Billy who has made "finding interesting and entertaining stuff for me to look at" one of his life's works, found me this application for writers.
It's a free download for the Mac at http://www.ommwriter.com/en/
In some peculiar way, I like it. OMMWRITER provides a clean, white environment for writing. No menus. No nothing to disturb the muse.
(You can also choose eggshell or gray. Or grey. Isn't the English grey just some how grey-er, all soupy with fog and sorrow? I just taught the English spelling to Spellchecker. She's weeping, just a bit, at the sorrow and fog of grey. )
But I digress. The app also provides a landscape of snow and spindly winter trees that frankly I do love. It reminds me of the cover of Tinkers by Paul Harding, the Pulitzer winner of 2010 which you should read. (Mini review!)
AND, as an extra added bonus, OMMWRITER lets you select a pleasant New Agey music of bells or chimes. Or blessed silence. I do enjoy the musical bells and I do find them restful, but if you were writing something long, I'd guess that about two hours into the trance of bells, you'd suddenly wake up and slam your laptop up against the wall. I guard against that kind of overreaction to extreme bell exposure. I love my laptop.
There's an article at http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/09/writers-software-month-ommwriter-d-na/ that describes this app in more detail. October is Writers' Software Month. I did not know this. I get the feeling that writers are this amazing, growing demographic that commerce is reaching out to. That's nice. But I myself would rather be reaching out to the demographic Readers. Rather be on the Reaching End of commerce, if you get my drift.
At any rate, here's my first quick take on OMMWRITER (I wonder if it always has to be UPPERCASE.)
It's ... just for fun. I would never commit a novel, even a novel I might be writing at the rate of 1667 words per day and under the influence of La-La-Go-Away Juice, to something that plays music and is saved as a text file. Phillip Roth, for example is not writing his next novel using OMMWRITER. His lip is curling, even now. Phil, stop hanging out at my blog. Go. Away. Write something.
But if I were doing a rough, just for fun, kind of outline for my NaNoWriMo adventure -- pre-outlining is permitted, perhaps even encouraged -- I might enjoy doing so on a clean, snow-covered, tree-lined page with the sound of distant bells.
You?
So funny that you bring up OMMWriter. Yesterday I had the opposite of zen-- facing the page. First thing in the morning, our internet connection goes haywire, and one by one, every computer in the household (but my Dell laptop) goes down. Mid afternoon, I no sooner finish my post (in Word!) all the while ignoring an anxious pop-up message from Microsoft that I have upgrades waiting -- when the phone rings. Chatting for a few minutes, I turn my back on my Dell (never do that!) -- and on its sneaky own accord, it shuts down and reboots, and returns my word doc minus 6 paragraphs of the draft. Jeeez, I never lose text, but somehow yesterday it vanished. (What happened to autosave? Dunno) Anyway, with the text of the post in the one hard drive left (still in my head) I reconstructed my 750 words. Give or take. And wouldn't you know it, with the "upgrade," the Dell lost its internet connectivity, too. M just happened to be out of town with the password to our network, so I ended the day -- online at Carribou Coffee down the street. 9:00 pm - I sure would have loved to have heard some of those bells and chimes. . .all afternoon and into the evening.
ReplyDeleteRe-reading your post, did I just detect the phrase "but I digress?" And did you not see that same phrase in my post today? How ever did we both digress yesterday? Bummer. And if I pulled it out of your post, it was unconscious, I promise, as I was rewinding the entire spool of words in my memory to retrieve and reconstruct my own lost draft.
Ommmm. Mmmmm. Ohwell. Not boding well for me on the chances of getting to 1667 words a day for 30... (sounding panicky again, am I not?)
Oh I think we should both digress with impunity.
ReplyDeleteI hate connectivity snafus with a purple passion. And I growl loud and long about updates, but that sounds like a worse than usual bad day to me. You were relentless to go out in search of wireless. But lucky to have a Caribou so close! Jealous of that, I am.
So --- I'm in suspense -- are you outlining madly to chimes and bells? Have you been incubating a new story? On Sunday night, I thought - in the fog, I could see a shadow of a story passing before my eyes. Monday morning, not so much. The vision vanished, squinting in the light.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, if I sweep all this junk into a pile, I could empty it into a dustpan and call it 50,000 words, but a novel?
Novel. Such a noble word.
Heh, heh, heh?
ReplyDeleteAnnie, that's the last I've heard from you since you threw down the gaunlet: to write to the finish of 50,000 words. (And that after I spent the night in rewrite hell for nothing more than a post on a blog. Ohwell, that's the way the cookies crumble out here on the web)
So, are you roughing it just for fun, outlining a new adventure, incubating your story for NaNoWriMo? I trust you are in deep concentration at your computer, tuning out noise and nonesense like the commentary here - marshalling your energies for the month ahead. Write on. "Write strong."
(mmmm, Do I hear a call for black & white wrist bands?)