Some of the news this week threatened to throw me into the holiday weekend on bit of a downer. First there's the "Obama Running To The Center" news cycle. It was to be expected, but during the heady days of primary Obamamania I and much of his liberal base conveniently forgot little things like his support (albeit limited) of the death penalty and his, shall we say, "nuanced" take on gun control. I was headed toward despair when he came out in favor of Bush's faith-based initiatives plan, but it only took a visit to BlySpace to settle my nerves.

Then there was the LA Times piece on the lawsuit between the Tolkien estate and the recently-deceased New Line Cinema. I'm not a huge fan of the Tolkien estate (J.R.R. explicitly created Middle Earth for other writers and artists to use as a mythology, but his son Christopher has stingily kept the names, places, and tales strictly guarded for his own painfully pedantic purposes), but for them to have not received a penny of the billions of dollars raked in by the film trilogy is... well, there's no adjective big enough to describe the injustice. (I find it telling that, although a picture of the Professor appeared in the print edition, Tolkien remains anonymous in the online edition; presumably Elijah Wood makes for a sexier page.) As both a former producer myself and a playwright and screenwriter who's worked with some skanky money men, it never to ceases to amaze me how rare it is to find a producer who truly respects the writer. Many give lip service; few put their money where their lips are. I'm glad to say that my experience the publishing industry is a breath of fresh air. My agent Ellen Levine at Trident and editor Cary Goldstein and publisher Jonathan Karp at Twelve Books all define the word "integrity."

Speaking of integrity... I'm thrilled to note that my good friend and great comedian/raconteur Nick Revell has begun regular blogging for The Huffington Post. Think Jon Stewart about to start a pub brawl through sheer intelligence. This is a very good thing for the world.

Finally, I've had a couple of friends point me to a recent story about the long-term therapeutic effects of magic mushrooms. This comes as no surprise; it merely backs up the very real research that my fictionalized Timothy Leary spouts in MY NAME IS WILL.

That little tidbit heads me into the holiday -- and my book launch next week -- on a happy note. Have a safe and celebratory Independence Day weekend!

I want to proselytize a bit about a piece of software. Sometimes, software truly opens a door in the mind, makes you do something you couldn't or wouldn't do before. I only became a writer when I got my first Macintosh with Word 2.0 installed; I can't imagine writing, as both of my writer parents did, with ribbon, ink, and carbon paper. I didn't know I could, or wanted to, learn to play the piano and write a song or two before GarageBand came out, or process my own photo images before Photoshop. Software can change the paradigm.

Such a piece of software is Scrivener, a dedicated writing application that is as far beyond Microsoft Word as Word is beyond the wax tablet and chisel. Designed for writers by a writer, it works the way a writer thinks. The features are so many and so different from paragraph-and-page based word processing apps that it's hard to describe here. Scrivener assembles your work as a "project" with an iTunes-like sidebar organizing the project into different folders and documents. There are default folders depending on the type of project template, but these are entirely customizable. The current novel I'm working on, for example, I've divided into Book One, Book Two, and Book Three, with separate folders for each chapter and separate documents for each scene. There is also a folder for "research," which is a boon: you can drag and drop nearly any image, jpeg, pdf, website, or document that you might refer to, and have it at your fingertips right in the same program. A split-screen feature lets you view, say, a Google Maps street-level image of the streets your character is navigating in one half your screen, while writing in the other. The text editor doesn't really care about "pages" or other formatting until you wish to print or export to another program, at which point it offers all sorts of handy options like converting all m dashes to double dashes, or italics to underlines, entering hash marks to divide scenes, replacing double spaces after sentences with single spaces, and the like. This is liberating, as it keeps you focused on cranking out pages instead of whether the margins are lining up prettily.

You can view your project several different ways. The "Full Screen" view takes just the chunk you're working on and blacks out everything else on your computer, giving you a completely distraction-free writing space. The chunks of your project can also be viewed in either "Corkboard" mode -- a virtual pin-up environment (you can even color code the pushpins to represent different types of, or drafts of, your work) and an "Outline" mode that's better than all but the most dedicated stand-alone outlining programs. And this is the best part... move a chunk of your project in Outline view, or the Corkboard, or in your folder structure in the sidebar, and it moves in your text document, too... and vice versa. Anyone who's spent a day revising an outline to match what was actually written before being able to continue working knows this is a boon. I also love the "statistics" feature, a floating window that not only tells you your word count but lets you set targets, both daily and overall: 80,000 words for a novel say, and 1000 words for daily output, and gives you a status bar to let you know how you're doing. There is so much more: keywords that let you easily track characters or themes, highlighting features, annotations, a killer versioning tool that lets you quickly take a "snapshot" of your current version before embarking on a dubious "what if" scenario, screenplay commands based on Final Draft, autosaves practically every millisecond so you never lose work... too much to list here.

On the tiny downside, the export options can be a little daunting, and there is a bit of a learning curve because it's so different from other word processors. But if you're a writer you owe it to yourself to check it out. After all, you had to learn to throw away the wax table and chisel when you bought a word processor, too.

There's a terrific demo video on their website. The free demo version is fully-functional, allowing thirty launches before requiring you to buy a license... $39.95 for as many machines as you use. Hell, you might have your novel done after 30 launches.

Tags: Scrivener, Computers, Technology, Writing

I'm thrilled to report that I'm back online after a few months of dealing with everything-but-the-Internet: death, taxes, broken pool motors, aborted forays in real estate. Fuck it all, I now (finally) have a new office and will be writing, writing, writing. I'm also thrilled to report that favorite political blogger is back online. For progressive political opinion with a suburban punk rock mom edge, there's no better place on the web than Bly Space. I'm proud to say that my anonymous-lest-she-become-the-victim-of-a-vast-right-wing-conspiracy (does anybody really deny that they exist?) has inspired me to blog again, and I hope vice versa.

Look for a new post on LA Food Crazy soon, too.

Speaking of politics, I might as well link here to an op-ed piece I wrote in the LA Times a few years ago. It was actually written to run on Shakespeare's Birthday (April 23), the day after the Pennsylvania primary, but the Times wanted to run it right away. It'll make more sense when you know that.

I'm back in LA after a week doing some final fact checking for my book in Santa Cruz and Berkeley. Santa Cruz is BIZARRELY unchanged. Students literally look as if they haven't changed clothes or hairstyles since 1979. Berkeley was amazing. I've occasionally said I might have erred in transferring there from Santa Cruz, that Santa Cruz was better for an undergraduate education. But I remember now why I transferred. Santa Cruz was already making me feel isolated after 24 hours, and Berkeley is not about the classroom experience. It is still, of all the places I've been, the most intellectually and socially stimulating environment in the world, always on the cutting edge of everything. And now it has the added attraction of boasting the #2-ranked football team in the nation! I came away energized, inspired, and in possession of a Bears baseball cap.

I'm currently posting a series of pieces on LA Food Crazy about New York style pizza in LA.

Having spent the past weeks loading up on social networking sites... I'm now available on myspace, linkedin, facebook, etc.; I confess I have little or no idea what to do with it all. I mean, does one really need ALL these cliques? Even I high school, I only had ONE clique, and that was more than enough. Is there a site called "cliqueme"? Just wondering.

If anyone has ideas for what they'd like to see on MySpace or elsewhere, let me know!

I'm in the final round of edits on My Name Is Will. Should be seeing artwork soon, probably next week. I'm going on a little fact-checking trip to Santa Cruz and Berkeley next week, visiting pet-friendly hotels with the Cutest Dog in the World, Orson. And look for a new Food Crazy post, very soon.

I'm beginning to think about my my next novel, too. I've found a program called FreeMind that I'm using to organize my thoughts. But more importantly, it's time to get back in the writing rhythm. This means waking, eating, showering, dressing, and knocking out work before posting, surfing, answering e-mail. It also means scheduling break time. It also means blogging, to get the fingers moving. Here are my fingers... moving.

I'm trying to keep myself in Back To School mode. I tidied up my office, filed my files, paid my bills, and now I'm diving into the last round of revisions on MY NAME IS WILL. This is the highly un-glamourous portion of the process. People are shocked when they hear my book won't be out for a year. Why does it take so long, they wonder. Getting an editor to acquire the book for a publishing house is just the first step. Said editor then has to convince publishing house it's worth promoting, excite the sales force, make it a priority. Copies of the book go out to opinion makers for jacket cover blurbs. (I've already got a great one from a somewhat surprising source, given our respective politics... Christopher Buckley, editor of Forbes, author of Thank You For Smoking and former George HW Bush speechwriter, has called WILL "witty, hilarious, and brilliant"). I have a passel of letters to write requesting permission for use of various song lyrics and the like that are used in the book. I've been updating websites, writing bios, etc. And then there are the revisions to the book itself. Suddenly, July 2008 is looking all too soon!

On another front... my friend Michelle sent me to a website this morning which left me a little shocked. Did you know that the No Child Left Behind Act has a provision that gives the military access to records of teen and pre-teen students, including mental health history and home telephone numbers, for recruitment purposes? Yeah, why "leave 'em behind" in our schools? Instead, we can draft 'em while they're down about breaking up with that last girlfriend, send 'em to Iraq and leave 'em there. Michelle supports an organization called "CAMS" -- Coalition Against Militarism in our Schools. This is the way to truly leave no child behind.

Today I'm launching my new website. Between adopting RapidWeaver, to which I am now officially addicted, and my new webserver at Machighway, I hope to have a more dynamic and regularly updated site. I hope you enjoy. In addition to my food blog at L.A. Food Crazy, I'll be posting here on whatever tickles my fancy. Politics, Shakespeare and the process of publishing my first novel and writing the second one will surely be regular topics.

Note to self: do not take Ambien before posting.