I have decided, along with information on using Git with Visual Studio I have decided to include a project. I won’t say what project but it may provide the residual income I have been looking for. I’m confident this will make or break the book project.
Category Archives: Scrivener
Mechanical Hard Drives are more robust than the new SSD’s
It came as a surprise to me last week, after a little more than a year I had to replace my Surface Pro 3 because the (Solid State Drive) SSD failed. I have multiple computers four, five and six times that age and the old mechanical hard drives are still going strong. Needless to say I spent the last half of the week and the entire weekend loading the new computer with software, completing the task this morning (Monday 6-6-2016). This also means I was not able to pump out a first chapter for the book, however I will put out a forward of sorts plus an outline of the chapters this week as a teaser.
First Chapter – Next Monday
I’m going to start posting each chapter on here ever Monday. So, anybody watching this blog will be able to get the book for free right here.
Time to bite the bullet
I have spent too much time preparing to write my book. I think this is because I scared of putting myself out there to be judged. I can accept criticism from my family and friends but accepting it from people I don’t know and more importantly don’t know me is terrifying. It is time to bite the bullet as the title says and just do it.
With that being said, I have plenty of notes regarding each chapter so getting started should be easy. Lets get cracking!
Book Research and Writing, a lot of work
I don’t know how many times while reading a technical book, it does not matter if it is a book about programming in C Sharp or creating a circuit and then sketch for an Arduino project I always find some sort of technical error in the text. The first thing that could come out of my mouth would be something similar to, “Well, mister/miss author, you certainly did not do much research on this code.” Or, the author will walk you through a group of steps performing a function within the application and you believe ‘your’ way to be much less time consuming or more intuitive.
I have found this is not necessarily correct. I have spent more than a few hours working in Microsoft Visual Studio, creating and deleting solutions trying to find the best way to perform a specific task. Needless to say I have at my disposal now multiple ways to accomplish the same goal and now I must decide on which procedure to publish. Do I assume the one I publish is the best overall or do I publish all of them possibly leaving out a set of steps one of my readers use that they think is less time consuming or more intuitive. That sounds familiar doesn’t it?
I have been a technical reviewer for some publishers, most of which involved C Sharp code and 3D models. I have always been given the manuscripts to review however it was like pulling teeth to get the models and code out of some authors to review prior to publication and one particular book I never was able to see the code or models. In my experience I can see how some reviewers can and do miss errors in the code or procedures. My dilemma, publish what I think to be the best solution, publish multiple solutions or all that I found. Something to think about.
On another subject, I completed the 16 hour C# course in Udemy this weekend. Started a course about Excel Dashboards with interactive charts etc., ultimately completing this course last night. Today I am starting “Becoming A Writer”, I guess I better start this course.
Everyone have a great day and Wonderful Week!
The writing begins
My introduction to Scrivener was obviously God sent. I was delaying writing for so long it became an increasing effort for me to begin writing the first word. The reason for this, I am now thinking was because I did not know where to start. After setting aside the time needed to read through the provided interactive tutorial, avoiding the quick start guide, I can see how you can start anywhere, then organize as you go. Heck you could organize all of your writings at the end if you wanted to. I’m not sure how that would work with a novel but with how to, instructional formats it would work fine and gets me started.
The book has started, getting organized and I have begun collecting my references.
A possible draw back to this software, much like Blender and Unity I might try to start too many books and not finish a single one. Much like my folders full of Blender and Unity files. I have started and completed a lot of Blender files however these were tutorials for learning purposes. I have never finished a single Blender project I have started on my own. My Unity files are for learning purposes only and do date I have never started a Unity project I actually meant to finish as a published game.
I also dropped a good chunk of change on a Surface Book. What a great piece of engineering. So far this make a MacBook pro look like a Childs toy.
It’s book time
Its seems strange how as I start to organize my thoughts on writing this book I have been talking about, useful blog posts and tools start showing up out of the blue. For no reason other than I had not perused the site in a couple of months I logged into CR4. The first article I started reading lead me to a piece of software specifically designed for writing and looks like a great program for its stated function. I am one that always prefers to use software for their intended function therefore you will never see me use Excel for any kind of data access or flow charts like everyone where I work. I will use Access and Viso for those functions and Excel for spreadsheet calculations and have become quite a proficient user of all three.
Without further ado I give you Scrivener. At first glance it looks to be another word processing program but after a couple hours of YouTube videos describing the various features such as organizing your chapters and research items. The ease with which you can rearrange your content which is nothing like a cut and paste in a Word document I find quite appealing. As I start creating the content for my book I will continue to update you with the various features I discover within this software and at 40.00 I will definitely be using this for much longer than the 30 day trial period. Actually my trial period finished last night 🙂 after watching those great videos. I love getting other users opinions of software or items I am thinking of purchasing outside of the comments reviewers leave on the product websites. I believe those as much as I believe the commercials that state, “These are not actors but real people…” yeah right.
Another item of note, I completed my taxes for 2015, yes I am getting a refund from my Federal but alas I must pay the state of Oklahoma. Another check mark on my todo list for the day.
Writing a book
Now it is time to stop procrastinating and start writing my short eBook for Kindle. I will start with installing Visual Studio adding Git and Visual Studio Tools for Office VSTO extensions. The VSTO extensions I know were difficult for me to locate and using Git was trial and error in getting it to work properly. I’m hoping people will find this information useful and worth paying for. I know I would have.
GIT, Visual Studio, Office application extentions and C#
There are some information on each of those that are relatively hard to find anywhere. You can Google, Bing or what ever your favorite search engine is and you may find a lot of books or YouTube channels but the information is usually buried at the middle or end of the video or there may be a couple chapters in a book with each devoting limited space to these topics. These, combined is the topic I plan to start writing small informational eBooks for Kindle on.