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If you wrote a story about your life with technology, would you title it “The Curse of the Cursor” or “The Magic of the Mouse”? Regardless of how you feel, here are ten tips that may ease stress and improve your writing life.
1. Buy a writer’s mini-toolkit. Do you carry your calendar and contacts in a Personal Digital Assistant (Palm or similar PDA) with a stylus and also carry a pen and pencil with you? For about $8 at any office supply store you can buy a combination tool. Click once and you've got a pen, click again and in its place is a pencil, click a third time and you'll get a stylus. Plus a hidden eraser in the top. The one I use is a Paper Mate, but other brands include Triple Click from Avery, Multi-4 by Staedtler (an extra function is the inclusion of blue as well as black ball point pen), 4-in-1 PDA Stylus Pen from Belkin (includes a red as well as black ball point pen) or Multi by Paper Mate PhD.
2. Keep up with technology. If you’re writing for kids, you need to know the technology they’re using both in and out of school. You don’t have to buy the latest of everything electronic (although I constantly fight the urge) but you should understand, let’s say, how an MP3 player like an iPod can be used to download music. Click on http://nl.cnet.com to select from a variety of free technology newsletters that you want delivered to your email box. Written in mostly plain English, Cnet’s articles contain general information and are not geared to pushing a particular brand.
3. Join a listserv. When I start a new project I join one of these online communities of authorities and plain folks interested in the same topic I am. I’m now thinking about a YA book on fraud in the art world. I googled and found, to my amazement, there is a listserv on that topic. Will it provide specific help? Hopefully, but reading people’s posts will at least give me with a general sense of the topic, invaluable to a novice in the field. A bonus: For several of my books I enticed listserv members with the offer of an acknowledgment and a signed copy of the book for vetting it.
4. Use a flash drive. A flash drive can be described as a portable hard drive that’s the size of a key ring fob. If you insert it into a USB slot with which most computers now are equipped, you can quickly transfer files and documents. USB slots are like tiny electric outlets that are the same on both PCs and Macs and allow various accessories to be transferred between computers. Because of this compatibility, you can carry the flash drive in your pocket and transfer files between computers or use it to backup important documents. A few cautions:
--Check for computer compatibility when buying.
--Leaving it in your computer for extended periods is not recommended.
--To protect data, follow directions for removing it.
These tiny marvels hold varying amounts of information. Price starts at about $25 but for less than $100 I recently purchased a huge onegigabyte (GB) flash drive. What does one GB hold? Well, let’s say a chapter in a YA book is 25 pages, or 5,136 words. This chapter takes up 120 kilobytes (KB), which is a very teeny .00011 GB. Why did I buy a one-gigabyte flash drive? As Scarlett said, “I’ll never be memory poor again.” Well, she said something like that. Suffice it to say, plenty of room remains for other documents and files, including my PowerPoint presentation, which leads me to…
5. Develop a visual presentation for speaking engagements. Kids and adults respond to the visual and I find having a visual presentation is like carrying a blankie with me. When you first open Apple’s Keyword or Microsoft’s PowerPoint for either PC or Mac, the program looks overwhelming. After mucking around for a while, you’ll discover these programs are very user-friendly. Go to http://cel.colgate.edu/howto/powerpoint/pc/default.htm for an online resource that leads you through each step in creating a presentation to upload onto a CD or flash drive.
If schools have a computer and Liquid Crystal Display, or LCD, projector or similar, all you need to take along is your tiny flash drive. Unfortunately, few schools are so well endowed. Katie Davis, author of Kindergarten Rocks! (Harcourt, 2005) and a popular speaker at schools, says, “One or two visits pay for a projector, and it’s worth it because you never know whether your host will have the equipment.” Prices for projectors vary from about $1000 to way high. Get information from www.projectorcentral.com and talk with media folks before investing. For example, Katie says bulbs, called lamps, on current models last 2000-3000 hours but cost about $400 each. Project both cost and income before you commit.
6. Learn from a podcast. If I say “music and news” and your mind thinks radio or television broadcast, you need to learn about podcasts. A podcast is a free (note: free) audio file that you save and listen to at your convenience from your computer or MP3 player, such as an iPod. (More than you probably want to know: MP3 refers to compressing CDquality sound by a factor of roughly 10, while retaining most of the original fidelity; for example, a 40MB CD track is turned into a 4MB MP3 file. Reference: www.answers.com/topic/ mp3.)
The amazing 262,000,000+ hits you get if you Google podcast is a testament to its current popularity. Elementary school students now record podcasts and upload them free (note: free) to iTunes, for grandparents around the world to hear. Since there are so many sources for podcasts, some examples will give you the flavor of what’s out there. I open iTunes (available for Mac or PC) and my iPod automatically downloads several I subscribe to:
--Living near Washington, DC, I’m a political junkie whose must-listen shows include Diane Rehm’s Weekly News Roundup and Washington Week with Gwen Ifill on NPR and Tim Russert’s Meet the Press on NBC/ MSNBC.
--Scientific American podcast
--History Podcast, an informal review of all things historical
What you download is limited only by the time you have to listen. I periodically review the list on iTunes and at www.podcast.net/ for programs to entertain me during an afternoon break. The latter is where I found Don’t Panic— Its Organic!, bookbuffet.com podcasts, and Holly Lisle On Writing. You surely now realize there are free (note: free) podcasts about every topic imaginable, from yoga to BBC news to podcasts about podcasting. An MP3 player makes listening transportable. No MP3 player? Listen while seated at your computer.
7. Attract attention. Some authors and illustrators visit schools with a dog, a guitar, or some other prop that makes their visit memorable. Kathleen Karr, author of Mama Went to Jail for the Vote, unexpectedly wows an audience that doesn’t anticipate seeing a middleaged woman casually wind on hand wraps, then pull on boxing gloves as she talks about the usefulness of real life experiences in writing. (She got into the sport when writing The Boxer, an ALA Best Book for YAs.)
Likewise, kids are thrilled when I suddenly whip out a model of Zinj, a Paranthropos boisei skull, and tell how Mary Leakey found him in 1959. Today’s Internet made buying such a beauty easy, with the click of a mouse and, of course, credit card information.
8. Keep a database of fans and other writers with whom to network. Dandi Daley Mackall, author of Love Rules (Tyndale House, 2005; www.dandibooks.com), says that keeping a “fan base” is easy. With parent awareness of what you’re doing, create a database from addresses and emails of kids you meet and kids who write to you. Include friends and writers who support you and your work. When a new book comes out, share your excitement with them. And when you need someone to write a review on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com— click, click— who better to ask than your “fans”?
9. Carry an inexpensive digital camera. Take pictures to remind you of a future article or story idea or illustration or something to include in your present project. Because there is no film cost, you can snap away. When you upload to your computer, just delete any you don’t want to keep.
| 10. Contribute to the charity of your choice. While writing the biography of the Leakeys, I realized how difficult obtaining money for education is among Kenya’s Maasai tribe and how crucially tied the connection is to helping endangered wildlife. A mouse click at tusk.org sent a tax-deductible contribution that I requested be applied toward the Koiyaki Guiding School project www.koiyaki.com, which educates Maasai to become tour guides and promote conservation. Jackson Minteeng Liaram, the young man who benefited from the donation, recently wrote me: “I aim to be the best guide in the Mara and also a strong conservationist since I have come to learn the importance of the animals around us and want many more generations in the future to enjoy, cherish and live in harmony with wildlife, for this is the purpose for which God created us all.” Without research for my writing, I would never have known about this need. Find the charity of your choice and a quick click will leave you with the same good feeling. |
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Jackson Minteeng Liaram |
SIDEBAR: High Tech Resources
http://cel.colgate.edu/howto/powerpoint/pc/default.htm for directions on creating a PowerPoint presentation.
www.usbflashdrive.org/usbfd_faq.html#whatis for general information about flash drives.
O’Hara, S. (2005). ICan iPod. Indianapolis, Indiana: Que. Written for YAs, this little paperback is great for any iPod novice.
Sande, S. Take Control of your iPod: Beyond the Music, v. 1.1. An ebook published by www.takecontrolbooks.com.
www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/resources/st_travelswithipod0604/ipod.html Ideas for using an iPod of other MP3 player on trips for fun (and, of course, research).
This article first appeared in the May 2006 issue of Children's Book Insider: The Newsletter for Children's Writers.
Thanks to Catherine Stover, librarian at Montgomery County Campus, JHU, for title.
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