Horror! The last typewriter factory in Britain has just closed its doors. This month, without a clatter of protest, the west has succumbed to Microsoft Word. Courtesy of MorgueFile How can this fateful event help us to write better stories? Please allow me a moment to digress... With the demise of IBM Selectrics and their manual predecessors, we must finally say goodbye to those days when our every ms was as finely worked as a medieval palimpsest. Do you remember that era? Our pages were weighted down by correction fluid, stained by coffee and smudged by erasers. (Grey ones for top sheets, pink ones for carbon copies.) Fast forward to the present day. The typewriter is dead. So what? Its demise is not just a trivial footnote in history. It marks a radical change in the way you and I think. Up to the 20th century, writers had a tangible and direct relationship with their work. Everything came out of the tip of a pen. Writing was a sensual experience. Typesetters went bl...

Please welcome Terry Odell, our regular 3rd. Tuesday guest blogger. She has some good tips about using the Find/Replace function in Word. Thanks Terry. The theme this month here at the Blood Red Pencil is technology. Anyone trying to become a writer these days has to accept that learning to use a computer is part of the deal. Whether or not you prefer to write your manuscript longhand on legal tablets, eventually, you're going to have to get all those words entered into some word processing program. I'm hardly a technology wizard. I can remember our first computer (An Apple II) and breaking out into a sweat any time I had to do anything other than type words. I knew I'd hit a wrong key and either lose everything or blow up the computer. But as the industry standards change, we have to be willing to change with them. And once you're committed to using a word processor, you find that it does all sorts of nifty tricks . In fact, I have trouble writing with a p...

I have a truth to admit; I kept telling myself and others that I wanted to get a tablet so that I could do more writing. That wasn't really the case. First and foremost on my things to do on a tablet was to play games. Since I purchased my ASUS Transformer , the bulk of what I do on it is play games...and watch Netflix. Once I bought the keyboard, however, I started to think about my writing again. I began downloading apps every chance I got, picking up note taking/writing apps, such as SuperNote , Evernote , Springpad , and Catch . While I enjoy each of these apps and the ASUS came with Polaris Office , there are three specific apps that I've been using a lot and that help me to get my story ideas (and the actual stories) down on paper . Mindjet In my initial foray into working on a story, my mind is scattered. As such, writing linearly doesn't suit me. I need something visual, something I can move, something that shows me my idea and not just shows me the tex...