n boxes of new equipment and software, and play with the new stuff until they tire of it. It's nice work if you can get it.
The problem is that no one pays you to be an author.
To be an author, you must first be a writer; and while it's easy to be an author, being a writer is hard work. Surprisingly, it may be only hard work; that is, while some people certainly have more talent for writing than others, everyone has some. The good news is that nearly anyone who wants to badly enough can make some kind of living at writing. The bad news is that wanting to badly enough means being willing to devote the time and work necessary to learn the trade.
The secret of becoming a writer is that you have to write. You have to write a lot. You also have to finish what you write, even though no
one wants it yet. If you don't learn to finish your work, no one will ever want to see it. The biggest mistake new writers make is carrying around copies of unfinished work to inflict on their friends.
I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it.
The late Randall Garrett, one of the most prolific writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, used to have a number of rules, many of them scatological. One of them was that no professional writer ever got anything from formal courses in writing. I think he was wrong, in the sense that a good formal introduction to the rules of grammar and spelling can be extremely useful; but he had a point, which is that there aren't any secrets to be learned from creative-writing courses. If the only way you can force yourself to write that million words of your best work
is to take a class in creative writing or attend a writers' workshop, by all means do it; but do it understanding that the good comes from the writing you do, not from the criticism or theory or technique taught in the class.
Of course, it helps if your million words are done in good English, which brings us to the main point: with few exceptions, beginning writers are appallingly bad. I don't mean that they can't organize their material, although that's true enough. I mean something more basic: their grammar is atrocious, and their spelling is abysmal. What's worse, they don't know it. Worst of all, though, they're generally prepared to defend their mistakes, and if someone corrects them, they want to argue about it. I once tried to help a dear friend learn to write, and it was sheer hell. We fought over every correction I made, and if I won an argument, I lost some friendship.
If you're arguing, you're not writing. If you're defending bad grammar, you aren't learning good grammar. If you're try
ing to prove that good writers break the rules, you're not learning the rules -- and believe me, until you have the rules down pat, you shouldn't break any of them. Time to be creative after you learn to write.
What saved our friendship was a program called Grammatik. It ruthlessly corrected every error, no matter how trivial -- and it wouldn't argue. You write your essay, letter, or whatever, and aim Grammatik at it. The program will tell you what you did wrong. It ruthlessly points out passive voice, needlessly complex sentences, silly clichés, too many adjectives, and repetition. Now, of course, good writing will contain some passive voice, complex sentences, a few clichés, and adjectives; but it won't contain a lot of that, and until you're aware of just how much gubbage you routinely throw into your writing, you won't get a feel for just what good writing is.
Grammatik, plus a lot of hard work, made quite a good writer out of my friend. It may even have cut the million words by
5 percent. I unhesitatingly recommend it to new writers: use it on, say, the first hundred thousand words you're going to finish and put into the trunk. Use it until you're sick of it and then use it a bit longer. Make a game of it. Deliberately try to fool the program. You're trying to learn the wordsmith craft, and if you can't fool a stupid computer program, you probably aren't good enough.
Eventually, you won't need the program. Then for a while you'll write by the rules, and what you write will be correct, but not as interesting as it might be. Then you learn to break or bend the rules, and by the time you're an accomplished writer, you'll produce stuff that Grammatik will hate; but it won't be finding the same problems you had when you started.
Alas, Grammatik no longer exists; but it's been built into Corel Office Professional 7. (It's also available with Microsoft Word for DOS and Novell's PerfectWorks.) The Corel suite competes very well with Microsoft Office. Quattro Pro is at least the
equal of both Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel, and while I prefer Word to WordPerfect, that's as much a matter of what I'm used to as anything else. They're both good enough for professional work, meaning that if you use Corel and Grammatik as learning tools, you'll be learning on a system you can use when you hit pay dirt.
Corel Office Professional 7 will eat well over 100 MB if you install all of it; and you should. Disk space is cheap. You can get a gigabyte for less than what any component of Corel Office Professional 7 used to cost, and all the components work; if you're going to get a suite, take advantage of it. Learn to use it all, which means installing it all. If that requires you to get a new hard drive or an Iomega Zip removable drive, so be it.
Incidentally, Corel Office Professional 7 works just fine off a parallel-port Zip drive. It's not as fast as from a regular hard drive, of course, but once again, it's good enough; and a parallel-port Zip drive is a good tool to have in your ki
t. You can keep your million words on a Zip cartridge, and chances are they'll still be readable years from now. Most writers manage to rewrite and sell their early material. In the trade, it's known as selling your trunk.
Clearly, I make no guarantees; but in my judgment, if you're determined to get my job, the best way to start is to get a good enough computer -- any Pentium qualifies -- Windows 95, a Zip drive, and Corel Office Professional 7. Put them in a room with no telephone, be sure there's neither modem nor games on the machine, and spend several hours a day seated in front of the screen. A million words from now, you'll be ready to compete.
I still have mixed emotions about mushpads (i.e., touchpads).
They certainly work, and since my neat Nimantics Orion 6X laptop has a mushpad, I don't have much choice about getting used to it. The real question is, do I want to replace my standard mice?
The main advantage to mice is that they seem natural, but surely that's a f
unction of being used to them. If you've never used anything but a mushpad, it would probably seem natural as well. I tend to think I have more precise control with a mouse, but I can't prove that, and it may not even be true. Certainly I'm more comfortable doing a drag and drop with a mouse, particularly when I'm in a game where I have to drag to the edge to get the system to scroll and I don't dare let go.
On the other hand, Cirque's GlidePoint Touchpad 2 certainly works: you can either click with the thumb button and drag with one finger or do a click and a half: double-click but don't lift your finger after the second click. That puts you in drag mode, and it does work, even with a game like This Means War. I still find I'm more accurate with a regular mouse, but again, that may be a function of experience.
Installing the GlidePoint Touchpad 2 on Cyrus took no more than turning the machine off, plugging the GlidePoint into the PS/2 mouse socket, and turning it back on. There is a disk of Glide
Point software that I may get around to installing, but so far Cyrus doesn't seem to care that I've changed mice; and all the features work just fine.
The GlidePoint takes up a lot less room than a regular mouse, and, once you get used to it, it seems to be just as fast and easy to use as a mouse. Cirque claims it's better, and you'll actually be more productive. I'll tell you in a month or two, meaning that while I'm not sure I prefer the GlidePoint Touchpad 2 to a mouse, I don't hate it, so I'll leave it installed for a longer test.
Our friend David Em was one of the first of the computer artists.
He's been testing some graphics boards for us. Unfortunately, we don't have his report yet, because he had hard drive problems.
A year or so ago, he bought a Connor 4-GB fast and wide SCSI drive. It recently went flaky. That wasn't supposed to happen with Connor's top of the line, but it came with a five-year warranty. Unfortunately, a few months ago, Seagate bought Connor.
It took two days for David to persuade someone at Seagate that they were supposed to honor the Connor warranty. He had to call twice. Each time he had to go through a telephone tree system that wanted him to punch in drive and model numbers; wait while a recorded message told him that the company was experiencing a telephone-system crash and it might be a long time before someone got on-line (it was); and then give the person who answered every bit of the information he had painfully punched into the Touch-Tone phone.
On his first call, he barely persuaded Seagate that anyone ever sold such a drive. They couldn't find it in the Connor database. On the second call, they found the drive in the Seagate database, but then tried to tell him that the drive was made in 1991, and thus the warranty had expired. Of course, the fast and wide SCSI technology hadn't been invented in 1991, and by insisting on talking to a supervisor, David got Seagate to admit this.
Eventually he got satisfaction: they're send
ing him a replacement. Since they no longer make the model he has, they'll send him one that's not only comparable, but in some ways better.
The moral of this story is that most of these companies will, eventually, do the right thing; but you have to stick to your guns long enough to work up to someone with the authority to say, "Make it so."
On a different note, I get a lot of mail, and much of it is interesting.
For example, Louis-Marius Gendreau, president of ClicNet Telecommunications, a Quebec Internet service provider (ISP), recently wrote to remind me of Solutions, which is free symbolic-math software that provides a host of mathematical, statistical, and plotting functions, as well as a structured programming language for complex problems. Solutions was developed by Paul Dubé when he was a student. Eventually, he and Gendreau started their own software company, and, after porting Solutions from the Atari ST to Windows to commercialize it, they wound up becoming an I
SP. As Gendreau writes: "...we have not had the time to work on Solutions since. Instead of letting it gather cosmic particles on our hard drive, we think the software would be put to much better use by a million students and scientists! So, we have decided to give it away..."
If you think this might be of interest to you, hop over to
http://www.qbc.clic.net/Elan
. You'll find two versions available for downloading: the last commercial release, version 1.05, and a beta version 2.0, which adds new functions, including non-RPN (reverse Polish notation) entry. Naturally enough, the software is not supported, and help-file development stopped with version 1, but then, it is free.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: The Art of Writing
