"There are things machines will never do. They cannot posses faith. They cannot commune with God. They cannot appreciate beauty, they cannot create art. If they ever learn these things, they won't have to destroy us, they'll be us."
--Sarah Connor
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Episode 12 and ...
What's new...? Life happens...
Please note: Last few months have been unexpectedly hectic. The "hectic" being an indication that I am a master of understatement. Mostly attributable to an excess of workload.
Hopefully, the circumstances look like clearing ahead and very soon the craziness may be over and I'll try to get back on track as soon as I can. It's possible that I'll release several episodes at once or at least withing short span of time, to make up for lost time.
The best way to get informed is to register, so I may be able to send you an email once the episodes are posted.
Update pending.
How is it done?
Friday, 28 January 2011 01:22
Beside trying to be creative as much as I can and sometimes dreaming the episodes material, there is a technical side of putting it together. I would address the creative aspects of writing elsewhere.
I work in two environments, linux and windows (both virtual and extra standalone machines), so the toolset has to be either the same, cross-platform or somewhat similar to make my life easier.
QuickFox Notes is a Firefox extension that is a text editor for... you guessed--making quick notes while browsing or if something crosses your mind. Since the a browser is opened all the time, this makes making quick notes easy. It has three modes, either it pops up, dispalys in a tab, or in a split screen at the bottom of the browser. You can have many tabs with different notes. You can also set up a repository in your shared drive/directory that would make the notes accessible to other machines on your LAN.
When I need to work with texts, I can copy QFNs to an editor of my choice. I don't use word processors, they are overkill unless I want to send a printed letter to someone or make an outline of a project for a client. So, in windows, I use TextPad and in linux I use KDE 3.5 based kate that comes as a part of the default KDE installation. Kate does not work well in KDE4, which I am not using as a desktop environment for that and numerous other reasons--to put it bluntly, it's a bugware. Both editors allow me to save the session (workspace in TextPad), split windows or tabs. I use these also for coding, so it is a natural tool for me.
Xmind is a visual map application available for all three major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac). It provides a way to create mind maps--laying out relationships and trees. I use it to map out relationships of characters of the story and also for cross-relation of events. If I need a to create a timelines set, I use Xmind's Gatt feature or OpenOffice spreadsheet.
To make actual scripts, I have to do it in windows as the software is platform dependent. Page 2 Stage is the screenwriting software I use for the scripts.There are more robust applications out there for screenwriters out there, but this one does the job and is an easy tool. Once the script is finalized, I'd print it in a PDF format.
Last, but not the least, a 1TB external drive for nightly backups. My experience taught me that this is probably the most important part of my tool set.
