Columbia University has a BreakWriting program that encourages students to write during their December-January semester break. Last year’s series of 16 posts have been put online and are well worth reading if you do any writing (or think about doing any). Each posting has oodles of useful, real-world advice, with plenty of tips and recommendations for being as successful as possible when it comes to writing (success here being measured in terms of actually writing, not commercial success).
Archives For writing
In this edition…
- About This Newsletter
- What Were You Thinking? => The JavaScript Book
- On the Web => Flash Builder 4.5/Flex 4.5 for Mobile Apps
- On the Blog => Cookies and Sessions in Yii
- On the Forum => FALSE Comparisons in PHP
- Q&A => Could You Say More About Stored Procedures?
- What is Larry Thinking => Doing What I Do: Web Development
- Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites” (4th Edition) and “Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design”
I’m a pretty big fan of Scrivener, a writing application for Macs (there is a Windows version currently in beta). For about six months now I’ve been using Scrivener to write my newsletter, and a JavaScript book I’ve been working on for some time will be the first book I’ve written using it. There’s something about Scrivener that just works for me, first and foremost, that I’m able to keep everything about a project—the writing, references, notes, etc.—in one place. As with any good piece of software, though, I’ve got a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I’m not using Scrivener to its fullest potential. And by that I mean I’m absolutely convinced that I could be using Scrivener better.
For this reason, I was quite happy to see the release of the book “Take Control of Scrivener 2“. I haven’t read it yet (ironically, I’m waiting to complete the book I’m currently working on first), but it’s high on my “to-read” list. Just scanning the 22-page sample that’s available, this looks like a good, fast resource. And at $10 (US) for the book, it’s a steal.
In this edition…
- About This Newsletter
- What Were You Thinking? => How I Got Here
- On the Web => Fences for Windows
- On the Web => PhpStorm IDE
- On the Blog => Interview Posted Online
- On the Blog => What Everyone That Writes Should Know About Writing
- Q&A => With the availability of so many PHP frameworks, what is the role of PEAR?
- Q&A => What happened to PHP 6?
- What is Larry Thinking => Doing What I Do: Writing
- Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites” (4th Edition)
Having written 20 books, numerous articles, 260 blog postings, and 38 newsletters (at the time of this writing), it’s probably safe to say that I qualify as a “writer” by now. Once you’ve gone past your first million words, I think the label applies. Over the past few months I’ve happened to speak with several different people, sharing what I’ve learned about writing, and there’s one insight that seems to be the most intriguing and useful to those that aren’t accustomed to sitting at their computer for hours on end trying to put two good paragraphs together: writing is the least important step in the writing process. Continue Reading…
