Clear Lakes 44

If you were here last week, you probably saw me talking about TV shows, and you probably saw Marble Hornets on that list as my number five SF/F show, and me bemoaning the fact that, even though it's an incredible program (One of the best horror shows I've ever seen. Ever.), the experience of waiting for a new episode and seeing it posted on the channel was gone. New viewers would miss out on that one thing.

If you keep up on all things Marble Hornets, then you probably already know where I'm going with this. You probably knew from the second you saw the title of this article. If not, keep on reading because you won't be disappointed. Not at all.

It's back. Something is back and happening on the Marble Hornets channel, now called Clear Lakes 44 | Marble Hornets. three new videos have been posted so far, with more on the way, from the sounds of things. But what's more is there's something extra. Something special.

Marble Hornets, a Film by Alex Kralie

There's something strange going on over at the film's website, and possibly on the Twitter feed as well (@marblehornets). If you want the full, immersive experience, check all of it out. I recommend it. I, for one, am going to be watching out for updates from totheark on Youtube as well. Maybe nothing will be there, but it's not worth missing some information.

And of course, as fair warning: don't watch this with the lights off.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: Tomato.es

Last year during NaNoWriMo, my Co-ML came up with an ingenious method to make our Nanites work their tails off. She started us off sprinting. Short bursts of writing (10-20 minutes) intermixed with 5-10 minute breaks. It was a way to show the Nanites who were 'too busy' that they only needed to devote an hour or two a day, whenever they could get it in. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there. Turns out, of course, that it wasn't an original idea, but she hadn't heard of it when she came up with it, so it was a totally awesome little brain-baby.

Well, I found something just as good, and it has it's own website. Today, I bring you the Pomodoro Technique, and a free supporting website, Tomato.es. The basis of Pomodoro is to increase productivity with the same basic principles that make sprinting work: concentrated periods of work, interspersed with regular breaks.

You work for twenty-five minutes, then mark off that twenty-five minute work session and move on to a five minute break. After four sets of twenty-five, you take a fifteen minute break. And it's that simple. It sounds a little strange, but it really works. Not only do you write words, but you condition yourself to write a lot of words in a short amount of time. I mean, you only have twenty-five minutes to work right now. You can't rely on more. So you'd better bang out some words. When you then don't use the Pomodoro Technique, you'll find that you're writing words faster in general, hence increasing overall productivity.

It's that simple. And the Internet is full of so many ways to work it. There are even apps you can download to help you, such as Pomodroido, Pomodoro Timer, and the desktop compatible, and very unobtrusive Tomighty. Or , of course, you can do it the simple and cheap way and just watch the clock, or use one of the thousand online timers out there. But if you, like me, would rather cut back on your workload as much as possible, and you have access to the Internet, you'll be best off with Tomato.es.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: MyNoise

Here we are once again, and today, I have an interesting little website for you. It's called MyNoise.net, and it's a personal ambient noise generator, which is wonderful. There are a number of studies showing that ambient noise, in spite of what anyone might think, actually allows the human mind to focus better on the task at hand (I'll link some down below for you to look through at your leisure.). And if anyone needs help focusing, writers need help focusing. There's only so much your mind can handle, and writing tends to be a push toward the outer limits of that, depending on the day. Anything to help us get through those next two, three, or ten thousand words is good by me.

When you first go to MyNoise.net, you'll want to do the personal calibration. Go to the Online Noises tab and it should be in the top left box. That will take you to the calibration screen. All you do there is turn your volume up (I had to have mine all the way up, but I also don't use headphones, just my laptop speakers; please don't do anything that might damage your hearing.) to where you can hear the static it's producing, and then you'll adjust each slider to where that particular frequency is just barely audible. The hit done, and MyNoise will actually save all that calibration info for you, so it's there every time you come back (While I'm not fully sure of the mechanism involved in that data storage, I'm pretty sure they use cookies. So if you have cookies disabled, it most likely won't remember you. Fair warning.). Since over ninety percent of the sounds on there can be calibrated, it's worth the two or three minutes, I think.

MyNoise has more than a few generators. As a rough estimate, I would say 25-30, but don't quote me on that one. And, at the top of the Online Noises page, they give you a little legend that gives suggestions on the quality or effect of each noise generator. Eerie, meditation, noise blocker. My personal favorites, as of right now, are the Cat Purr, the Rain Noise, and the Himalayan Bowls.

Now, if you'd like to donate to them (they provide this whole service for free), please do. Not only does it help out, but it allows you to get the new sounds before non-contributors have access to them. Which makes me jealous, since they have a coffee shop generator in the works. I may have to donate and get that one.

And on the subject of coffee shop noise generators, I have a couple alternatives, as well, if you don't like MyNoise. The first one, Coffitivity, is a web app, but can also be downloaded onto Droid and iPhone/iPad (at one point, it could run on the basic Mac OS as well, but when I looked into it, the link was broken. If anyone knows otherwise, let me know and I'll edit the post accordingly). Coffitivity is a collection of recordings from various coffee shops all over the world. On the web app, you get three: the morning coffee run, the lunch rush, and a collegiate café.

The other one is Rainy Café. It only has two sliders to control—rain and café—but it's surprisingly useful. To boost my personal creativity, I prefer to crank the rain up really high and keep the coffee shop murmuring about halfway, maybe a little less. I guess white noise just works better for me.

If you have any other noise generators you love like this, particularly good ones that can run on Windows, let me know. They're some of my favorite productivity tools. If you want to hear what else I have to say, hit subscribe up on top of the page.

Articles:
http://99u.com/articles/16711/turn-it-up-how-the-right-about-of-ambient-noise-increases-creativity

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/how-the-hum-of-a-coffee-shop-can-boost-creativity/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: Twine

And welcome once again to the Friday Writer Roundup. Today I bring you a piece of software very close to my heart, and possibly very close to the hearts of some of my readers. Did you ever read the Choose Your Own Adventure (or similar) books growing up? They were some of my favorites in elementary school.

That's what Twine is all about. It's a simple program for organizing interactive fiction books, and it then spits them out as HTML, which means that they can be put up just about anywhere on the Internet, from self-publishing sites to blogs to web pages. Or you can use it simply to help you track your interactive fiction and then put the full product together in the word processor of your choice. It's a little more work, doing it that way, but it gives you a lot more freedom when it comes time to hit publish. More on that a little later.

For those unfamiliar with interactive fiction, it's sort of a hybrid. Part game, part story. The writer creates many possible plot arcs for the reader to follow. Traditionally, this is where we actually see second person point-of-view in its natural habitat. You walk into the creepy old house. A puff of dust hits you in the face. If you turn around, go to page 3. If you hold your breath and continue forward, go to page 17.

And it continues from there.

Twine starts you off with three boxes: a title, an author, and a Start. You can mess with whatever you want except for the word Start. It has to remain that way. Otherwise, when you go to try and preview everything (which I recommend whether you intend to compile it in HTML or just use Twine to storyboard), it's going to be all screwy. And, if you go the HTML route, messing with the word Start will change around the HTML file it spits out, too. So don't touch it.

From there, you add your events and, via internal links, begin to open up your lines of interaction. Believe me, having a program to help you keep track of everything is much easier than trying to do it all on paper or, even worse, in your head. You want to leave your reader with as much freedom as you can manage, which means a lot of possible ways of interacting within the fiction.

Now, Twine is not the only one you can use for this, but it is one of the few, and it's the easiest to learn and deal with, even if it doesn't have a nice, flashy appearance. The other one I would recommend possibly looking at is Inform7, but only if you think interactive fiction is going to be a major part of your writing lifestyle. It's a little easier on the eyes, and it, like Twine, is free and cross-platform. Inform7 takes a little bit more dedication to learn than Twine, however, so it's a matter of personal choice. For me, Twine is the best option.

For those who intend to use it just as a storyboarding tool, you don't have too much more work to do. But, when and if you format it for print, you will have to edit it after the fact to put in appropriate page numbers. For eBook, depending on how you go about it, you may be able to just use your exported HTML and keep the links, or you may have to go through and manually add the links after the fact. But I trust you can figure it out.

If you believe me, turn to page 62. If not, turn to page 38. If you want more like this article, go to the top of the page and subscribe.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: StayFocusd

Hello, and welcome to a new feature here at Demon Hunting and Tenth Dimensional Physics: the Friday Writer Roundup. Rather than posting writerly advice and finds and such on the rest of the log, from now on, I'll be doing them here, every Friday. Fun fun fun!

This week is a doozy, at least for me. I'm sure I'm not the first to talk about StayFocusd, and I probably won't e the last. For me, it's a godsend. Like a lot of writers, I have a nasty habit of procrastination, and my biggest crutch is Facebook... and the occasional online game I get obsessed with. With Stayfocusd, that's not much of a problem. I load up my list of blocked sites, however many I need to keep myself from, and I just hit the button. Then I pick my time (I just stuck with the default ten minutes) and there you go. That's the amount of time you have per day to go to your sites. Not the amount of time you have for each site, the amount of time for all of them. Now, you can change your time... but only while you still have time left. If you use up all ten minutes and then decide you want more Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest... sorry? You have to wait until the next session.

Now, if you're disciplined enough to have specific blocks of time where you work, you can also set the program to only run during those specific blocks of time and then leave you free outside of those blocks.

And then there's Nuclear Mode... we don't talk about Nuclear Mode. Just like we don't talk about Kamikaze Mode in Write or Die. Nuclear Mode is a complete Internet block. If it's not in the allowed sites, you don't go there for however many hours you set the timer for. It is t be sued with caution, as you will definitely be without distraction but you may lose access to research material, your eMail, your bank account... important things. Definitely not something to use for more than a couple hours.

The downside? It's a Chrome Extension only. No other browsers. But there are programs out there to help with the same thing. Firefox has an Add-on called LeechBlock. There are programs you can download. The most popular I've heard of is Anti-Social. It works on any OS and blocks all of the social networking sites for you. That one, however, costs fifteen dollars. Leechblock and StayFocusd are both free.

One more issue with StayFocusd, which most Chrome users will be familiar with, is the somewhat finicky attitude the Extensions can have. You may be uninstalling and reinstalling the extension a few times, with no notice. It doesn't take long, and it remembers which sites you've blocked.

So, there's the Friday Writer Roundup. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it. I'll be back next Friday with more advice from the trenches,

Voss