A guest post by Ryan English.

The best kind of writers groups are the ones that can meet in person, but there any number of reasons why that might not be something you can pull off. Perhaps members keep moving; perhaps it’s simply a hassle to put pants on and leave the apartment. Fortunately, there are pantsless options.

My writers group has been using the following for at least four years, perhaps longer. We started out a few years before that as a group that met in person, often at the Barnes and Noble, and that was going splendidly until people started moving away. We found that being able to verbally discuss each submission as a group led to a real improvements in our skill. We got a better feel for what worked and what didn’t because we were able to sit there and have a conversation about it. When it started to become impossible to meet in person, we needed something that replicated that dynamic.

We needed two things: to be able to have a verbal conversation, and we needed to be able to easily distribute and view texts. We use Skype because it has superior call quality. We’ve tried Hangouts a few times over the years and it just doesn’t cut it for us. Some of our members have bad internet connections and Skype seems better able to handle it. Hangouts is worth trying, though, because it is integrated right into Google Drive, so you won’t need two windows open. One other advantage Hangouts had was that group video calls were free, but Skype recently made it free as well.

For the texts, we use Google Drive because it is truly the ideal platform. Honestly, even if you’re meeting in person, the features you get in Google Drive are such that I would recommend everyone bring a tablet or small laptop instead of a printed page. It works like this: Whoever’s in charge or has been there the longest creates a shared folder for the writers group. Name it something obvious. Then invite each member of the group to share the folder. Make sure that when you add them, it says “can edit” on the permissions. For each meeting, create a new folder inside that one for submissions. Name it by the date of the meeting.

Then it’s time to submit and read each other’s writing. This is important: make sure that your members aren’t just dropping in a Word file—they need to be in the right folder, hit New, select Google Doc, and copy and paste their writing. Once it’s saved in a shared folder as a Google Doc, the entire group will be able to read it and comment. If it’s a Word document, several features will be missing.

When it’s time to meet, everyone opens the same document and can enjoy real-time collaboration. Each member viewing the document has a uniquely-colored cursor, and you can see where everyone is on the page. If one person highlights a paragraph, the entire group can see it immediately, which is tremendously useful for pointing things out. For example, I might say, “This sentence right here is weird…” and I wouldn’t have to explain where to find it—it’s highlighted. Just scroll down.

The second benefit to using Google Docs is the comment feature. Highlight a passage, right click, and hit comment. This works like it does in Word—a box is created on the side of the page that contains your comments. Everyone can see these, which means that six people won’t need to point out the same typo. I find that this is an excellent way to take notes during a meeting, as well; if I want to remember something, I highlight a word and leave myself a good comment about it to go back and read later.

Google will email you whenever a comment is left on a doc, which lets you know that someone reviewed your submission. This can get a bit spammy, but it hasn’t been a problem. It can be nice to know that someone who wasn’t able to make it to a meeting was still able to leave comments.

There’s another benefit to working online. Anyone familiar with writers groups knows that members come and go. People join, stick around for a year, and lose interest or move on. If your group is tied to a geographical location, replacing members is going to get harder and harder every year. But if you meet online, anyone in the world could conceivably be recruited. Also, it gets a lot harder to justify missing a meeting if you don’t even have to put on pants to attend, and consistently is the lifeblood of any writers group. I can’t recommend this method highly enough.

Guest Writer Bio:
Ryan English writes speculative fiction in ancient and classical world settings. He recently achieved his Masters in Political Science but works in IT because it pays the bills. He plays a number of instruments ranging from piano to didgeridoo to shakuhachi and studied Shaolin Kung-fu for eight years. He lives in Utah, where he can often be found hiking barefoot.

An Image is Worth . . . A LOT

May 15, 2015

Frank Morin

They say an image is worth a thousand words, but is it worth all the hassle to find a good one? Once we find one, can we legally use it? Do we bother to find out?

We should.

Images are everywhere, and a blog post without an image is like spaghetti without the sauce. It’s edible, but who’s going to want to try it? This is the age of the internet, of micro attention spans and too much competition from pictures of cats and babies on Facebook.

So yes, we need images for blogs, for articles, for social interactions, and often for covers. There are tons of great images on the internet, but finding a fun image, although sometimes a hassle, is just the start.

Can we take any image we find on Google and slap it onto our blog, article, or cover?

Not necessarily.

There are many who would say, “Everybody’s doing it. No one’s going to care if I ‘borrow’ this cool image and use it. Even if they notice, they’ll be happy about it – free advertising.” Etc.

Those arguments can be persuasive, but they’re also false. There are ways to do reverse image searches and identify everyone who’s using your image. Sites like TinEye make this very easy.

The more I think about it, the more I realize it’s the principle even more than the fear of potentially getting ‘caught’ that should drive our decisions about the proper use of photos. I don’t want people stealing my words, so why would I steal someone else’s image?

So what do we do?

Actually there are lots of options, so no one should feel obliged to take an image that they may not actually have rights to use. Here are some suggestions.

Use your own photo.

Sounds almost too easy, but why not? In today’s world, everyone’s got a phone or three handy and most of those have cameras. If you’re like me and you’re not a professional photographer, who cares? If you see a pose or an idea that you like, there’s no reason you can’t go set up a similar photo of your own. Someone else owns their photo online, but they don’t own the ‘idea’ of a photo. It’s remarkably simple to stage your own photo for use. I’ve done it quite a few times with excellent results.

Chess — A photo I took as part of a blog post.

Ask permission.

This can take longer, but if you find a photo you like, feel free to contact the person who owns it if they have a web site or link. They might just say yes.

Modify your search criteria.

You can actually find great photos on Google that are available for use. Most photos you find through the general search don’t clearly state if they are, but simple modifications to your search criteria can limit your search to those photos flagged as reusable.

On the Google page, click the “Search Tools” button
In the new toolbar that appears below that, click “Usage rights”
Select “Labeled for reuse”.

You will notice often that the list of photos returned is not as extensive as the wide-open search, but sometimes you can find some cool gems. It’s worth a try because it’s fast and it’s free.

More on search modifications

Another major image site is Flickr. Again, you can click on the “All license” drop-down, which is the default search and select “All Creative Commons”.

When you find an image you like, click on it and look for the rights declaration. Quite often it will say “Some rights reserved.” If you click on that, you can see what rights can be granted. Quite often it will allow you to use the photo for free for non-commercial use (ie – blog post) as long as you give the photographer credit and link back to their site/image from the copy you use.

Free image sites.

There are a lot of these. In seconds, I did a Google search and found listings and listings of sites containing free images. Some are pretty basic, but some have a lot of images and might be worth a look. Depending on what type of images you’re looking for, and with a little investment of time, you can develop a listing of your favorite go-to sites.

Paid options

For some of the best images, you might just have to pay for them, although that doesn’t mean you have to pay much.

My favorite site is Dollar Photo Club. Great high-res photos for $1. They have a huge selection and I’ve found some incredible images there. Using pieces of several photos from Dollar Photo, combined with some mad photoshopping skills, one of my cover artists designed this excellent cover for Saving Face and also the cover for the soon-to-be-released Memory Hunter. I got killer covers for a very reasonable fee.

I’ve also used Dollar Photo to grab images for my blog and to design simple covers for short stories I posted on Wattpad.

Istockphoto is a well-known site where you can find royalty free images, but often you pay up to $12 per image. That’s a bit pricey for my wallet, unless it’s for a cover or other high-value use.
Deposit Photos is a site I haven’t used, and it also uses a subscription model like other pay photo sites, but if you use a lot of images, you can get a plan that drops the price to $0.33 per image.
ShutterStock is another well-known image site where you have to pay about $10 or so for most images. If you’re looking for a high-quality image to include in a book cover, it might be worth it.
You might also try a place like Fiverr where you can get a lot of creative work done cheap. As always, verify the source of any images you get.

There are lots of other image sites out there. I barely scratched the surface. The bottom line is, know what license restrictions your image brings with it and stay on the right side of the question. It’s not worth the hassle (and likely cost) associated with misusing someone else’s property.

Where do you get your images?

Researching it Old School and a Little New

May 14, 2015

Jace Killan

Craft & Skills Ideas & Plotting Jace Killan The Writing Life World-building Writing Tools 1 Comment

Louis L’Amour talked to every “old timer” he could find so that he could accurately portray how folks used to live in the old west. Nowadays most writers just turn to the Internet.

There are great, insightful websites that offer a virtual experience and allow us to get into the minds of our characters. For example, I was writing about a space station built on the planet Mercury. Using computer software I was able to visit Mercury and see what Earth looked like from her surface. In the right rotation, Earth and her moon looked like two bright stars. This detail added a nice level of authenticity to my story.

A couple years ago, I was researching my family history and came across a gentleman that I may or may not be related to (I still can’t figure that out) but his story is a great one. Commodore Joshua Barney fought in the American Revolution and was one of the first to serve in the continental navy.

I decided to write his amazing coming of age story (and am nearly complete with this endeavor). Though at the time, I hadn’t a clue about ships and sailing in the 18^th century. So I turned to the Internet.

Wikipedia is alright for double checking a reference, not hard fast research. But I perused its site first to get some direction.

YouTube offered some interesting videos on ship replicas from that era and I was able to glean some insights into sailing such a vessel. But even the replicas have been modified with gas engines and motorized rudders, so how authentic could that be? Most of the cabins have also been modified to accommodate the 18^th century luxuries we now consider necessities like running water and flushable toilets.

I gathered twenty or so books from Amazon on sailing in the 18^th century and other period pieces. The first thing I noticed is that folks back then didn’t talk like we do today. Keeping to the historic dialect would probably be more authentic, but I would most likely alienate my middle-grade readers in the process. So I drifted from authenticity in that area and hoped to make up for it in my research of the sailor life: food, sleep, hygiene, and so on.

I went to an antique mall and purchased a few model ships from the 18^th century so I could get a feel for their look, dimensions, and layouts. This helped me gain a better prospective than just looking at photographs.

After reading the Amazon books and playing with my model ships, my head was swimming in information, but I really had no way of knowing what was worthwhile and what was rubbish. So I booked a sailing expedition on an 18^th century tall ship replica (now referred to as a yacht). I was able to feel the experience, see it, smell it, and taste it. This made it easier to convey sailing in my writing. But I still lacked some aspects of the ship life.

My next research adventure came by surprise. I was visiting Collette Black’s Desolation book signing in Half Priced Books and wondered if they had anything on sailing. I was able to browse dozens of helpful books and elect the ones that were most specific to my project, at a great price. That is something you really can’t do on Amazon. I even found a book that discussed trekking through the Alps during summer in the late 1800s (something that my protagonist did at the age of fifteen in the late 1700s).

David Farland said that I needed to visit the Alps to convey the experience like I had with sailing. I’d love to, and don’t doubt that my writing that particular chapter would be much more convincing and insightful if I did, but I’m going to try writing the chapter from my research first and we’ll see how it goes.

So sure, researching has gotten much easier with the Internet, but researching it old school is still necessary to add levels of depth and authenticity that virtual experience has yet to duplicate. My experience on Mercury would no doubt be a drop in the bucket to what I might actually experience if I travelled to the planet (and lived to tell about it). Bottom line, there isn’t any short cuts. Even a fantasy novel on a made-up world still requires huge amounts of research to capture the reader. Good research facilitates better writing.

I live in Arizona with my family, wife and five kids and a little dog. I write fiction, thrillers and soft sci-fi with a little short horror on the side. I’ve got an MBA and work in finance for a biotechnology firm.I volunteer with the Boy Scouts, play and write music, and enjoy everything outdoors. I’m also a novice photographer.You can visit my author website at www.jacekillan.com, and you can read some of my works by visiting my Wattpad page.

Scrivener: Friend or Foe?

May 13, 2015

Colette Black

Colette Black The Writing Life Writing Tools 7 Comments

They chose their icon well. Punctuation marks to engender the triumphant swells of magnificent writing, a black and white background representing the light and the dark side, and a big S. The S might stand for suffering or stupendous. It really just stands for Scrivener, often called the ultimate writer’s tool or the biggest (insert swear words of choice here) software program to ever torture mankind. When I first started with the software, I wasn’t sure which was true. Now, I might threaten your life if you threatened my writing program. I’m still no expert with Scrivener, but I love using it. Here are a few reasons why:

Writing Templates: From Step 1, I can design my work space specifically for the project I’m starting. I can have a blank template; fiction writing that comes in short story, novel with parts, or basic novel; non-fiction in essay, research paper, and other flavors; a plethora of scriptwriting options; and a miscellaneous option that contains persuasive lecture and even a cookbook template. How cool is that? From my husband’s research proposals to my non-fiction writing to my novels, it’s all there.

Outlining features: When you outline, do you like the index card method, formal outlining method, color-coding…? Yep, Scrivener can do that. Unless you need to draw a graph, in which case you could draw it, scan it, and still upload it to Scrivener to have on hand. As you can see in the picture to the right, there is a place to organize my outline with notecards. I can move them around, just like cards, I can color-code the whole card or just the corner based on any criteria I like. I have different colors for each character’s point of view. By clicking on one of my notecards, I have an optional window to the right with more information. At the click of a button, I can change the type of information. I can also view my novel in a list outline form, with notes to the side of each entry. I honestly can’t think of any outlining feature I could want that Scrivener doesn’t have. *Correction, I just read Katie Cross’s post about Nova mind. I think it would be a perfect start to getting out your ideas and then I would want to organize them on Scrivener. Not an outliner? That’s okay. You can skip this or get a broad look at your story progression as you go.

Workspace: I need a Chilean name–find a website. What color was that character’s eyes–find my character files. What was that website with the research I needed–Find my list of websites and remember which one to open. Sound tedious? It is. Scrivener gets rid of that. The program has a name generator. You can run it as many times as you like until you find a name that works. The left-side bar holds a list of files that you can diminish or expand including: your manuscript, separated by chapters or sections, as you choose; characters, each one with a character sheet that shows their name, role in the story, physical description, personality, habits, internal and external conflicts, and anything else you’d like to add, and you can even attach a picture to the file; places with similar descriptions and a picture; all of your research files with pictures and links if wanted; and it will even hold onto your trash for you. Deleted that chapter, but changed your mind? It’ll still be there for you, out of the way, but easily accessible.

Not only is the information accessible, but I can keep track of so many aspects of my writing as I work. If you look at the picture to the left, you’ll see how I often keep my information organized as I write. I have all of my files, characters, places at my fingertips in the bar to the far left. In the middle screen I have my chapter title, the synopsis, character pov, my progress on that chapter’s word count goal, the goal number, and the goal for the entire manuscript. In right screen I have my writing. If I don’t want the distraction of all the information staring at me, I click an icon and my writing screen goes front and center and I can set the background. Then, I write like I would on any other word processor. If I need the information hiding beneath, the ESC key brings me back again. With a simple click I can do just about anything I want without searching through files or checking word counts at the bottom of each chapter.

Cons: If I love it so much, why is my post entitled Friend or Foe?

Complexity: Anything with a million bells and whistles is going to have a learning curve. I took an online course on how to use Scrivener. It helped, but I knew enough to be bored and little enough to get lost, so it required time and patience. There’s also the learn as you go method, which is what I do with Photoshop. Need something? Look up the tutorial on youtube. If you decide to purchase Scrivener I would suggest that you go through the basic tutorials at least once then refer back to them as needed. The basic program isn’t all that complex, but it can do so much more if you take the time to figure out the special features.

Compiling: This is where you insert the curse word of your choice, in my opinion. Compiling seems straightforward and simple, but I have had more problems in this area than any other. It’s always little things, so I suggest you don’t follow my example which was to think I could figure it out on my own. Definitely watch a few how-to videos on compiling before you jump in. It is simple, if you know what you’re doing. I’ve also heard that it doesn’t always compile according to manuscript guidelines. Be aware and do some off-site formatting before submitting. My novels receive their final compilation through my Jutoh program, which I’ll be talking about in a couple of weeks, but that doesn’t help with short stories.

Limited screens: You can divide your work into two screens, but I do wish I could have more. I work on a large computer screen next to my laptop. Sometimes I’d like to have three or four screens open at a time. With Scrivener, I can get to my information quicker and easier than having multiple files to wade through, but I’d still rather have them open next to each other sometimes.

Overall, however, I don’t think you can beat the program for the price. Just be prepared for a bit of study on the front end and you need a willingness to review until you get a handle on the aspects that are important to you. In the end, the time is worth it.

I’d love to hear your questions or experiences: