Anthony Gerrard's Blog

Whether you want to get more followers on Twitter, encourage people to buy your books or just get your name out there, you need to engage with them. Tweeting (or blogging) lots of buy links will get you noticed but in the wrong way. A better way to do this is to get involved in […]

There are many different views about grammar, ranging from ‘it doesn’t matter’ to Grammar Nazi. Its easy to cheque you’re reaction too bad grammar. Whilst I get annoyed by those people who trawl the internet searching for missed apostrophes or checking for rules-they-care-about being broken, grammar does matter. If readers are distracted or confused by […]

My current WIP is set in an alternative (Steampunk) Victorian England. Although the setting is fictional, I want to create the right Victorian feel and only deviate where the steampunk elements require it. To help me, I started an Pinterest board to gather images for different characters and settings. I already had an idea of […]

  I do enjoy finding new challenges to keep my writing brain thinking. I came across the 100 word challenge on a blog called Julia’s Place. I liked the idea of writing a story in 100 words or fewer prompted by an image. This week’s image was three wise monkeys. This is my response. I […]

I’ve been planning to put together a Steampunk outfit, just in case I need one at any time – you know how it is…

I was interested in modifying something to make it Steampunk but I still wanted it to function as a real object. I believe the Victorians would not actually have liked the obsession with putting cogs on things for no purpose.

I bought  cheap thermometer and hygrometer from the internet (similar to this one).

It arrived today and I unpacked the box.

Straight out of the box

On the back of the meter are three pegs used to hold it all together. Prise it apart.
Pull off the needles (take care with this or you pull out the innards – use a screwdriver to twist them off). Peel off the two meters which are stuck on to the dial.
Spray the two white plastic parts and the needles with primer. When dry, spray with the metal colour you wish to use (I used brass).
Scan the dial into a computer and use Photoshop (or similar) to age the image. I used a sepia tint and a texture.
Cut out the new dial and glue it back on to the original dial. Then glue the mechanisms back on.
Put it all back together.

This is my first modification and I’m really pleased with the result. Now for that Nerf Gun…

Not actually me (but it could have been).

When I was a teenager at school, I used to enjoy teaching myself BASIC on their Sharp MZ80K computers. One day, the school bought an Apple ][. It had very good graphics (for the time) and new commands to learn. One of the new commands was PLOT. It allowed the programmer to draw a dot on the screen at a given coordinate.

I realised I could draw quite complex shapes by giving the computer a list of coordinates to draw. Being a geeky sort of child (but you worked that out), I bought an A1 size piece of graph paper and traced an image of the UK on to it. For the next three weeks, in my spare time, I transcribed all the coastline’s coordinates into the Apple ][. When I’d finished, the program I’d written drew an accurate image of the UK on the screen. I was very pleased and, more importantly, my friends were impressed. One told a teacher who came along to see my work.

I loaded the program I had previously saved on my floppy disc but, to my horror, I got an error (Bad checksum, if I remember). It meant that the work was lost … except I had backed up my work. I put in my backup floppy disc and reloaded the program. It also didn’t load. I was devastated. In an instant, I had lost three weeks of work. The teacher walked off laughing … but that’s another story.

It taught me a good lesson: One backup is not enough.

When I hear people brag (and it often is a brag) that they don’t backup their work I feel obliged to point out the error of their ways.

To make sure I don’t lose any of my writing (or anything else) I always do the following:

Save my WIP each week as a new dated version on my laptop.
Copy this file onto a flash memory stick.
Email a copy to myself.
Print out a hard copy, which I carry around with me.

If my laptop crashes, I have other versions elsewhere. If I delete a section I later decide I want, I can go back to older files to recover it. When the formatting messed up in my WIP, I was able to copy the style from a previous version and fix it (it’s also useful if you ever get into any legal challenges over plagiarism).

If you choose not to backup your work properly, you are choosing to lose it. You have been warned!

I am still exploring the way I write. I say this because, unlike so many people I read about, I’ve only recently started to put pen to paper. I have to write reports in my job but writing stories is new to me. I decided that the best way would be to read a few books about writing but they appeared to be contradictory. It was then that I realised that what works for one writer does not always work for another.

The best pieces of advice were:

Just write – Your first attempt will not be perfect, but it doesn’t matter, just get it down on paper.
Write the first chapter and then the last one. You know where you start and where you end up, now join the dots.

I use both of these but things change. The first chapter I wrote became the second chapter of the book. The final chapter ended up as one in the middle. I don’t mind that. Things happen and I’m not afraid to change them to make the book better.

I have an idea of where the story will go and what will happen but new situations arise and I might end up in a totally different direction. The story started out as science fiction based around an alternative currency. Now it’s a crime thriller. It might change again.

I have settled into a routine. At the weekends and some evenings, I write new chapters. Then, I print out my manuscript and read it, editing as I go.

There might be some writers who look at this and say ,’Oh no, don’t do it like that.’

I say, ‘I’m enjoying myself so does it really matter?’

Styles

Some authors spend a long time (or a lot of money) ensuring their works are in the correct format for Kindle, Smashwords or a manuscript. By setting up styles before writing, Word will do most of the hard work for you.

What do they do?

A style is a pre-defined format for text. Any of the modifications you are able to make to a paragraph can be set up in advance using a style. When you allocate a style to a paragraph all the settings are applied to this paragraph.

How do you use them?

In my novel, I have three styles defined.

Chapter Title

12 Point, Italic, Centered, Page break before, Outline Level 1, Style for following paragraph: First paragraph

First paragraph

12 Point, Fully Justified, First line indented 0cm, Style for following paragraph: Main Body

Main Body

12 Point, Fully Justified, First line indented 1.25 cm

It looks like this:

To create a new chapter, I go to a blank line and select the Chapter Title style. Word starts a new page and allows me to type the chapter title. When I press enter, the caret moves to a new line and the style changes to First paragraph. When I’ve written the first paragraph and press enter I get a new line and the style changes to  Main body.

Effectively, I can just type my document and Word automatically formats it for the Kindle.

It it possible to set up styles for Manuscripts too. The main change is to add the following to Chapter Title.

Spacing before 255pt, Spacing after 60pt

You also need to change the two paragraph styles to left justified and double spaced.

The power of styles

If you have set a style for every part of your document and you modify the style, it will change every instance in the whole document. This has two implications:

If you only want to change one instance, you have to be careful!
If you want to reformat the whole document you only need to change a few styles. For example, if you want to change the font on every chapter title, just change the Chapter Title style and they will all change.

You can add styles to a document you have already created but you need to go through and set each paragraph to a style to get the benefit of using them.

Automatic Table of Contents

As I set Chapter Title as Outline Level 1, I can add an automatic Table of Contents. Word will create this and put in all the correct page numbers. You can update it with one click of the mouse.

The automatic Table of Contents feature looks for all instances of text labeled as Outline level 1 and adds them to the table. As all my Chapter Titles have this attribute they are all automatically added to the table.

Enjoy!

I hope you enjoy using styles and, more importantly, I hope you save yourself hours of reformatting time.

Further information

Microsoft Style Basics

Originally posted on Engineering Sport: The Centre for Sports Engineering Research:

As something most of us will have wondered when swimming, the next blog post in our ‘ask a Sports Engineer!’ series looks at how long we’re able to hold our breath for underwater.

Despite what most people would think, humans are actually quite well suited to being underwater, as after all, we spend the first 9 months of our lives in an ‘underwater’ environment. If an infant is submerged under water it will instinctively hold its breath for around 40 seconds whilst making swimming motions. We seem to lose this ability shortly after we start walking and many people believe that waking up these reflexes are one of the most important factors in surviving underwater for long periods of time.

History

The art of holding your breath underwater is something commonly associated with ‘Freediving’, something which history suggests has been around since the 5th century BC. The first documented…

View original 866 more words

Microsoft Word offers a number of features that make the writing / editing process easier.

Function Keys

The function keys at the top of your keyboard (labelled F1 to F12) perform different actions in Word. Remembering them all is a chore but some are really useful.

Shift F3

Toggles captialisation. so word becomes Word becomes WORD becomes word again.

This is very useful when editing.

Shift F5

Moves the cursor to the last edited point. This will also work when you first open the document and helps you to get off to a flying start.

Shift F7

Brings up the Thesaurus for the current word.

Automatically jump to last edit when opening a document

Whilst you can press Shift F5 as soon as you open a document, you can automate this.

Go to View – Macros – View Macros

Type in ‘AutoOpen’ as the Macro name and then click Create

Enter the following text:

On Error Resume Next
Application.GoBack

Then save the document. From now on, when you open a document it will automatically jump to the last place you were editing.