1. ia Writer (iPad and Mac). This isn’t a super-fancy text editor, but it does some very important things. First, it syncs with Dropbox. Second, it allows me to work seamlessly on my iPad or Macbook Air. Third, it blocks out the distractions of font selection, screen color, line spacing, or any of that other fancy formatting jazz that can prevent you from the Serious Business of banging out words with your monkey fists. It looks nice, has a useful soft keyboard, and won’t get in your way. Plus, it’s cheap – for $10 you can get a useful, pretty text editor on both your Mac and your iPad.  I use ia Writer for all my actual writing. It’s fast and clean and won’t get in my way. You don’t need anything else.
2. Scrivener (Mac and Windows). I don’t do any real writing in Scrivener, but I do use it for final edits and assembling finished works for export to ePub and Kindle formats. Scrivener is inexpensive ($45), but packed to the gills with features that writers of all stripes will love. It has powerful outlining and organizational tools, and every time I open it I’m tempted to tinker with its shiny knobs, buttons, and levers. It is so tempting to my inner geek that I cannot use it to actually write, which is why it gets relegated to editing and production work. That’s a personal failing on my part — if you aren’t prone to losing hours fiddling around with your software, then Scrivener is probably the only tool you need.
3. Index Card (iPad). Years of painful pantsing made it very clear to me that I require the structure of a good outline if I’m going to write anything worth reading. Before the iPad, I did all of my outlining with the help of index cards, onto which I would scribble my fevered scene concepts. That system worked, but it was slow, the cards had limited space, and if someone at the coffee shop bumped my stack of cards off the table it was a serious pain in the ass to get them back in order.  Index Card gives me all of the functionality and flexibility of physical note cards, with none of the drawbacks. The killer feature, for me, is the ability to group your note cards into neat little bundles – if you’re used to writing your outlines by novel section, this is super useful.

So that’s it – you do not need any other tools to get your writing on. You may want them, but don’t make the same mistake that I did. Pick tools that do what you need (outline, text editing, assembly) and stick with them.
Otherwise, you risk turning your Great American Novel into the Great Internet App review.

I’m the first to admit that it bothers me when bad books become successful. But, it shouldn’t. Because every bad book that sells is further proof that every book — and this includes all of your darlings hidden in your footlockers — will one day find a home if you just put it out there.

Stop begruding others the success you crave. Write. Edit. Publish.

Succeed.

You can see one of the consequences of this benign neglect in the post before this one, which was written over a year ago. I was a finalist in that contest, and then . . . nothing. You won’t see any posts about how much I learned, or how great it was to be recognized for my efforts. I didn’t follow through, I didn’t commit to my writing the way I should have, and an opportunity to jumpstart my writing career slipped right through my fingers.

Relaunching this site is an attempt to make sure that doesn’t happen again. It’s not a journal. It’s not a how-to-write series. It’s really, really not a deep peek into the inner recesses of my writerly soul.

It is a chronicle of my attempts to pull together all of the disparate threads of my writing life. It’s a look at the steps I’m taking to put writing front-and-center in my life. It’s a commitment device, wherein I impress my loyal readers into service by telling you about my goals, reporting on my progress, and letting you vilify me when I fall short. Finally, it’s a crass attempt to help me reach the goal of being a successful, profitable author.
In the coming weeks, I’m going to unveil my Big Evil Plan and the steps I’m taking to put it into action. You’ll get to watch as I implement each diabolical step and either succeed, fail, or stand in bemused wonderment at the results. You might even learn something.

Real friends are up for a kidnapping and won’t complain too much when you get down to the bloodletting.

There are a lot of other folks entering as well, and plenty of intriguing first lines, so head over to Brenda’s blog and get to clicking.

By Dean’s math, to hit the point where you make $80k a year from writing you’ll need about 20 books in your personal backlist. There are a lot more examples and explanations as to how he arrived at that number on his site, and you really should go read what he has to say, but that’s the gist of it. If you want to make a living at this, then you’ll need about 20 books out there bringing home the bacon.

At first glance, that seems like an enormous library of books. And in a world where writers are throttled back to only release one book a year, it’s an enormous hurdle. But we don’t live in that world.

Based on what I’m reading and hearing, we live in a world where the author is in charge of his destiny in a whole new way. If you want to be successful, you need to put the hammer down and write books. The more you write, the more you sell and the faster you’ll get to that magical point where your writing pays all the bills.

But to get there in a timely fashion, we’re going to have to love what we write – because we’re going to be writing and reading it more than ever before. It’s an interesting time to be a writer, and I’ll be very curious to see how all this shakes out.

For now, though, I’ve got books to write.

And now, I’m done.Not with the job or the novels, but with school. I just passed my last set of tests and am all set to take the state certification exams in April. The moment when it was announced that I’d past my last qualifying tests, that all the hard work had paid off and I was finally finished with school, was one of the proudest moments in my life.

It was also one of the loneliest. Because I was surrounded by folks who were not there yet, who had struggled just as long and hard as I, but who still had long months of hard work ahead of them. They wanted to be happy for me, but I didn’t expect them to cheer along with me – it’s hard to be happy for those who escape when you’re still stuck in the trenches.

Writing is much the same. You spend years working on your craft, honing your stories to present them to the world around you. As a writer you crave publication, the feeling that you’ve arrived, that you’ve succeeded where so many others have failed. While you struggle, you may have the support of your family and friends, you may be surrounded by fellow writers all working arm-in-arm to reach the same goal.

But when you finally do arrive, don’t expect your supporters to blow trumpets and praise your name. Your success is great – for you. For others, even your staunchest supporters, it can be tough to swallow. We all work hard, we’re all dedicated to our craft, and it can be hard to see one of your peers succeed while you’re still failing.

Achieving your dreams is a great feeling, but it’s lonely, too. Celebrate your victories, but don’t expect anyone else to understand or truly appreciate what you’ve done, or how hard it was to accomplish. Raise a glass of champagne and toast yourself, take a moment to really revel in the success, because only you really understand what it all means.

Then set up another goal and get back to work.

• My Smartphone. I have a DINC, but at some point may switch to an iPhone (for reasons that will become apparent a little later on). The phone lets me record voice notes to myself, snap pictures for later reference, and even do a little writing. The smartphone has revolutionized my writing life.
• My iPad. Light, easy to carry, perfect for writing and reading, and always connected to the Internet, my iPad has given me the freedom to write anywhere, at any time. It’s the handiest tool in my toolbox, and it contains most of the other tools on this list.
• Springpad. This super-handy app handles all of the organization of the junk I collect on my phone. It’s a digital scrapbook and filing cabinet that’s always at my fingertips via my Droid Incredible, my iPad, or any computer with a web browser and internet connection. See also Evernote, which some folks prefer. I give Springpad the edge, however, because of its ability to scan barcodes which is handier than you’d think.
• Elements app for the iPad. This is where I compose all my drafts now. It’s a simple text editor linked to my Dropbox account.
• Index Card app for the iPad. I outline everything before I sit down to crank out a first draft, and I do all of my outlining in this app. It’s dead simple to use and connects to Dropbox, offers a couple of different outline views, and is everything I need in an outlining app.
• Scrivener for the Mac. The iPad is my primary writing tool, but when it comes time to polish and prepare for publication, Scrivener is where the magic happens. With the latest release, Scrivener plays very nicely with Dropbox, allowing me to pull in all the work from Elements and Index Card with a simple sync operation. Once everything is cleaned up and organized, I can publish it to a wide variety of formats (including Kindle and ePub) with the click of a button.
• Todo app for iPad. This task management software is flexible and robust, perfect for scatterbrained writers such as myself. Everything I need to accomplish goes into Todo, which keeps me focused and on track.
• The Internet. For blogging, working social media, research, and wasting time. Can’t live without it.

And that’s it – everything I do as a writer is covered by one or more of the above tools. At this point, I only buy a new tool if it can either substitute for two or more of the above apps (if Scrivener ever makes it to the iPad, then Index Card and Elements are toast), or if it does something so radically different and new that I just can’t live without it.

As a technophile, this list is important, because it keeps me focused on what I do, rather than on the tools I use. When I did a lot of freelancing for the Roleplaying Game hobby industry, I ran into a nasty patch where I as obsessed with tools that could help me work faster. I spent a lot of time learning new tools, none of which were able to demonstrably boost my productivity but did eat up a lot of hours that I should have poured into just writing more.

Tools give writers, especially those of us who like to procrastinate, a lot of reasons to postpone the actual writing part of our jobs. Setting fonts and margins and tabs and paragraph spacing are good delaying tactics when faced with the fear of a blank page. Just remember: a tool that doesn’t encourage you to WRITE isn’t a tool, it’s a problem.

But most of them were crap. Worse, they were insidious crap that convinced me they served some useful, indispensable function. As a writer, you have to be on constant alert for this kind of technofetishist thinking or you end up carting around a whole pack of tools that weigh you down.

After weeding through the tools I use, I came up with a quick list to help me determine what kind of tools are useful for me, as a writer.

1. Ease of use. Once she gets started a writer will scribble away the whole day and night, pausing only to suck down coffee/tea/energy drinks. But anything that makes it difficult to start writing will sap her will to write and stab her momentum in the face with a pointy stick.
2. Utility. Single-purpose tools are crap. An app that ONLY does outlining, for example, is not as good as an app that lets you outline and track the status of your writing. And that isn’t as good as an app that outlines, tracks statuses, and monitors word count. You’re a writer, you want to write, not constantly sift through your tools looking for just the right one for whatever it is you’re doing.
3. Ubiquity. You never know when inspiration is going to crash down on you. If it happens to hit when your tools aren’t at hand, you may lose whatever bolt of genius just smote you on the crown. Whatever tools you use should keep your writing close to you, at all times.
4. Reliability. Every word you commit to ink or electrons is holy, even if you later decide it’s complete shit. Your tools must treat those words with ultimate respect and protect them at all costs. The first time a tool eats your words should be the last time you ever use that tool.
5. Function. This seems ridiculous to even mention, but you need to make sure that whatever weapon you have in your arsenal has a purpose. I once bought a piece of software that did nothing but evaluate manuscripts for ease of reading. I was the stupidest fucking thing I ever spent money on. Don’t be stupid.
6. Price. You’re a writer, don’t waste money. Free is better than paid until proven otherwise. This tip is free, so it doesn’t count against the promised total of five.

If a tool meets all of these criteria, then by all means get it into your quiver. But if it doesn’t, walk on by.

If, like me, you’ve managed to acquire a trove of apps that threaten to bury you in an avalanche of collapsing productivity promises, it’s time to start pruning. Look at those apps that you use to write versus those that you use as an excuse to think about writing. If you spend more time fiddling with your outlining app than you do writing, ditch it. If your word processor encourages you to jack around with fonts and sizes and spacing when you should be creating sentences and paragraphs and novels, it’s not helping you, it’s slowing you down. Ditch it.

Except I wasn’t.

After a hard day of work and a few hours of night school, I’d fall back into my deviant writerly ways. While my family slept, I’d crank out few pages here, a few pages there. In those years I was busy being anything but a writer, I managed to finish three novels, a couple dozen short stories, and about a million words of miscellaneous scrap and junk.

About a year ago, I decided the writing bug was too deeply embedded in my brain for me to dig it out. I was never going to quit writing, so I might as well spend some time getting good at it. I studied the craft of writing, I dug into the nuts and bolts of telling stories. Most dangerous of all, I started thinking about publishing the words I was tapping out in the dead of night.

This site is where I’ll tell the story of how I got back in to writing, and the tricks and tips that have worked for me. With any luck, we’ll follow the course of my first published novel from its first one-sentence pitch all the way to the point where you, faithful reader, can pick it up off the shelf or download it to your Kindle.

And if we don’t get that far, at least you’ll have an entertaining time watching my attempted re-entry catch fire and crash into the ground. Either way, you win.

But before I let 2010 go into the history books, I wanted to share a few things I learned.

First, there is a right way to write, but no one can tell you what that way will be for YOU. By all means, read every book you can on the craft of writing, but don’t go looking for the Magic Formula. Use what works for you, discard what doesn’t, and don’t let anyone try and convince you they have the One True Way. You cannot duplicate what works for others, you can only adapt it to work for you.

Second, talking about your writing uses the same mental muscles as actual writing. Doing one will relieve you of your need to do the other, so choose where you want to put your efforts wisely.

Finally, you aren’t in this alone. Find a critique group you can trust and share your work with others. Even reading works in progress will improve your own writing by leaps and bounds. You may be good, but writing in the midst of other writers will make you even better.

That’s enough for 2010 – 2011 looks like it will be even better for me as a writer. I’ve really been digging into the concept of structure in fiction and how complex work can be broken down into manageable pieces. I’ve been a devoted pantser for all of my writing life, but just understanding the structure below the narrative has provided immense benefits for my writing. Not only do I write faster and more precisely now that I’m looking at the nuts and bolts of story structure, but I’ve been able to resurrect old ideas that I’d abandoned and make them work. If you’re a pantser, too, read a few books on story structure and see what it does for you.

And now it’s time for the ambitious part. In 2011, I plan selling/publishing my first novel, and getting at least three shorts in magazines of one sort or another. Along the way I’ll be posting regular progress reports and some bits and pieces of writing theory. If you’re kicking off your own writer’s journey, let me know, and we can congratulate, commiserate, and kick each other in the ass if we start to slack off.

2011 – it has to be better than 2010, right?