IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD PROCESSOR1

by James Lincoln Warren

A carpenter is only as good as his tools.

The first time I ever got to play with a consumer-oriented computer was in 1985, when I was at the U.S Navy’s Department Head School in Newport, RI. One of my colleagues, Dave Rodgers, had two, count ’em, two, Apples, a IIc and a IIe. He let me play with his, and when I decided to buy my own, he recommended I purchase Apple’s new wonder machine, a Macintosh. So I did.

My Mac had a total of 128K memory and no hard drive, and a small black and white monitor built in. (In those days, computers did not yet come with hard drives, and even access to the internet was through CompuServe or AOL.) It did, however, come with a couple of 3.5″ floppy disks—the Apple II still used the old 5.25″ floppies—with application software. One of the applications was called Write, and was my first introduction to the miraculous concept of Word Processing. Before getting my Mac, I had always used a typewriter. And erasable bond paper.

With all the features, especially the ability to edit before printing, I found myself immediately hooked, and I never used a typewriter again if I could help it. (I was so taken with my machine that I wrote a novel using it.) But in the Navy, I had to use a PC, and the first word processor I had to learn for the different architecture was WordStar v.3.0. At the time, it was the dominant word processor in the market, but I hated it. I swore I would never abandon my Mac.

But reality intervened. When I got out of the service, I switched to the PC architecture because my wife used a PC at work, and we needed our computer to be compatible with it for those rare occasions when she brought work home, and I’ve been a PC guy ever since. But all was not lost. At the Law Offices of Clausen and Campbell, where my wife was an attorney, the word processor they used was WordPerfect 4.2. In contrast to WordStar, this program was a delight, fast, stable, and easy to use. I stuck with it through WordPerfect 6.0, which was the first WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”, meaning it used a graphical user interface) version of WP. This was not such a great program, but the WP folks (this was before they were bought out by Corel) were having their butts kicked by the new Microsoft Word v.6, and they needed to imitate the Microsoft WYSIWYG features to remain competitive.

Although I had quit the active duty Navy at the end of 1987, I retained my reserve commission for another 13 years, and eventually, through Windows 95 and its successors, Word became the USN standard. I finally buckled down and got MS Word sometime in the 90s, a program that I hated but needed for compatibility purposes. Lo, these many moons later, I still use a version of Word, but I no longer feel obligated to get the latest version—mine is Word 2002, and it does all I demand of it, especially after I lobotimized almost all of its irritating “AutoCorrect” features.

But I never really got over my dislike for it, at least not all the way. Since I’m a writer, and since the advent of huge hard drive storage capacity, I decided that One Word Processor Is Not Enough. So although Word is still my primary word processor, I actually have several of them, and you know what? I use all of them. Not all the time, but I do. And here they are.

WordPerfect 5.1

This was the last text-and-keyboard driven version of WP, and still the best. Some folks regard it as the best word processor of all time. It takes a ridiculously small amount of memory to run, less than a gigabyte, and it still has virtually all the functionality of contemporary word processors. You can use a mouse with it if you want to, but it’s not necessary, and actually easier without it, as long as you remember all the simple keyboard commands—and they aren’t all that challenging. To be honest, though, the only reason I still have it on my machine is out of sentiment, but even so, every few months or so I fire it up.

Word 2002

This is my workhorse. I was one of the beta testers for Word 2007, and that’s the main reason I use Word 2002.

Power Writer

This is a word processor specifically designed for writing fiction, particularly for writing novels. It’s really very well designed, especially with all its outlining features—a window on the right of the text entry screen lists section, chapter, and plot point headings and can be used for quick navigation. Another window at the bottom of the screen is for keeping notes on everything from story structure to characters.

The only problem I have with it is that it’s not as versatile as it should be when it comes to formatting certain things—for example, it has a feature where it will insert markers for separate sections if you put in two carriage returns. This is convenient feature, since most writers’ submission guidelines will instruct you to separate sections with some sort of marker, usually three consecutive pound signs (###). The trouble is that it will insert the markers every time you enter two carriage returns—so you can’t separate text inserted into the narrative, like a poem or a blocked-off section of something else, without the program tossing in those markers. (You, can, however, turn off the markers entirely.)

Its design is so well thought out, though, that whenever I am working on a novel or an idea for a novel, it’s my choice.

It hasn’t been updated since 2007, but it is still widely available.

OpenOffice.org Writer 3.2

I first learned of Open Office back in the 90s, when I had partitioned my laptop’s hard drive for a Linux installation and was looking for an office suite to run on it. A fellow Naval Reservist directed me to Sun Microsystems’ free open source office suite for download, and that’s all she wrote. That was v.1.0.

It didn’t take me long to download the Windows version, something I have continued to do ever since the loathsome application of planned obsolescence to Microsoft Office made updating Excel—the spreadsheet I’d been using since its standalone DOS days in the 1980s—prohibitively expensive. Open Office does everything that Microsoft Office does, and it’s free. Including allowing me to watch all those sappy PowerPoint presentations I get sent by email.

Their word processor is called Writer, and the only reason I still use Word instead of Writer is because I have massaged my installation of Word to the point where it’s like a comfortable old pair of broken-in boots, and doing the same thing to Writer just wouldn’t be worth the effort. But whenever somebody I know gets a new PC, I tell them to download Open Office and forget about Microsoft.

Movie Magic Screenwriter 6

I am not a screenwriter, but I fiddle with the format whenever I have writer’s block—which thankfully, I haven’t had in a long time. Screenwriter is by far the easiest to use dedicated screenwriting software and has the most powerful and accessible features. And it’s fun to use. (If you want something free, you might try Celtx, which is very popular among aspiring screenwriters here in L.A.—but it is not the professional standard for any of the “pre-production” tasks it is designed to address—but did I mention that it’s free?)

Final Draft 8

Final Draft is the de facto standard for screenwriting software in Hollywood, mainly because of some deal that some studio made with its publisher several years ago—but I don’t know any professional screenwriter, and I know quite a few, who prefers it to Screenwriter. I have it for the same reason they do, to wit, because for better or worse it is the standard. And I got a great deal on it.

Visual Typewriter 1.5

Visual Typewriter is a typewriter simulator for Windows. And that’s exactly what it is. It clacks and dings and acts exactly like an old manual typewriter. (It also displays a typewriter as its interface.) I wouldn’t use it for anything serious, but it’s a lot of fun for those of use who learned our craft on an ancient Underwood, Royal, or Olympia.

1. Irreverent title offered with abject apologies to the Gospel According to St. John. [↩]

VAMPIRES DON’T SUCK

by Leigh Lundin

Last week, I wrote about Terrie Moran‘s top flight banshee mystery, ‘The Awakening’ in the MWA anthology, Crimes by Moonlight. The sounds you hear are Irish fairies singing its praises, especially since Women of Mystery are giving copies of the anthology for free!

With a slight detour for a fun undead Mike Hammer story, I headed for Toni Kelner‘s ‘Taking the Long View’. For the second time, I was blown away. (That’s literary talk for ‘most highly impressed’.) It’s little wonder– Terrie and Toni competed against 240-300 or so top mystery writers and we’re reading the crème de la crème.

A big concern of mystery fans is whether clues make sense to readers in the real world. I can assure you they do. ‘Taking the Long View’ contains one of the cleverest mystery plots I’ve read in a long time and the evidence is fairly laid out for the astute reader. I won’t embarrass myself by revealing how I interpreted a major clue except to say it was simpler and more obvious than my take– but then I’ve never met a vampire. (Well, not counting my Great Aunt Viktoria, but that’s another subject.)

Toni’s tale closes the anthology on its highest note. Here’s the story behind the story in her own words:

Toni Kelner

Taking the Long View

by Toni Kelner

"Taking the Long View" is the second outing for my vampire sleuths Mark and Stella. The couple first appeared in "How Stella Got Her Grave Back," (published in Many Bloody Returns), and solved the mystery of a Jane Doe buried in Stella’s grave. Several readers asked me if there were more Mark and Stella stories because they seemed like such well-established characters. That’s a tremendous compliment to me, and I really appreciated it. So it would have been awfully nice of me to write this new story to make them happy. Sadly, I’m not that nice. I had another motive entirely.

You see, I was kind of pushing the deadline on this story. I know I shouldn’t do that. I also know that I shouldn’t wait until mid-April to do my taxes, but… Anyway, I only had eight days to write this story. This was cutting it a whole lot tighter than I like.

Often with short stories, I start with a plot point or gimmick of some sort, and then hunt and search and meander until I figure out who the viewpoint character is. No matter how much I like the plot idea, I cannot write the actual story until I hear that protagonist’s voice in my head. If I pick the wrong person, I’ve got to start over again. That wasn’t really an option with this story–I just barely had enough time to write it once, let alone rewrite it.

I decided that I could save a lot of time if I stuck with a protagonist I already knew, whose voice I could already hear, whose background I’d already sketched out. Unfortunately, the collection was going to be paranormal mysteries, and I’d only written two paranormal stories before. One was about a teenaged werewolf and the other was about Mark and Stella. Guess who won the coin toss?

Next I needed to kill somebody– this had to be a mystery, after all– so I went looking for motives. In "How Stella Got Her Grave Back," I’d established Mark as an investments counselor who met Stella while handling her portfolio. Since the economy crash was big news at the time, I figured I could work around that a bit. I’d also recently read something about the economics of keeping mistresses in New Orleans back in the late 1700s, which reminded me of the negotiations for Leslie Caron’s favors in the movie Gigi. Money, sex, vampires–who couldn’t come up with murder with those things combined?

But I needed more characters. Back to the first Mark and Stella story, where I’d mentioned two vampires who didn’t actually appear. One was Vilmos, the vampire who sired Stella. Mark was more than a little jealous of him. The other was Ramon, a vampire with a fondness for practical jokes. Mark was usually extremely annoyed by him. Since a happy character isn’t much fun, naturally I threw in both Vilmos and Ramon to bug Mark.

Once I had all those pieces, I shuffled them together, tossed in some more characters, got the mystery worked out, and started typing as fast as I could. I turned the story in a whole day early!

And yes, I’m well aware of the irony of waiting until the last minute to write a story called "Taking the Long View."

Every story I’ve read has been superb. Conjure up a spooky good read with Crimes by Moonlight.

Footnote

While we’re on the subject of good writing, pick up the June 2010 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (I know, I know: It’s only April, but you’ll be able to buy your 2011 Chrysler shortly) with Michelle Phillips on the cover. There’s a story in it that contains very clever writing and, to my impressionable ear, some of the best dialogue I’ve ever read. No, I didn’t write it, but someone else you know did. It’s called ‘Jungle Music’. If you can’t find it your bookstore, try an eBook.

GETTING CAUGHT

by John M. Floyd

Living as I do in the hinterlands, it’s always fun when a nationally known writer comes to our area for a signing. That was the case a couple weeks ago: bestselling author Harlan Coben visited Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson. I was of course in attendance, to buy his latest novel, Caught.

Coben’s body of work, including the Myron Bolitar series, is enough for a separate column, but today I’d like to talk about how much I enjoyed, and learned from, what he had to say to his audience after the signing.

What I enjoyed

I’d met Harlan a couple of times at Bouchercons, and found him to be as personable and kind as you always hope famous authors will be. That kind of honest likability was in evidence at his appearance here; the crowd loved him, and there was a packed house for both his signing and his reading.

The “reading” turned out to be the kind that I appreciate the most: he didn’t read from his book at all. Instead he talked about his novels and his characters and the way he gets his plot ideas, and even about his writing habits and his views on the writing “life.”

What I learned

According to Coben:

• Writing is more than (as we’ve often heard) inspiration and perspiration. It’s inspiration, perspiration, and desperation. Every writer, he said, occasionally feels insecure about his or her work.

Nevada Barr once told me the same thing, in different words: one day you look at what you’ve written and say Boy that’s good; the next day you think Oh my God, I’m terrible at this; the next day you think, Hey, I actually know what I’m doing, here; the day after that you think, Who would ever want to read this crap? And so on and so on. The bottom line: self-doubt is natural.

• You know a writer’s lying when you hear him say something like “I write only for myself, not for anyone else.” That’s the same thing as saying when I talk, I talk only for myself; I don’t care if anyone else hears me. The truth is, all writers want to communicate their words to others, and to have others appreciate and enjoy them.

• Rewriting can be fun.

James Michener said, “I’m not a great writer—I’m a great re-writer.” Coben agrees, and says he actually enjoys the process of rewriting and polishing and making his fiction better.

I always feel a little funny when I tell people that, and it was good to hear a hugely successful author say he shares that opinion.

• If you CAN quit writing, you SHOULD quit writing. If you’re really a writer you’ll write, no matter what.

Conclusions and observations

I found myself agreeing with just about everything he told us in his talk to us that afternoon. I could even relate to what he said about the first questions people always ask him at booksignings. Number one is “How tall are you?” (we’re both six foot four) and number two is “Where do you get your ideas?” The first is easy to answer, the second is hard.

There are, of course, several major differences between Coben and me: (1) he’s from the northeast and I’m definitely not, (2) he writes mostly long and I write mostly short, and (3) he’s just a tad more talented and wealthy and well-known than I am.

Okay, maybe “just a tad” isn’t being quite honest . . . but what did you expect? Fiction writers are supposed to lie.

Questions and suggestions

Any other Harlan Coben fans out there? If so, what is it about his novels that you like? The fast pace? The plot twists? His ordinary, everyman protagonists? (Last night I finished Caught, by the way, and it contains all those ingredients. I loved it.)

If you’re not a fan, here’s a challenge, and a prediction: read one of his seven Bolitar novels, or his ten recent standalones.

If you do . . . you will be.

OF GAMUTS AND GOBBLEDYGOOK AND TILTED TONGUES

by Steven Steinbock

I was overwhelmed with all the discussion that took place in the comment section of last week’s Bandersnatches. Comments ran the gamut from euphemized swear words to pronunciation pet peeves.

Jeff Baker rightly pointed out that the expression gobbledygook is connected to the word maverick, and by only one degree of separation. The first person to be known as a maverick was Texas lawyer, politician, and land-baron Samuel Augustus Maverick. (And I always thought it was James Garner!) Sam was so independently minded that, according to legend, he stubbornly refused to brand his cattle. The term maverick was first cited in 1867, three years before the maverick’s death.

It was Sam’s grandson, Texas congressman Maury Maverick (1895-1854), who made up the term gobbledygook to refer to incomprehensible jargon. It is said that he came up with the term while imitating a turkey. You can never trust them Texans.

The comments in last week’s column also featured Rob Lopresti’s reminder that there is no R in Washington. Rob is correct. I, too, occasionally hear people say Warshington and it drives me batty. I also find it annoying when people stress the final vowel in the word Oregon, but that’s another matter. This point about misplaced Rs brings up a linguistic issue I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I hope you’ll bear with me.

As a little experiment, please read the following passage aloud:

The quick yellow fox jumps at the lazy dog.

Try it again. Don’t be shy.

The quick yellow fox jumps at the lazy dog.

Okay, now try this one:

Robert Rowly rolled a round roll around a really red roast.

Notice any differences? As you read the first passage (which I had to alter slightly for this experiment), your mouth probably did the whole job symmetrically. Your left cheek was mirroring what your right cheek did. Your tongue licked, clicked, and danced in perfect, even balance.

If you read the second passage with a standard American accent, I’d wager next week’s column that unless you have a speech impediment, your tongue tilted sideways every time you pronounced an “R.” Go back and try it again. You’ll see that I’m right.

I’m not a real linguist by any stretch. I have no formal knowledge beyond what I’ve read and the countless hours I’ve spent playing mouth games. There may be a real linguist or speech therapist who can explain this more scientifically. I assume that there are other languages the do lopsided Rs the way we do. I gather that in England the tongue doesn’t tilt nearly as much as the American tongue, but perhaps one of our British readers will set me straight. The French and Hebrew “R” sounds are said deep in the throat, without tilting the tongue at all. The Spanish “R” is a trill made near the tip of the tongue. Japanese and Chinese “R” sounds are made with a downward flick of the tongue starting on or near the alveolar ridge (which is why there are so many obnoxious “flied lice” jokes). I don’t know why we roll our tongues when we say our Rs. Do you?

Our time is just about up. I still haven’t had a chance to share my thoughts on laconic, languid, feckless, ninny, or nincompoop. They’ll have to wait. But in my opening paragraph I used the terms gamut and pet peeve. (I also managed to use the expression euphemized swear words for which I’m giddy with pride).

I was intrigued to learn that gamut began life as a medieval musical term. Gamma ut was the first, or lowest, note in the medieval six-note musical scale. The word ut was later replaced with do, which is a good thing. Other wise Julie Andrews would be singing “Ut a deer, a female deer,” and the von Trapps might never have made it out of occupied Austria.

The expression pet peeve involves a long, sad story and will have to wait.

See you in seven.

FINDING TIME TO READ

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

If you don’t have a young reader in your home, you may not be aware that April 12th is Beverly Cleary’s birthday. The author of the Ramona Quimby series is celebrated each year as National D.E.A.R. Day. D.E.A.R. stands for Drop Everything and Read. Many elementary school students discover this activity experienced by Ramona Quimby with her class is Ramona Quimby, Age 8. D.E.A.R. Day could be any day. Dare I suggest, it might be every day? But what if we just don’t have the time to read every day?

Suppose we managed to work in a thirty minute wedge of time in our daily schedule to simply sit and read every day. I don’t think it’s that difficult. You’re doing it now. Imagine you were reading a short story or a chapter of that novel you’ve heard others talk about.

No time? Hmm, I am betting if someone knocked on our door – whether it be at home or at work – and when answering it, we found ourselves alone with a friend we haven’t seen in a while, and that friend we’d lost touch with said, “I only have a half hour before my flight, could you manage to squeeze me in for a short visit?” that we’d make the time.

What if at the door, it were one of your favorite authors? Would you say, “Gee, sorry, Mr. Bradbury.”?

Right now you’re at the computer. Maybe you’re home or sitting in a coffee shop or the park. Maybe this is break time at work. You may not have a full thirty minutes. Maybe it’s only 15. In fifteen minutes, you could be looking at anything or nothing at all. Or you could be on an adventure with Alan Treviscoe via James Lincoln Warren. Traveling through a mountain pass along with Leigh Lundin or as listening as Angela Potts solves a mystery Sheriff Charles “Chunky” Jones hasn’t yet with John M. Floyd. Rob Lopresti could be sharing a story about a man who spent the last twenty-five years of his life in a prison. Steven Steinbock could be at that door wanting to read his story from the March/April 2010 issue of Ellery Queen!

If you’re like me, the time you find for reading may be just as you begin your workday or perhaps only long after the regular grind has ended.

Here at the Criminal Brief headquarters, it’s quiet. Time has frozen for a magical thirty minutes. I think I’m going to take advantage of this time before it thaws and the real world rushes back into focus.

We have plenty of room on the cyber sofa. Help yourself and choose from the stack of books just behind you on the shelf. It’s okay, take whatever makes you the happiest to read.

In case you have a different problem and being forced to read, here’s a solution that just may work.

WHAT MY CATS WOULD READ if cats could read

by Rob Lopresti

Chloe is a tortoiseshell lady of a certain age. She is the smallest, oldest, and dominant member of the feline force.

Nonfiction: Chloe is known from the attic to the very basement as the Great Commun- icator. She never hesitates to tell us what she thinks or wants or what we should do about it. I see her as a reader of popular political texts, and since cats are natural conservatives (highly adverse to change) she would probably be reading some of the right-wing rabble rousers. It wouldn’t help her temper any.

Fiction: Since her favorite hobby is being carried around the house in a basket or cardboard box I suspect she has a secret longing for aviation fiction. I picture her reading Rob Is My Co-Pilot.

Jaffa is a mid-sized orange. He is so neurotic we recently got a spray-release container of feline pheromones – my wife calls it “kitty happy juice” to keep him calm. Less drastic than kitty Valium.

Nonfiction: Definitely gardening guides. He loves helping my wife in the vegetable patch. Well, he isn’t that much of a paws-on gardener, but he loves to be out there supervising. I could picture him whiling away the winter with seed catalogs, like some people I know.

Fiction: Definitely suspense and thrillers. Jaffa would enjoy books that support his paranoid belief that everyone who doesn’t live in his house is a positive threat. If we have guests he stays away for hours after they leave, because you can’t be too careful these days.

Bob is another orange, almost as large as the other two put together. He is – how shall I put this – not the intellectual in the crowd. If he could read and he bothered to, I think he’d stick to the sports page. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Nonfiction: Bob’s favorite sport is lying on his back looking cute as the dickens. When you reach down to scratch his tummy he turns your hand into sushi. Little things amuse little minds. Bob might enjoy books on hoaxes and practical jokes.

Fiction: Considering how much time he spends looking at the world upside-down, I diagnose a taste for fantasy novels.

So there you have it; a gift guide for my cats' birthdays. Please print it out for those special occasions.

Now, what would your pets read?

Leigh Lundin is our resident Puzzle Master, but I stumbled upon these “minute mystery” videos on YouTube and thought the Gentle Reader might find them amusing.

—JLW

THE MURDER MYSTERY GAME

by Riddlenow.com