David Wake's Blog

I was doing a self-pub mini-fest (https://self-pub-fest.co.uk/) with fellow authors, A. A. Abbott and Morgen Bailey, and the topic of what software we use to write cropped up.  It would be interesting to know what others use and recommend.

So, to kick this off, here’s my list:-

I don’t really use anything other than Word to generate a bullet list of notes.  Most of it is done in my head.  Others use Plottr; I’ve not, so I can’t really recommend it.

WriteClick is a front-end to Word.  This is a program I wrote myself (using Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/), a Delphi clone that uses Pascal) to launch Word, keep track of time taken and words written.  It also has a pop-up for quick notes.  I can hit Shift-F14 (more about why later) and it looks up a word, so I can have descriptions of characters quickly to hand.  Great, if I remember to make the note in the first place.  It also checks a few things that Word doesn’t like, say, non-smart apostrophes – we don’t want those swines creeping in.  It also helps with uploading files to KDP, but that functionality ought to go in its own program.

Microsoft Word is my word-processor.  I turned off its updates, so that Microsoft won’t fiddle with it or, worse, break the version I’ve paid for and insist that I subscribe.  If I could, I’d move over to Linux and LibreOffice Writer (https://www.libreoffice.org/), but its search function isn’t as useful and I’d have to rewrite WriteClick.

WordWeb (https://wordweb.info/) is a thesaurus program that I use when I discovered that Microsoft was limiting access to certain words in Word’s thesaurus.  I recommend this.  Just pop the cursor over the word, hit F14 (more on this later) and up pops a definition and alternatives.  I like that it’s free, providing you take no more than two plane flights a year.

Oryx is… well, this is where it’s going to start sounding far too complicated.  I use an Ergodox EZ keyboard (https://ergodox-ez.com/) and Oryx is their program to customise your keyboard.  For example, I’ve made an anonymous blue key that I can reach with my left index finger into F14, so I can access WordWeb and WriteClick easily.  I’ve keys for an endash and many other changes – question mark here, apostrophe there and brackets everywhere.

AutoHotKey Version 2 (https://www.autohotkey.com/) then takes these key presses and turns them into other things.  For example, F14 is turned into Ctrl-Alt-W for WordWeb.  Shift-dash is the en-dash and so on.  In searching for advice on writing AutoHotKey scripts, it is vital to put ‘V2’ in any Google search for how to use this program as the syntax version 2 uses is completely different from version 1.  AutoHotKey does not exist for Linux, which is another reason I’m trapped in the Windows world.

And then to finish the keyboard complications, I’ve Word autocorrects and macros set up. 

This is much the same as doing the first draft for the most part.  I do use Microsoft Excel sometimes to track chapter and section lengths and to do structural checks.

Word checks spelling and grammar, WriteClick checks stuff and I also use Grammarly (https://app.grammarly.com/) for spelling and grammar, and Hemingway (https://hemingwayapp.com/) for style.  The latter hates long sentences – it’ll have kittens over this one – and the overuse of adverbs like quickly; it highlights anything that ends in ‘ly’, so ‘only’ is an adverb, apparently.  I have used ProWriting Aid (https://prowritingaid.com/) and I think I will again: it spots things the others don’t and there’s no harm in another pair of software eyes on the prose.

I DO NOT use the generative AI functions of any of these.  All my words are my words.  It’s one thing to have software say, ‘Do you really want his adverb here?’, but quite another for it to tighten a paragraph or write a rambling sub-plot plagiarised from another writer.  (Or even plagiarised from myself.)

KDP is Amazon’s website for self-publishing paperbacks, hardbacks and ebooks.  Word produces PDF files for upload.

Photoshop is another program that I’ve paid for and don’t update to avoid the subscription model, but my version is perfectly adequate to create covers.  Sometimes KDP objects to them and I need to flatten the image as a workaround.

To make the ebook, I use another program I’ve written, Firewood.  (Firewood for a Kindle, geddit?)  It makes an HTML file from a Word document and helps to edit this.  It also checks formatting in a different way and often spots something that needs updating in the Word document for the paperback.

Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) is a program people use to organise their ebook libraries and it converts html files into epub files for uploading to KDP.  I use Calibre 7.26 as I hit snags with an update.  I can’t remember what the problem was now.

This is a really complicated way to do this; even my co-written book Punk Publishing (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Punk-Publishing-Self-Publishing-Indie-Authors/dp/B0BGN97Y1X) doesn’t recommend this route.  I, however, like the fine control of the ebook’s appearance all the above gives me.

I suppose for completeness I should add Spotify.  I create playlists to generate the right mood for whatever I’m writing.  Books have their own theme music and background ambience.  This blog was written to Daily Mix 1.

At school, I was terrible at spelling.  I don’t think trying to learn strings of letters by rote really work and my brain always wanted to sort spelling out so that it was more logical.  I could never ‘get’ syllables either, because I’d think that using three-letter groups instead would be much more logical.  I had the same issue learning French – why have genders, why not not… etc, rather than just accepting that’s how it is.  This way of thinking is great for computer programming, but useless for learning things.  (I have got better at spelling after years of the computer red underlining errors.)

In The Murder of Conky Whallop, I had a gag about whether it’s scone or scone.

“No!” she said, “it’s not pronounced ‘scone’, it’s pronounced ‘scone’!”

I’ve riffed further in the forthcoming sequel.

It’s a good joke on paper, but I imagine an audiobook narrator would have kittens.

English spelling is a nightmare.  We discovered the printing press at exactly the wrong time.  For a couple of hundred years, there was The Great Vowel Shift, when all our vowels moved from Middle English to Early Modern English.  ‘Oh’s became ‘You’s and so on, and some letters became silent.  Printing fixed the spelling, but sometimes before the shift, sometimes during and sometimes after.  Some words seemed to be spelt according to what letters they had left over.  The Americans tried to correct the spelling, so ‘color’ not ‘colour’, but that wasn’t consistent either.  And then scholars in Victorian England changed things to demonstrate their superiority over the uneducated.  Don’t, boldly or otherwise, split the infinitive came from that movement.

I have been wondering about updating spelling in an SF book, but it would be a) hard work, b) cause arguments and c) be impossible to read.  But my brain keeps working on it.

To start with, we don’t want accents.  ‘E’ is ‘e’, not ‘é’.  I didn’t learn French (true), just to suggest we adopt lots of little difficult-to-type lines all over the place.  Esperanto has a fixed way of pronouncing letters, limiting its sounds, but meaning that all speakers sound the same and can therefore understand one another.  (Cue the Harry Harrison story about Esperanto speakers meeting in New York.  One of them didn’t know Esperanto, so they switched to English to include them in the conversation.  Unfortunately, they had to switch back to Esperanto as no-one could understand the Scot and the Aussie.)

I’d get rid of long vowels.  ‘Lead’ the metal and ‘lead’ the action is just foolish.  Surely ‘led’ and ‘leed’, respectively.  You see, ‘Mon’ as in ‘Mons Olympus’ and ‘Moon’ as in shiny thing in the sky, makes it very clear whether there’s along vowel in there, so why not ‘Daavid’.  With the single ‘a’, it would be ‘David’ as in ‘Davros’.  Add using the right vowel, so ‘one’ and ‘won’ become ‘won’ and ‘wun’, respectively.

Also, we don’t need all the letters.  A feline pet can be spelt ‘cat’, ‘kat’ and ‘qat’ – we don’t need three ways of doing that.  ‘C’ can be hard, ‘cat’, and soft, ‘city’, so that’s one to go.  ‘Kat’ and ‘sity’ works fine.  Disposing of ‘q’ also removes the ‘must be followed by u’ business too.  We need ‘z’ as ‘zit’ is not the same as ‘sit’, although the Romans had no ‘z’, but do we need ‘x’.  Xylophone can be spelt ‘zylophone’ and we could spell ‘Oxford’ as ‘Oksford’.

That’s ‘c’, ‘q’ and ‘x’ gone, which brings the alphabet (or our ‘ABD’) down to 23 letters.  These frees up three keys on the keyboard and that would mean less finger strain and new opportunities for me to reconfigure my Ergodox.

And I’d separate, not letters or syllables, but something in-between to divide the different sounds.  You could use an apostrophe, so that everything looks like Klingon.  So I’d be Daa’vid, but the apostrophe is a much over-used and abused piece of punctuation already doing too many jobs.  This article’s ‘use’ of it, for instance.  So why not the old middle dot, ‘·’ as in ‘Daa·vid went to Oks·ford’.

(Good grief, the computer has gone berserk with red underlining.)

So, finally, to come back to scones.

These would be spelt ‘sk·on’ or ‘sk·own’ – that’s very clear on the pronunciation, although it ruins the joke.

It would have an effect on dialect.  Speakers in different regions would spell things differently.  The Scottish, for example, write ‘scone’ and say ‘sch·oone’.  It’s an art to write dialect and should be used sparingly.

And finally, on the subject of scones, is it cream then jam, or jam then k·reem?

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Leonardo Da Vinci.

I’m approaching the abandoning point of quite a few projects.  I’m not saying they are Art, but they are carefully crafted art.  The trick is to realize when you are about to make it worse and stop.

I write using Microsoft Word and it’s been a struggle recently.  They ‘updated’ it and now tracked changes doesn’t work the same.  Some versions allow you to use ‘legacy’ comments, which is how they used to work, but not in my setup, apparently.  I wish they’d just stop fiddling with it.  Things change, and will always change, because Microsoft wizards (do they still use that job title?) have to justify their pay cheque.  So, they invent new features to wind up their users with every update.  They’re just making it worse.  Word was as close to perfection as it needs to be – it’s just a word processor, for Xxymn’s sake, not a rocket simulator.  Just stop.

However, I have been fiddling improving my own piece of software, so I can’t really talk.  I wrote a program to convert Word documents into HTML ready for conversion into an ebook.  I added features that made it worse.  So, I took them out, backtracking to a less dreadful version with less fiddling.  It works.  Stop, David, stop.

I think that sentiment should also apply to my keyboard, which, of course, I’ve been reconfiguring.  I have a key that types ‘£’ now and the Alt key is under my thumb.  But come on, it may not perfect, but it’s done.

The soon to be abandoned projects (that sounds like an awful way to say, ‘finished’) are The Crow’s Law (the second in The Daughters of Égraine trilogy) and A Dragon in the Title, written with J. R. Steel.  The latter novel took 42 years of wizardry, as it were.  It’s the first of a trilogy and there are actual wizards in it.  They are both being launched at ArmadaCon down in Plymouth and should be available on Amazon just after.

On Tuesday 4th November, I shall publish them both with abandon.

A lot of writers I know reward themselves with a treat if they write, say, 1,000 words or finish a chapter.  Given that most of writing seems to be playing small psychological tricks on yourself to knuckle down, this seems quite clever.  And who doesn’t like a Hobnob?

Except… consider this before you dunk your Rich Tea.

Recently, there was a study (and, as usual, I can’t remember where I read it, so I can’t reference it) where they took kids, primary school age, who liked doing art.  You know, sploshing water colours around, finger painting, etcetera.  Anyway, they took them to one side and let them get on with their art.  At the end of the session, they gave them a reward – a sweet, a biscuit, whatever.  I know, Jammie Dodgers, the lot of ’em.

This went on for a couple of weeks before they withdrew the reward.

Now, these kids, who had liked art for art’s sake, resented this and stopped doing their painting and drawing.  (How many future Leonardos, Donatellos, Raphaels and Michelangelos were ruined by this suddenly unethical experiment?  Not Nice – geddit?)

So, if you are giving yourself a chocolate bourbon for writing, then your writing becomes a chore, something that requires a reward to get through.

I recently flipped this around.  (And not just the chocolate digestive, which, apparently, we’ve all been eating upside down since they were invented.)

So, if I do this piece of housework, put that laundry on and do the other washing up, then I can write for a couple of hours.  Two things resulted from this.  First, the vacuuming is getting done, I’ve got clean shirts and the dishes are clean.  (And the Jaffa cakes are in the tin, not the barrel.)  Second, and more importantly, I’m enjoying writing more (one hopes that means it’s better) and I’m more productive.  I’m like the cat that got the Custard cream.

Oh, and third, I eat only the essential cookies, not the optional ones.

I did a guest blog recently and misspelt ‘guest’ such that, in my biography, I’ve been a quest at SF conventions.  This was queried, obviously, but perhaps the blogger thought, it was something we do at SF conventions.  And, you know, it could be.

I quite like the idea of being a quest.  It rather involves readers searching out the author’s books, battling extraordinary odds to defy the evil one and gain the secret knowledge.  Going on a journey as they always put on the back of fantasy books.  (Checks own fantasy book, yep.)  It sounds more exciting than just tapping the Zettle or clicking on Amazon.

The Jackdaw’s Choice is out, finally.  I launched it at ArmadaCon with a limited edition.  It’s the first of the Daughters of Égraine trilogy.  A story I wrote all in one go!  It tells the tale of Mara going on a journey… well, she does go on a journey.  It’s managed a few five-star reviews already, which is very satisfying.

Anyway, it’s here if you want a copy.  It’ll make a good gift too for the upcoming wintery nights when going out on a journey involves boots, coats and scarves, and it’s just warmer indoors.

I hope your quests, whatever they are, have happy conclusions.

I’m updating my website (email, life choices, office…) and it’s driving me to distraction. I ought to be writing, not faffing with editing systems, WordPress, HTML, web hosting, web forwarding, klystron generation, arctron energy, etc, etc, etc. A long time ago, I worked in computer science research and I’m finding my attitude ‘It should work like this, I said so at the time’, isn’t helping me actually use the stuff as it ended up being designed. Ho hum.

Bizarrely, I’ve taken part in some PhD research into the hassles and difficulties of modern technology. The interview was due to take an hour, but two-and-a-half hours later, I was still going, “…and another thing!”

So, watch this space as it gradually lurches back to the way it was.

You should always sail into the sea of the unknown on a voyage of discovery.

I go to Science Fiction conventions, events full of… well, everything. They’re a maelstrom of activity that washes over you in a sea fury?

Recently, a convention up in Sheffield. ‘Redemption’, asked me to be one of their Guests of Honour.  Quite something.  My fellow guests included a senior lecturer on ‘War Studies’ at Sandhurst, a videogame developer, an artist and a film historian specialising in silent cinema.

It was fantastic to be there, but I missed most of it.

There was, apparently, Fight Choreography for Writers (which I think I’ve now missed at three different conventions), Lock picking, Ration Roulette (a tasting session for survival rations) and talks on The Prisoner at 50 and Star Wars at 40.  You could be involved in the cabaret, the play, the ceilidh, Morris Longsword dancing or a publishing project.  There was a sewing workshop, Victorian martial arts lessons, cookery through the ages and the now obligatory Tea Duelling.

Lectures and discussions ranged from historical re-enactment, Artificial People (a talk on robots and androids in media and reality), on dystopian fiction (perfect for those studying English), What Are E-Sports?, Post-Apocalyptic Survival, Where Next for the Large Hadron Collider, How Safe Are We Digitally to Victorian Costuming,

That covers subjects like English, Physics, History, Media, Sport and Home Economics. I can’t think of any environment, even University, that offers so much intellectual stimulation in such a short span of space and time.

Myself? My guest talk was on writing and I starred in the play, Captain Tartan – Redemption.  I also ran a panel discussion called Where Have All The Heroines Gone?, which, due to last minutes changes, turned into just me, a bloke, mansplaining feminism to a room full of women.

I sold some books.

And it had a pirate theme.

I’m back from the Lincoln steampunk festival, Asylum, so named because it started off in a building built for the insane, and I had a revelation there.

I first came across steampunk at SF conventions and it seemed like fun, a fashion that might last a couple of years, nothing more. Co-incidentally, I started writing an adventure series set in Victorian times, which featured some genre elements, and realised that The Derring-Do Club was steampunk.

However, it’s the cultural side that I want to walk about here and I think it’s why the subgenre isn’t a mere fad and has gained longevity.

The literature strand at Asylum was in a school hall and the playground was a food court. There were burger bars, vegetarian dishes and a double decker bus, a proper red routemaster, serving proper ales with a gin bar on the top deck. (See view from the top, Morris dancers elbow bottom right.)  I walked in when some Morris dancers were doing a show to the gentlemen and ladies in their finery, and it struck me, quite forcibly, that I was surrounded by Britishness.

Of course, I was: it was a steampunk festival.

It was an all-inclusive, welcoming crowd bringing to the fore Morris dancing, politeness, tea drinking, industrial heritage, invention, eccentricity and a pride in – yes – the Empire. (The British Empire spanned the globe, the sun never set, etc, and it did bring civilisation to the colonies along with a global Pax Britannica. OK, OK, we mustn’t forget the atrocities and stupidities, I don’t wish to white wash history, but ours was the only empire where the subjugated nations, having gained independence, joined a club, so we could all get together to reminisce and play cricket. That’s something of which one ought to be proud.)

Steampunk is a mechanism to celebrate British culture that’s a million miles away from that nonsense on the nationalistic far right, EDL, BNP tabloid reading moronic gibberish. Englishness is inclusion, not exclusion; Englishness is politeness, not raised fists and shouting; Englishness is eccentricity and individuality, not identikit skinheads; Englishness is about appreciating other cultures (Balti anyone?), not forcing tea on anyone.

For example, there was a talk about etiquette that included how to shake hands. Men and women should present their hands differently: males with the usual start, but women ought to present the backs of their hands as if to initiate a hand kiss, though it becomes a handshake. It sounds quaint, old-fashioned, perhaps sexist, but the talk went on to say that transgender people can use this to easily indicate whether they wish to identify as male or female. That’s extraordinary when you think about it. Such diversity included and celebrated by the recreation of staid, repressive Victorian values – bizarre.

But it makes sense. The Victorians for all their faults were trying: the abolition of slavery, suffrage, rights, education, etc, etc, in a stumbling fashion, perhaps, but they went in the right direction nonetheless.

Steampunk is British pride done properly. Long live the Queen.

I’ve not blogged in a long time.

I was preparing a piece on the importance of touch typing, and the irony is not lost on me. I’ve been ill. It started with a slight swelling in my right foot accompanied by numbness and a tingling sensation that spread to my legs. It wasn’t unpleasant, pulling my trousers up over a mad tingling was oddly thrilling; but, particularly when it reached my bottom, it was fear inducing terrifying. Around the same time I also caught hypochondria off the internet.

After a while, it flipped: below the waist went back to normal, but above the waist various parts took it in turn to swell up, go numb, tingle or a combination of the all three. I’ve seen eight Doctors (sadly medical, rather than the actors in my favourite TV show), who have all shrugged in various ways. What are the criteria before I can claim Wake’s Syndrome?

Finally, after weeks, it settled in my hands.

My hands!

My motor skills were still there, I could feel textures and temperature, but the ‘signal noise’ meant anything I used to do purely by touch became impossible. I couldn’t do up buttons, I couldn’t handwrite and, worst of all, I couldn’t touch type. A writer who can’t write is a truly useless thing.

I tried dictation software, correct ‘so oft were’, no don’t write ‘so oft were’, oh undo, no, not the whole paragraph, don’t type that youth king stew bit computer… and so on, until there’s just a document full of swearing. It’s affected the way I speak.

“Hello comma Andy comma how are you question mark.”

Things like being unable to get my credit card wallet out of my pocket, while the cashier looked at me disparagingly and the queue behind built up impatiently, have given me a real appreciation of disability issues.

Gradually, at a Plutonic frozen nitrogen glacial speed, it’s gradually getting better. Typing became possible with an error every other word, then two per sentence and so on, until now it just feels really strange. I’ve not tried a thousand word sprint yet, but I am back to typing – phew.

However, the idea of finishing the third Derring-Do Club novel by the Steampunk convention, Asylum, has been blown out of the water. My heroines are nowhere near surviving the terrible events of the Invasion of the Grey, but I’m finally writing their adventures again.

So, my car, a rather fetching, pink Honda Jazz, only had a CD player, a format that is well and truly being bypassed much like vinyl.  (I know, I know, there will be collectors who say that you can’t get the music quality from anything other than a shiny disk or what you need for that real genuine experience is a string quartet in the backseat, but, you know, I’m an SF writer, people expect me to be cutting edge.)  Also, I keep forgetting to change the CDs in the car, so my choice of music has become somewhat limited.

As I had to go to a Honda dealership anyway due to the nearly annual car recall to fix a minor electrical part that might possible, 1 time in 10 trillion, burst into flames and oh, while you are here, do you fancy a new Honda; so, while there, I asked if there was an upgrade for the stereo – nope.  Try Halfords, they said.

So, I went to Halfords and asked if there were any options.  The chap there said he had the same problem with his Honda Civic (which as he works in a car place, probably wasn’t pink), why not try a Car Audio Specialist.

I tried the nearby Car Audio Specialists and they said, no problem at all, that’ll be £120 for the kit, 2 hours work at a sucking-of-teeth price, shall we call it a reasonable £240 all in.  I thought not.  I can surely beat £240.

There were options on-line.  I should have thought of that in the first place.  I ordered one for £21, including postage from Portugal, and I set about dismantling the car and fitting it.  It took half an hour of fear and worry to take the dashboard apart, five minutes to plug it in and say ten minutes to put it all back together again.

So, £240, including two hours of expert, versus £21 and an hour of amateur.

Even if I include the aborted Plan A, which was to build the kit from scratch, is only adds £27.75 and an hour of a faffing in Maplins.  That’s only becomes £48.75 and three hours of amateur, and I have a perfectly good soldering iron, which is bound to come in useful for something.

Since my success, I’ve added a Bluetooth receiver for £11.99, so I can play anything at all from my phone while it’s still tucked inside my pocket.  Technology eh?

But, and here’s the downside, I resent having to become an expert on so many things.  I’ve added car maintenance to bricklaying, plastering, fire installation… etc, etc, etc.

I’m an Indie Publisher, so I’m also an editor, proof reader, cover designer, copy editor, accountant, marketing director (thinking of firing myself from that one), lawyer, CEO, the poor  intern who makes the tea and so on and on.  I want to be a writer.