So, for one story, i’ll be giving LyX a go.

It’s a WYSIWYM (or what you see is what you mean) system thats meant to take the associated hassle out of word processing.  No having to faff about with fonts and layout and any other distractions.  It just allows you to write, keeping the formatting to a minimum.  Of course, there’s a lot more to it or why wouldn’t I just use a simple text editor like vi or gedit.

You can check it out here.  It runs on Windows, Mac OS X and many flavours of Linux.

I’ll give it a go for the duration of this story, or until I can find the time to dig through the problems I’m having with yWriter/mono.

- Alistair

With everything I’ve written so far, even the stuff I think is half reasonable, I always get the feeling that it’s a bit flat.  There’s always that voice at the back of my head telling me that it could have been richer in the detail and, well, just better. And I just don’t know how.  The added concern is that my writing is never going to be more than mediocre.

I’m really scunnered with it to be honest and there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think of just giving the whole game up.

But I don’t really want to do that.  Or do I?

What I am going to do is take a break.  I’ve tidied away all my notes, all my yWriter files and I’ve put them into on-line storage somewhere.  I’m about to clear them off my pc and take a long time away.  That might be for a week or two, maybe a month.  Maybe longer.  Who knows?

With some time with writing out of sight and mind I might be inspired to pick it up with a greater passion.  Then again, I might not.

I’ll have to see how that goes.

- Alistair

The computer desk has been jettisoned (today, thanks to Edgy) and the pc has been set up in the front room on Ruthy’s old work desk, with a new Acer 22inch wide-screen TFT monitor replacing the 19″ CRT monstrosity that took up most of the space on the old desk.  And now that part of the shifting of stuff seems to have settled, I have time to dedicate to bashing more words into the various stories I have on the go.

Which nicely brings me to the point : yWriter is back on the PC!

For those who don’t know yWriter is a very nifty piece of software that helps you organise your work, by chapter and scene if necessary, and it helped me organise things enough to get though the joys of last years NaNoWriMo.  And it’s back in time for this year.  Quality.

One thing to note though, I tried running it on Linux through Mono but it’s nowhere near as good as it is in Windoze.  Fortunately I have Xp set up in VirtualBox and it’s working very nice there, thank you very much.

Which reminds me, more work to do.  The pub beckons soon but there’s easily an hours worth of writing to get done.

- Alistair

Actually, that’s not strictly true.  We already had that conversation and had moved on to fixing up some microphones and seeing what it actually sounded like.  We recorded my telling of a story and although I’m more used to it now, I thought I sounded like a wet fart escaping from a bag.

Apparently everyone feels the same way once you hear your own voice played back to you.  Or maybe my voice actually sounds like a wet fart escaping from a bag…

So, we used Audacity for the recording.  Had to use the Windows version as there was a known bug with the software and my Audigy sound card in Linux.  Shame.

But it wasn’t an altogether terrible experience.  Still have the mic and the mixing desk here, much to Ruthy’s dismay, and I’ll play with it some more to get a bit more comfortable with it.

In the last week I had it in my mind to give the software another go, but not on Windoze as I’m weaning myself off it as much as possible for life under Ubuntu.

So, while checking out the yWriter site I learned that while the software had advanced by two versions some guy had successfully had got it working under Wine, the Linux Windows-esque environment.

Thinking that this is a good thing I download Windows installer and the software to allow it to run on a pen drive, follow the instructions, install both in Wine and everything runs just fine.

Now, my recollection is that yWriter isn’t the best software in the world but it’s free and it fits all my requirements quite nicely.  I’m interested to see what version 4 brings.

I’ve been getting a fair whack of Osiris Rising on the pc and tidied up. I’m close to finishing it (I think, transferring it to the pc will prove that statement wrong) and having a version of the story that’s a bit more coherent helps with all the other half-finished/barely-started/all-just-notes projects I have. If I can just finish this one I can rest easy that I can actually do it.

Of course, with my current job I’m tired most of the time when I’m in from work, but tomorrow I might not be in, so… Here’s hoping I can get a chunk more done.

Now we have the indispensable tool to getting the layout even more right – The 30 Light Year Star Map!

Of course, this is just the first of many quality tools available for the budding intergalactic empire cartographer.

But it certainly is the shiniest I’ve found so far.