Category: Technical Tuesday

Technical Tuesday 0004

AM Devine

What’s this? A second post this week already?

Why yes, yes it is!

This one is actually one I promised a bit back, a final review of my wireless speaker (literally it’s initially covered in Technical Tuesday 0003).

I’ve now had my little Anker soundcore for a couple of months.

It lives in my purse.

I literally have only one complaint about it at all, and that’s that it did not come with an aux cable, but hey, those are cheap as hell so it’s not the biggest of big deals. It’s compatible with ANY aux cable you have laying around, so the cord to my high quality skull candy headphones that are massive has gotten hijacked for the wireless speaker for those days I want to be able to actually hear netflix on my writing laptop. Ironically, this laptop does great with onboard media. But the instant I want to watch netflix or youtube, the max volume drops by half, it’s really weird.

I haven’t charged him in a little over a week and according to the icon on my phone, he’s still at roughly half battery. I’ve not had any issues with battery life at all.

Only actual time I’ve had a moment of concern, I was running one of my binaural beat apps and it stopped producing sound at all. As long as I’m not running that sort of sound through it, everything is fine. (Besides, Binaural beats work better through headphones anyways, but I was testing it.)

It’s got decent sound levels from lowest to highest, good sound for something as cheap as it was. No serious complaints at all. No matter how you look at it, I 100% recommend this little guy for his volume levels and portability as well as battery life.

Technical Tuesday 0003

AM Devine

So I haven’t done one of these in a long while. I know – I even forgot to come back and finish the two parter back in May. (Which, let me know if you’d like to see the rest of it, and I’ll go and redo the whole thing from the beginning.)

Now, a little Truth before we get into the Technical Tuesday. For the longest, I think I realized that the problem I have been having, even with these structured posts was that I tried to limit them too tightly. I wanted the Muse Mondays and the Technical Tuesdays to be nothing but absolute solid stuff about writing. Mondays being for things that could provide inspirational help, and Tuesdays for the technical aspect of actually writing.

Unfortunately, I’m just not that good with the technical aspects of writing – and I’ll fast run out of things to post for Muse Mondays, I suspect, if I limit it to just purely writing related. BUT, if I were to expand both series to things that have made my life better as a writer. And class them by whether or not they inspire me (Muse Mondays) or assist me (Technical Tuesdays) – I could open up the series to a great many more things. While Mondays sound like they won’t really be changing, they actually will be. It’ll go from just things that could inspire just writers to things that can inspire all creative art.

So, with that being said, into TECHNICAL TUESDAY 0003!

Okay. So literally, this purchase, which as of this writing I’ve had for a little over ELEVEN hours, has made my life so much sweeter.

I love listening to music all the time. As I work on my stories, as I draft blog posts, as I do some upkeep work in my bullet journal, as I do actual work related work, ALL THE TIME. To be quite honest, it is something I do pretty much more than anything else.

Additionally, I have this issue where silence actually makes my head hurt, because my hearing is sensitive enough that I pretty much have to have something to focus on or else I’m straining to hear the silence. Which probably makes no sense, but my ears complain if it’s too quiet.

So I’d been looking at wireless bluetooth speakers for ages. I wanted one that was respectable, had good volume levels, decent range on the wireless ability, and an aux port – but that was also a little waterproof (ie – I could sit it next to the tub while I was taking a bath and wouldn’t have to worry). I know this seems like a big list, but I have certain needs that I was really wanting it for over everything else.

I finally bought one on amazon this last thursday, and I got it saturday evening. (The joys of Prime, am I right?) I charged it for a little over 1.5 hours and then I connected it to the old iphone 4 I have and use as an ipod and shower radio and all that. (no, I don’t take it into the shower – I have a glass box shower and it’s just outside the glass.)

Well, off of that 1.5 hour charge (which wasn’t to full, by the way) I’ve already gotten 7 or so hours of playtime at near max volume – or a few notches down.

Right now, it’s playing off of my iPhone 6+ next to me, and I think I have the volume at half. Music sounds great, it’s just fantastic. I’m sitting at work and it’s a great little device to have parked on the desk not far from me. It’s about the same length as my iPhone 6, and is roughly 1.5 inches tall and 1.5 inches deep. It’s a tiny little brick that makes a lot of noise.

And it’s so nice to not have to worry about whether or not my computer is going to freeze at work because the 4GB of ram doesn’t like four internet tabs + scrivener + word + itunes running.

If you want the one I have, find it HERE.

I’ll definitely post another comment about this speaker either later this week or sometime next week. I’ll probably post my review after I’ve had it a week, and done some bonus damage to my eardrums.

Technical Tuesday 0002

AM Devine

So yesterday I talked about doing things with loads of brightly colored pens. Things like storyboarding and plot outlining. And these are things that each person does differently.

Personally, I start with which ever thing comes to my mind first. Sometimes this is a character, sometimes it’s a scene idea, in one story’s case, it was a line of internal monologue from the main character. Generally, depending on which one comes to mind first tells me where to start.

Over on the Facebook and the Instagram from 9pm to 11pm CST I’ll be sharing images of various WIP projects that utilize each of the main forms of Story Planning that I’ll be discussing below.

These types include:
-story boarding (which I do incredibly rarely)
-something I call ‘discovery writing’
-something I think of as story bubbles but I swear has a different name with every person I’ve ever shown them to, but are useful for thinking out things
-plot lines, which in my actions are less than story boarding but more than general outlining.
-and of course, outlining, which is something that I both do well and don’t do well.

The order in which they go is usually something a bit like this:
1. Discovery writing
2. Story Bubbles
3. Plot Lines
4. Outlining
5. Storyboarding (if I do it at all until the second draft)

This week, I’ll discuss numbers 1 and 2.

First up: DISCOVERY WRITING.

What the hell is discovery writing? For me, this is where I sit down with the idea and just start writing everything that comes to mind on an idea. These thoughts are generally not in any kind of order, they’re the most rough form of writing I do. It’s simply getting as much of the rough idea down that I can. The first sample (from a series of WIPs referred to as Trio) I’ll be showing and discussing tonight has gone through a couple of rewrites and is a little more organized than they usually are. The second sample is still a bare bones discovery write and actually covers two story ideas (cheerfully known as faries and aether academy).

 

Now: STORY BUBBLES.

I *love* story bubbles. Story bubbles are absolutely fantastic fun. Some people refer to them as thought bubbles, some call them thought maps, but when you see them, you’ll remember them from school. I personally love them. They’re a slightly more interesting way to work out all the pieces of a world, and are quite excellent for world building. This is where I’m sitting at a table with a massive sheet of paper and an army of markers. Some of what ends up in bubbles are plot points, character development, language bits, historical distribution of information. Sometimes it’s a breakdown of departments and what they do in the case of my science fiction universe (known as the Aurora Universe). This will be, providing I remembered to bring it with me today, the samples I use for this later this evening.

 

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Next week on Technical Tuesday, I’ll discuss numbers 3 and 4.

Technical Tuesday 0001

AM Devine

Woo, looks like I’m on track now doesn’t it? (I’ll tell you a secret, I wrote at least two blog posts in a row on Monday.)

So, onwards to TECHNICAL TUESDAY!

Technical Tuesdays are for discussing the actual work of writing. And today, I’m going to tell you what I’m currently learning and finding quite useful.

STORY STRUCTURE.

So far, I’m learning a lot from K.M. Weiland over at https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com, and honestly, what I’ve learned from her is seriously helping me out with my steampunk story (Of Mage Lights and War Machines). In fact, she’s made me realize that it’s quite possible that in order to get everything done, it may need to be more than one book. This is quite seriously news to me, and quite possibly news to the person who’s been my go to person for exercising my brain.

You can find everything that K.M. Weiland says about story structure at this >LINK<. If you’re unsure about her methods, pick up her free podcast series about story structure, and download her free ebook on the subject. Free things don’t hurt your budget, and you never know, you might learn some things in the process.

–NOTE: I HIGHLY SUGGEST HER PODCAST, I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO IT LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW.–