Month: October 2011

The last couple days proved an interesting experience for me, as I did several author interviews by email. One received publication so far over at Indie Writer Zone’s Indie Insider, and the other still is forthcoming. Years back, I interviewed professionals in the animation field as part of a regular column I did over at a site called Digital Media FX, where I gave people insight into the varied careers involved for people in animation who did not draw. This came from the fact that I myself, while very much in love with the medium of animation growing up, wasn’t really aware of all the opportunities people who didn’t draw could have provided they had the needed skillset. I knew there could be writers somehow (to this day, not really sure how, as that interest began in the mid 1980s before the prevalance of all the “making of” featurettes and information on the Internet), but I didn’t know what else lay out there. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1996, the first job I worked was as an animation Production Assistant on JUMANJI: THE ANIMATED SERIES. Then I saw the whole pipeline and the possibilities, and my view changed a bit over time.

So here I am in 2011, now finding myself on the other side of the interview. I will say that my respect for the people I interviewed certainly went up doing this experience. The first interview I sent off I think answers the questions all right, but that person likes to send out a lot of Twitter snippets with his quotes and in hindsight I’m not sure I’m all that “Twitter byte” quotable. My college training is in Radio-TV as well as English, so I definitely know what that is. If you’ve ever talked to me in person, short and to the point sometimes isn’t my strong suit. The Indie Insider interview asked questions that lent themselves to longer answers and I responded accordingly. I did see Indie Writers Zone actually pull some quotes out of that interview for Facebook, which surprised me that they were able to; I liked the selections.

 Some of the questions really made me have to stop and think, and I needed to keep in mind though the questions asked about me in specific, if I read the article just starting out today what would I really want to know and potentially apply to my own situation. You need to be careful and say potentially because in doing interviews or columns or commentary such as these, you must remember your audience will be at varied stages in the career track and one size does not in fact fit all. The trick comes that your readers must remember too.

These interviews came about because I wrote letters to the people introducing myself, providing links to my various books, and in most cases taking the tact “if you believe I am appropriate please contact me about the book(s) you would like to cover”. I left the control in the hands of the sites. After all, right now I am more interested in just making myself known that just any specific title on my backlist, and that might mean one ebook connects with one niche while a different title resonates with another. With future titles, I’ll definitely be focused on making a campaign around that specific ebook. Right now, being new to the indie game (though not the writing game), I’m just pleased with any opportunity to introduce myself.

If you’ve got a site that does author interviews and you believe my background may be a fit in some way, this is an open invitation to get in touch. Ebook publicity aside, I love mentoring and “paying it forward”. I’d be happy to help in any way I can.

Folllowing the death of Steve Jobs, it’s appropriate to write about computers and writing this week. Especially when the first computer my family owned was an Apple, and we got it about the time I first got into creative writing.

I first became recognized for my talents in creative writing at around age 10 (5th grade), in the early 1980s. About this same time, my father purchased our first home computer – the Apple ][ +. We were the only family for blocks with a home computer that I know of. Now I’ve always had poor handwriting (though crushing a finger in a door in 7th grade hasn’t helped), so I gravitated to the keyboard early even though I did not learn to touch type until I was about 16 or so. Both my sister and I would start writing stories and save them in various word processing programs. I believe AppleWriter was the first one we used, and then later AppleWorks.

When my Dad got out of the Navy and used his GI bill to go back to school after 24 years of service, he needed the ][+ for his computing homework and couldn’t compete with his kids for time on the machine. That’s when the Apple ][ c entered our lives. Yes that “c” meant compact but other than the drive and keyboard being in a single portable case, it wasn’t truly (the monitor, albeit small, was still a bit of a handful). Though I will admit it was of perfect size for a preteen and teenager. Both my sister and I continued to write a lot of material, making up what would amount to entire novellas at times.

Then came the moment.

The moment that would forever render us Users of the Other Operating System.

As I became closer to high school age, I also began to have an interest in screenwriting. I came to learn from a professional working in the field in Los Angeles that non-Apple machines were the screenwriting industry standard. I was told “it was a pain” exchanging formatted scripts with Mac users back then (and my family didn’t even have a Mac at that point, though we had them in high school so I knew how to use one).

With that, my Dad found someone at work – actually the mother of a classmate of mine – selling an older “non Apple” machine because her family was upgrading. Dad took the parts tothe now defunct  Superior Typewriter and Computer, later just STC, in Cheney, WA.  I had a great relationship for many years with those folks as they not only custom built the parts of the old system into a new case, but would build me a completely new system for my graduation (except Dad didn’t buy me the sound card since he didn’t think a writer needed it yet also bought me this fantastic new game that came out by a local company called MYST… which you could not play without a sound card, so I went and bought my own, top of the line with microphone input and all since I was working on a broadcasting future).

Of course the dark side of all this was the inability to convert all those files we’d done on Apple computers, up to including developing entire series of stories. My sister and I ended up making dot matrix printouts of anything and everything we thought worth saving, and then having to handtype them all back into WordStar (that was the first word processor we had) and later MicrosoftWord.  In the end, I think most of it was retained by making sure to upgrade a lot of the files not only by versions of Word but from one media to another (5.25 discs to 3.5 discs to Zip discs to flash drives, etc.).

So, I’ve been using non Apple machines ever since in terms of desktop work. Other than occassionally using my now fiance’s Mac for things – he’s had Apple computers and never left the fold – I don’t regularly touch Macs anymore. But in the last year I’ve come to own an iPad that with the right accessories I can treat like a laptop and easily write stuff on the go. Not to mention files are more cross-format compatible than ever between Windows and Mac when it comes to documents, even if the main programs themselves are not.

How far we’ve come… and how dependent I was on a computer even early on in my writing development.