Drawing from the Well
No queries, no scenes. Best intentions made for naught last night. I was tired. I may not get any scenes mapped today either, but I’m going to try.
Filling the Well
No changes here either. That’s the downside of a late night blog post: it’s trading reasonable progress day by day for significant progress in a single day. Again, nothing may change today on that front either, but that’s okay.
Polishing the Well
It’s Cinco de Mayo! This isn’t a huge holiday at our house, but it’s fun to indulge in burritos and guacamole and queso and chips and salsa and tacos…
And now I’m starving.
Well Chat
Leveraging MS Office
Next up on our journey through Tool Town is the Microsoft Office suite. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “What about people on Mac?” Well, MS Office isn’t confined to PC; it’s available on Mac too. Granted, it isn’t exactly cheap, but it is widely available and if you’re reading this blog, there’s a better than average chance that you have it. So here we go.
Microsoft Office is a suite of many tools. I use three in my writing: Word, Excel, and Access. Now most people probably aren’t familiar with Access, but I’ve used it so much for work that I’m familiar with it for use at home. It is a relational database program to store, catalogue, and report on data. If Excel is ten times more advanced at data handling than Word, Access is AT LEAST ten times more advanced than Excel, probably more. I had a gigantic Excel workbook with many spreadsheets in it. When I started to lose track of the data, I rebuilt it as an Access database so that I could navigate it more easily. There are online tools for that too, but we’ll cover that tomorrow.
I’m going to move on from Access since that’ll probably make most authors go cross-eyed. What more would be familiar with for storing background information about their book is Excel. You can create custom, ordered tables to keep characters, locations, timelines, descriptions, and more. I still use Excel for some smaller things within my books, but most importantly for the moment is my Agent List. I’m tracking a lot of stuff there including my remaining list to query.
Lastly, Word. Now this has GOT to be familiar to almost all authors. I used it to draft, revise, and edit my first book and I’ll use it to collect the scene text once I extract it from yWriter (that’s a program for another day at the end of this series). It’s straightforward. It’s a word processor. It has a litany of formatting options. You can use the thesaurus function in it. It has built in markup capabilities for editing and revising, especially with multiple users. It’s kind of the bread and butter program for writers. If you haven’t used it before, go check it out.
Microsoft makes SO many programs these days and they’re all available on PC and Mac. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t to organize and, ultimately, write your book. Get after it.
Happy Cinco.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG