Anthony J. Matthews: Self Help for Engineers and Other Almost Perfect People

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At an advanced age, I’ve decided to be a writer. I’ve had a book (OK, 24 pages of a planned 800 page tome) sitting on my computer for several months now. The idea has been germinating since 2003.

This year, I’ve had lots of impetus. My friend Peter Clothier published another book. I call him my friend – actually I don’t know him that well, although he and his wife Ellie are splendid people. We met at a college gathering he hosted a year or two ago. Peter’s a writer and blogger, and he’s been holding sessions to talk about the new book, Persist. The meeting we attended had about 40 people. Peter was very good. And I was thinking, I’d like to have enough to say to write a book and then have 40 people come out and listen to me talk about it. So now I have a goal, or a milestone to work towards.

Another push in the right direction came from my sister, who this Christmas got me a subscription to Writers Digest. That is one heck of an excellent magazine, and they know how to get you started – I received not one but three issues in the mail and it’s honestly a magazine that I’ve been reading cover to cover. Now, maybe I’ve just been starved for something creative (lifelong aerospace engineer) but I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of information in there. The most disconcerting news so far, and it has been a theme, is that apparently I won’t be instantly and automatically discovered when my book is completed – apparently there is some business and other stuff to be learned about editors, agents, publishers, queries, and so on. But again, a whole new world discovered and I’m embracing it.

The third piece of karma is the discovery of an amazing website: FeedBooks. Here, you can upload into their online editor your book, or any book it’s legal for you to upload, and they will store it and make it freely available in several different popular electronic formats. This website truly is a miracle. It has a ton of books available for free download, many original works, so worth browsing.

Another piece of encouragement found just today -this article that discusses that it’s actually easy to get published if you actually get that book finished. Is it true? Who cares – it’s an encouraging read so it’s on my list.

Finally, I researched several pieces of software for writing my novel and have settled on WriteItNow. I really like the graphics and so forth. I also own Dramatica Pro and Power Structure, both of which are fun but I never really got started with them. WriteItNow has been simple enough to get me going and actually has a lot of features and fun tools that have helped me think about the book I’m working on (only 776 pages to go, see paragraph one).

I’ve realized in writing this that I have a lot of other things to talk about so I will probably make these another post. Thanks for reading this one; it’s been a fun start.

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Self Help for Engineers and Other Almost Perfect People

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