their mark and follow them around the blogosphere. You can add tags and follow the comments of others too.

You can even add a widget to your blog so all your fans can see where you are commenting.

CoCommenter supports many of the blogging platforms that you are likely to come across in your blog surfing. It requires either a Firefox extension (extremely convenient) or you can run it on Internet Explorer as a bookmarklet.

I have been using it for about 2 weeks now and I love it. I am not sure if there are better systems out there, but so far this is very good.

Have fun out there! I have to run and make a pledge.

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