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Summerfest 2013: Artisanal Software For Writers

May 29, 2013 Leave a comment

You don’t need great software to be a great writer, but it helps. That’s why I was excited to see Eastgate Systems partner with a number of other indie software developers to offer special deals on software designed for writers.

I haven’t tried most of these titles, but I can vouch for Scrivener. It is expertly designed to help you organize your thoughts. Notes on characters, places, themes, or any other subject live in harmony beside your text, always accessible, never getting in your way. I use it whenever I’m working on any prose longer than a page. Scrivener is well worth the money at full price. At 20% off it is a steal 1.

Typing furiously into Microsoft Word can certainly get the job done, but it’s a blunt instrument. It’s nice to know that there are tools designed by and for authors to help with some of the heavy lifting 2.

  1. To be clear, this is not a paid endorsement.↑
  2. In the spirit of right tools for the right job, let me also endorse Mars Edit as a blogging tool. It’s much cleaner than writing directly into your browser, and you don’t have to worry about losing a post if the browser crashes. ↑
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If A Gun Is Fired In The Ghetto, Does It Make A Sound?

May 16, 2013 Leave a comment

David Dennis on our society’s uneven distribution of empathy.

This is the largest mass shooting in the United States where the shooters were still at large after the crime was committed. Think about that for a minute. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Fort Hill to Aurora, all the shooters were either killed or apprehended on site. But the person or people responsible for shooting 19 Americans are still free.

So why am I allowed to go outside? Where‘s the city quarantine or FBI and Homeland Security presence for this act of “terrorism”?

Because this is an act of domestic terrorism right? Just because the alleged shooter was wearing a white tee and jeans does that suddenly make the shooting a gang-related affair? And we all know how irrelevant gang-related shootings are in America. The Mother’s Day shooting is so irrelevant that politicians haven’t even bothered to mention it to further their anti-gun agendas. If the shootings aren‘t even important enough for politicians to spin, then it’s truly reached a black hole of irrelevance.

It’s a sad reminder that, in America today, some folks are deemed worthy of our attention and some are not.

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