I'm at home after a busy December in the workplace and am feeling grateful for the chance to gather with family and celebrate Christmas and the New Year. We have visitors and thought we might go out for dinner before attending an evening service, but all three of the restaurants we called were closing by 4:00 pm. So we'll prepare our own dinner and then I'll tend to my role as a member of the chancel choir for our church service.
During the past month, I've pushed a new product release out the door at work, but in the nooks and crannies of the evenings, I also wrote the latest chapters of my work in progress, a second novel. My tools for the latter quest have been simple: a notebook and a pen. Later on I'll enter this text into my PC, but I do a lot of writing while travelling, so the simplicity of being able to write without concern for power outlets, the vagaries of the Windows OS and the latest instructions from flight attendants has a distinct appeal.
As I look back on my writing this year, I filled up over half of a three subject notebook that I purchased last summer. Just a couple of days ago, I stopped in at the local Staples and bought another notebook, the third one for this particular novel. I'm past the halfway point, so I expect I'll fill this one and perhaps get one more for the final chapters.
Lest one think I'm strictly old school with respect to my writing tools, I also do a lot of writing on the PC and typically do all of my editing there. I wrote earlier this year about my favorite new software tool OneNote here and here. OneNote continues to help me organize the chaos of my active projects both at work and home. They have a useful password feature, so OneNote is also a fine repository for the hundred or so usercodes and passwords that attend to one's online life. It's very lightweight compared to Microsoft Word, so I use it to capture notes on my writing, ideas for future stories and even snatches of dialogue for chapters that haven't been written yet.
Much of the computing buzz this year is about netbooks and tools for online reading such as the Kindle. As a writer and reader, I'd love to have better tools that combine writing and mobility and I expect I'll go in that direction more and more. However, in the year of the new normal, with tightened budgets and a son in his first year of college, I'm being much more careful about my financial outlays.
I'll close this piece with a photo of my writer's library, a set of reference books I can turn to when I want a refresher on editing or want to clarify an arcane point of syntax or punctuation. I took the time to get organized in this way recently and it feels good to have rescued these books from dusty exile in other parts of our house.
This is a great time to be a writer as the possibilities for creating prose and bringing it to completion are so much robust than the early days of my business career, when word processors were $10,000 dedicated machines and most writers could only dream of an electronic tool that would collect text as it was written and allow for editing without the pain of re-typing a manuscript.
If you're a writer, what are your favorite tools of creation? Have you gone more electronic or mobile recently, and if so, how have you done it? If you're a reader, are you reading books or checking out magazines online?
And finally, let me offer my best wishes for the holiday season however you may celebrate it. I've enjoyed the interaction with readers of the James Rafferty Blog this year and have gotten an excellent response to my re-branding of the blog to focus on writing and travelling. Thanks for reading and commenting. I also want to thank my online writing group, The Writin' Wombats who reside on Gather.com and many other places. The wombats have been an amazing resource as friends, sounding boards, writers, critique partners and readers. They continue to enrich my writing and personal life.
