-it was enormously preferable to a Selectric typewriter, which was itself a giant step above an ordinary electric typewriter.
Today, though, old Zeke would seem impossibly slow and clunky. I could probably still write books with him, but I'd sure hate to try. I've gotten used to high-speed saves, big monitors with 20 or more rows of 60-column text displayed in an attractive and readable font, fast search and replace, instant access to InfoSelect and other utilities for keeping and organizing notes, an on-line dictionary and thesaurus, an encyclopedia on-line, relatively crash-proof systems with full backup, and all the rest.
What I haven't got
ten addicted to is programs to aid in the writing process.
All of which leads up to Dramatica Pro 2.0, which bills itself as the ultimate writing tool;
in fact, it calls itself a "Writing Partner."
It's not easy to describe what Dramatica Pro does. Partly, that's because I don't use it myself, but mostly it's because the program does so much. It's even harder to review, because while it works, in the sense that it doesn't crash and all the features seem to work, the real question is, do you need the program at all? And, alas, there's no simple answer to that.
When the late Rex Stout sat down to write a new Nero Wolfe story, the only note he had was a list of character names. Everything else was generated in his head. I tend to work that way myself. Dramatica Pro--let's call it DP--wants you to do things differently. Instead of a blank sheet of paper and some character names, you start with worksheets. The program leads you through a series of exercises in which you detail what kind of s
tory you want to write. Then you develop characters. DP forces you to think about those characters and invites you to have a dialogue with them. Really.
I once read about a writer's gimmick: know what your characters were doing on their twelfth birthday. Larry Niven and I actually employed that technique in some of our early works, and it was a good way of focusing on character details. DP does that in spades with Big Casino; if you go through all the exercises this program recommends, you'll sure have a lot of character-development details in your notes. DP also brings in writing theories, compares your works to some standard works, builds diagrams of character relationships, and even gives you visualization aids.
When I first described this to a writer friend, he said it sounded suspiciously like the character and plot wheels you could buy back in the 1960s. (They may still be available for all I know.) These gizmos took standard plot elements and human traits and mixed them up to generate "new
ideas." However, he was stuck for a story concept--TV writers seem to have that problem more than writers for print media--so he borrowed the program, tried it, and liked it enough that he bought his own copy. I gather he has used it to generate a couple of TV scripts and has sold at least one of them.
I arranged for my friend and sometime partner Steve Barnes to get a review copy of DP. After a good try, he decided it wasn't for him, but he was pretty sure some writers would find it very useful. We then simultaneously said "Gary Edmundson." Gary was the author of a number of memorable science fiction stories as well as some cheap thrillers. He was a good wordsmith with a gift for phrasing, but he absolutely detested plotting.
I once was stuck with a contract for a cheap pulp story (under a pseudonym, and you'll never find it; Larry Niven has tried for years to find out the name I used) and gave Gary the plot and character outline for it as well as for two other such stories I wasn't going to writ
e. In gratitude, Gary turned out a first draft of my story and gave it to me gratis. I edited it into a final form in about two days. Gary then took my other two plots and had them written and sold in under a month. Gary would have loved DP.
In other words, whether DP will work for you depends on what kind of writer you are. DP can't make you a better wordsmith; if phrases and paragraphs don't flow effortlessly, you'll just have to keep on pounding out words until they do. It can generate plots and characters, and if you follow it rigorously, it can even help steer you toward interesting story lines. It can almost certainly help you prepare for that Hollywood torture known as "pitching the story," in which you try to convince a studio executive to invest money in having you turn your ideas into an actual script.
DP is more likely to be useful to the writer of short stories and scripts than the novelist. It's unlikely to be any use at all to writers such as Harlan Ellison, who see the entire story
in one flash and then write at fever pitch until it's finished.
In short: I don't use DP. I know one writer who does and two more who tried it but never really used it. I can't tell you whether it will do you any good or not. It does work, and it's pretty impressive in what it attempts.
Roberta has been complaining about not having a flatbed scanner,
so when there was a big sale, we bought a Umax Astra 600S 300- by 600-dpi, 30-bit (10 bits per color) scanner. It works fine.
Installation was something else. The Astra 600S came with a crummy ISA SCSI board. We installed it in SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2 VL-Bus system that's becoming the fax and scanning server, but, alas, the Astra SCSI board couldn't find the scanner. Alex, who has considerable experience with such things, gave up after half an hour, and we decided to put in a decent SCSI card and have done with it. We have several, but most are Fast and Wide SCSI, which would be wretched excess for this operation.
Finally, w
e went into the old parts box to find an ancient Adaptec ISA-bus SCSI card with jumper settings. The documentation for the card is long gone, but the card itself is labeled well enough that we could set it up. Adaptec SCSI controllers work, so we weren't surprised that the SCSI card could see the scanner. The TWAIN software that came with the Astra took care of the rest.
The Astra 600S has no printed manuals. There's a single sheet of paper with a couple of illustrations and a CD-ROM containing Adobe Acrobat, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Presto PageManager, and on-line manuals for all those plus the scanner itself. The information is complete enough, but there's too much to load onto the hard drive, meaning that you'll have to keep the CD-ROM handy if you need any instructions. I have mixed emotions about this. On the one hand, manuals take up storage space and tend to get lost; on the other hand, CD-ROMs get lost, too, and it's very hard to turn down page corners on a CD-ROM.
Anyway, we had no more problem
s after changing SCSI cards, so we tested the Astra 600S with a color photo I took of Jeremy Bentham last time I was at the University of London. Bentham, a founder, had himself stuffed after his decease. He is now wheeled into Board of Regents meetings, where he is recorded as present but not voting; it seemed an appropriate picture to test the scanner with. If I get around to it, I'll put the scanned image on-line.
If you already have SCSI on your system, the Astra 600S will install without problems in your existing SCSI string, and you won't care that the SCSI card that comes with it isn't any good. If you don't have SCSI, my advice (assuming you have PCI bus, which most of us do now) is to get a PCI-bus Plug and Play SCSI card from Adaptec or Buslogic and install that first.
If you scan a lot, you'll want storage space--image files are big--and with SCSI, it's easy to hang an external SyQuest drive, Iomega Jaz, or glass disk on the SCSI string. Once you have SCSI, you'll be surprised at how ea
sy it is to attach other devices to your system and how often you'll want to. Eventually, many of those devices will be universal serial bus (USB), but so far that isn't happening, and SCSI isn't going to be obsolete for several years.
We recently got a digital videodisc (DVD) system,
an internal drive that replaces a CD-ROM drive. It works fine, although there isn't a lot to do with it yet. There are games and some 50 movies available; and, of course, there will be many more DVDs, games, movies, and education programs in the future. DVD has enormous storage capacity in a CD form factor. There's no strong reason to get it now, unless you're the kind of person who likes to be ahead of the pack. Early adopters can have fun with it now; and in a couple of years, it will be as ubiquitous as the CD-ROM drives it replaces. It's pretty certain you'll get it eventually.
When you get DVD installed on your computer, you'll probably want to watch movies on a TV rather than the monitor screen. For that,
you can use Wavecom Sr., a transmitter and receiver from RF-Link Technology that will take the DVD output from your computer and wirelessly send it to your TV. Actually, Wavecom Sr. will send color video and stereo audio from any source device--a monitor camera in the nursery, camcorder, VCR, your big living room cable TV--to any receiver device, such as the bedroom or kitchen TV (which may not have cable).
This is a consumer electronics device rather than a computer device and is correspondingly easy to set up: take the units out of the box and follow the diagrams on the instructions. There's even a way to control the remote TV with your normal TV clicker. If you install DVD in your computer, you'll probably want one of these.
Do you often get e-mail in foreign languages?
Easy Translator from Transparent Language is a single CD-ROM translator of Spanish, French, and German to and from English. Like all machine translations, it tends to be very literal, so the translation is hardly elegant, b
ut it does give you a sense of what is being said, and it will work from Netscape or Explorer. Installation is simple, and use is intuitive.
Of course, you should beware nuances and idioms: it's astonishing how common English expressions can become off-color remarks or deadly insults when translated word for word. Scientists found that out with the term black hole. With that caveat, if you do a lot of Internet surfing, you'll probably be glad to have this.
Your federal tax dollars at work:
we recently got a review copy of a new video board. It worked fine in Windows 95, but David Em had real problems with it in all our dual-processor machines running Windows NT 4.0. Eventually, the Canadian manufacturer got worried and wanted to send us a known reliable system running NT with their board in it. They called to say the machine was on the way by Federal Express. This was a Thursday.
It hadn't arrived by Saturday, so David called Federal Express: the machine was held up by U.S. Customs in M
inneapolis. They wanted to know about "radiation" and had accumulated five pages of documents. David thought perhaps they'd sent a monitor, but no, this was just a box.
In fact, it was a Dell Pentium 200 manufactured in Texas and exported to Canada in the first place. Now the federal government was concerned about the 12X CD-ROM drive: might that not "radiate"? Might it not somehow bring airplanes crashing to the ground or stop pacemakers? And, in fact, one of the agencies that was blocking our "importation" of this dangerous device was the FDA.
Eventually, sanity must have hit the Customs office, because the system was released after several days, barely in time for our deadline. I've seen the FCC send armed men to a trade show to arrest a small vendor displaying a disk drive without the proper FCC stickers, so I suppose nothing should surprise me.
Product Information
Astra 600S....................$249.00
Umax Technologies
F
remont, CA
Phone: 800-562-0311
Phone: 510-651-4000
Fax: 510-651-8834
Internet:
http://www.umax.com/
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Writing with a Partner
