http://www.flurb.net

Looks like they’re looking for submissions for issue #13.  The submission window is Feb 1st to 28th of next year.  Stories between one and six thousand words with strong characters and an actual story.  Fancy that.

Time to hunt though my yWriter files and see if I have anything appropriate.

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

It’s running well, if clunky (i’m too used to the quad core madness on the big machine), but it’ll do everything I need of it.  Already I’ve set up yWriter5, Sonar3, my Evolution mailbox and I’m just transferring my files and folders as I type this.  Of course, the main point of running things off the laptop is for the convenience of future writing.  This means I can get some work done on the train to work in the morning and actually head out and about for peace and quiet writing rather than stay on the main machine here in the middle of distraction-ville.

Or that’s the plan.  I am the procrastination master after all.

Ruthy’s laptop is looking as shiny as sin.  It’s a Windows 7 monster and I’m so impressed with Win 7 I may have to replace XP on the desktop.  But first things first.  There’s a laptop to finish setting up.

Oh, what a hard life…

- Alistair

It saves faffing around with Mono and, to be honest, it means I have handy access to a Win XP session without rebooting the machine.

As for yWriter, I have everything in the one project rather than across several and it really hammers it home how much I’ve written and how many projects haven’t yet been finished.

Just over 171500 words in total and only 3562 across three published stories.  Hell, I’d better get to work!

- 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

I’ve been plugging away at a project, an easier task since the re-acquisition of yWriter a wee while ago, and although I was working on Desert of Zin and an as yet unnamed vampire story (actually DoZ is being worked on steadily but just not this weekend…) I’ve a new story that has been keeping up nights.

I’m thinking of entering it for New Writing Dundee which is due on the 1st of November.  That would normally give me a month to get it done and edit it but I’ll be away for the last two weeks of the month, on holiday but working on plans for the upcoming NaNo, so I have little time to get it finished and in a state I’m happy with.

It’s called The Spires At Midnight, just a working title for now, and it may be fantasy/horror but I’ll have a better idea once it is finished.

Anyways, back to work…

- 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

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.