Manon Eileen – a Writer's Blog

It’s been a while since I last reviewed a Writing Tool, so I thought it was time to do one again!

This time I chose for Q10, and this is what their website says:

Q10 will clean your kitchen, walk your dog and make excellent coffee. Well, not really. But it’s really good as a full-screen text editor.

What, to me, makes it especially interesting is that it’s free. Features of Q10 include: live text statistics, customizable look and paragraph format, a timer alarm, spell checker, notes, target count, autosave, and more.

It's all black, what do I do?!

It took me a little while to find out how to use it, but luckily I had the time to toy around with it a little. After you’ve installed Q10 and you open the program, you just get a black, full screen page. At the very bottom, it shows your word and character count, how many pages you’ve written and the time.

That’s all. I had no clue whatsoever how I could, for instance, set the timer. I didn’t even know how to close the program. A little daunted, I closed it. Then, when I restarted it a few minutes later, I saw a little green message pop up in the bottom. Ah! “Press F1 for help”. And there it was, all the options listed neatly.

So, I found that if you press CTRL+T, you can set the alarm, when you press CTRL+P you can set the general settings, etc. Aha! You can see the list of all the options in the screenshot on the left.

Finally, I was getting somewhere. I changed the font color to a color more agreeable on my eyes, set the timer and had at it.

In all honesty, this is a nice program to work with. It’s absolutely distraction-free, it has just enough functionality that you don’t get distracted by toying with the options and once I got the hang of it, I was convinced I’d want to use this more often. You can use it not only for writing, but also for writing blogs or long emails or for school assignments.

And again… It’s free.

You can read more about Q10 on their website, which is also where you can download it. You can choose two types of downloads: with or without spellchecker.

http://www.baara.com/q10/

Enjoy and let me know what you think of the program!

Is everyone as excited as I am about the #writepsych chat? Check out what it’s all about here.

I would like to announce the definitive time for the chat:

I will be online to answer all your psychology related questions from

2 to 4 PM, GMT on Wednesday June 22.

That’s 4-6 PM my time (I’m in the GMT +2 zone). Figure out on your own what time that is for you!

I’m really looking forward to chatting with you all and to learn about your characters! I hope I will be able to help you with your character development .

Another announcement I can make is that today my very first real interview was published. M.E. Anders (@meandersfit) interviewed me for her blog. Go check it out here! The interview was a lot of fun to do, thanks again for having me, Mindi!

See you tomorrow, folks!

Hi all!

Last week I published the Main Character Survey! It appeared that it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped – nearly every browser, operating system and word processer caused different problems. I had no idea it was so damn hard to just share a document.

This made me think: I wanted to provide the form in a different manner, so that everyone could access it easily.

First, I started searching for a WordPress form plugin. There are tons, but non provided what I was looking for: a form that didn’t send the results to me, but simply reported them back (clearly, I don’t have any use of your filled in MCS, only you do). You’d think this is form basics, but no. I think I spent 6 hours last Saturday searching for a proper form thing, I think I’ve seen every free and paid option available. Still, none offered what I was looking for.

I lost quite some hair that day. I can’t begin to express how frustrated I was. Even Google Docs can’t do what I wanted.

The next day, last Sunday, I started looking again. Guess what, in only 10 minutes I had found the solution. A php coded form. It was going to be a shitload of work, but it also provided perfect procrastination (I had an exam on Monday ;p).

I’m proud to inform you all that I have finished the PHP form!!

You can find it by clicking “Main Character Survey” in my site navigation bar (below the header), which will send you to the introduction, or you can click on “The Survey“, and you’ll be sent to the MCS straight away.

Make sure that, after you click submit, you save and/or print the page.  You can do so by clicking the Print|PDF button at the bottom on the page (which you can see at the bottom of this post as well).

What’s the best thing about the MCS as a PHP form, in my opinion, is that it’s intuitive and easy to work with! Much better than that Word Doc.

So, have fun and I hope it will assist you in writing a great story!

And I’m considering making more surveys…. Any suggestions? :p

Over time, I have come across much information on how to outline characters and give them an appearance and personality. What I longed for was a tool that would allow me to simply have all there is on a character in one place, with simple questions that will help you define your character’s identity and personality, there were some, but none as comprehensive as I was looking for. As a clinical psychologist, I appreciate a careful outlining of and consistency in personality of a character. Outlining a character is not just making up a miserable history for him or her, there’s a lot more to a person than just life experience. For instance, how does a person deal with a certain issue he or she has no experience with whatsoever? This is decided by personality traits, which, in a way, are already determined when one is born.

If you know everything about your character beforehand, you won’t have to rewrite so many of his or her reactions to events in the story, after you have finished writing it.

This Survey is the product of a combination of my research and my knowledge on the human psyche. By simply filling in every field in this document and following the directions as completely as you can, you will have a very comprehensive and complete overview of your character, with everything in one place. It might seem I ask a lot of questions and it might seem a lot of work to put into a character, but my bet is that you’ll be happy you completed this survey when you start writing your story.

If you have any suggestions, questions or comments, please feel free to shoot me an email at manoneileen(at)gmail.com.

Good luck with outlining your character and writing your story!

–> Click here to go to the Survey!

P.S. Make sure you fill in the Survey as completely as possible  And after you click submit, you have to print and/or save the page so that you don’t lose it. There’s a Print|PDF button on the bottom of the results page (just like here), click that and you’ll be able to save it properly.

Ever find yourself struggling to describe your character’s emotion? Or the place that she is in? Or how to describe the weather? Or colors, shapes, textures? Or some sort of strange symbolism? I bet you do. I know I do.

With the blog of Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, those are worries of the past! At The Bookshelf Muse, Angela and Becca offer countless descriptions of emotion, like amusement, frustration, excitement, anger… You name it. Some are even separated in “introverted reaction” and “extroverted reaction”. How cool is that?

An example:

Excited/Elated

High color; a flushed appearance, Smiling, grinning, Laughter, Bouncing foot to foot, squealing, screaming, shouting, hooping, hollering, Pretending to faint (falling back on a bed with a huge grin; falling into a friend’s arms as if you can’t contain the level of happiness inside), Chest bump (guys), Crushing beer/pop cans (guys), Slam-dunking trash in a barrel after a game or event (guys), etc.

And that’s not all! Check out the full list here.

As for the Setting Thesaurus, this is one that helped me big time recently:

Basement

Sight

Wooden steps, cement floor with small cracks in it, floor drain, cobwebs, bare bulb light with a string pull switch, washing machine, dryer, freezer, boxes, recycling bins, bins full of Christmas/Halloween/Thanksgiving decorations, old electronics stacked in a corner, etc.

Sounds

Footsteps walking overhead, the dryer slapping clothes around, a chugging washing machine, creaky steps, the raspy noise of a cardboard box sliding against the floor, etc.

And these are just a few examples! All Setting Thesaurus entries come with descriptions of Sight, Sounds, Smells, Tastes, Touch and a few helpful hints.

Real world comparisons for the color Black:

Black hole, Dung beetle, Scarabs, Priest clothing, Cavities, Fungus, etc.

Look at the Tornado page for an example of the weather thesaurus: all the sensory description and emotional triggers are listed. Looking for a symbol of beauty? Check this list right here.

By the way, the Thesaurus blog entries aren’t the only ones – they do occasionally write some interesting posts on writing in general, too!

Whenever I’m writing I have the Bookshelf Muse blog open, so that I can consult it whenever I get the feeling I might get stuck.

(Make sure you read their About page, too – Angela and Becca met online, and on that About page they describe the first time they met in real life. Hilarious!)

Go check it out