I can’t come close to her breakdown, in part because of my day job. As you might have noticed, I’m sometimes competent as a writer, which means writing is a big part of my work life. Between e-mail, instant messaging, PowerPoint presentations, standard operating procedures, and everything else I do at work, I can’t hazard a guess. I know it’s higher than 12 words, but less than 1,000,000.

Then there’s Facebook, this blog, a blog I launched and decided to abandon about fitness, e-mails, project reports for the conference, and–if there’s time left–fiction.

Some of it’s easy. I know I write about 300 blog posts a year, give or take. The average is about 400 words a day. That’s 120,000 words–a book and a half. My current work in progress checks in at just over 50,000 words, but I’ve thrown away probably 300,000 words if you look at all the previous iterations. So that’s a baseline of about 400,000 words.

I’m not doing this to beg compliments, but cash money is always nice. I’m doing it because looking at where you spend your words can give you some guidance about what you might want to change. It allows you to create a word budget, so to speak.

Like all budgets, you have discretionary entries and non-discretionary entries. My non-discretionary entries are what I have to write for work and what I write for the conference. The discretionary entries are everything else.

Looking at my discretionary words over 2011, what might I want to do in 2012?

• Reduce the number of words spent on Facebook.
• Reduce the number of words spent on the blog. We have three permanent bloggers now, and another person who could become one very soon. Beauty.
• Reduce the number of words spent on writing fiction. That’s right. I keep writing first drafts instead of writing and revising and revising and revising. If I stick with my current first draft and revise it, the number of words I create is bound to be reduced.
• Increase the number of words I write in non-fiction outside this blog. I might want to write some essays at some point. Periodically blogging about non-writing topics could help with that. After all, I don’t want to find a way to turn Jeff Bagwell got hosed in the Hall of Fame vote into a topic suitable for a writing blog.

How about you? Do you keep track? If you were to budget your words, what would you do differently in 2012.

The Pirates who don't do anything. They just drink beer and pass out beads.

Just because SOPA and PIPA were pulled from consideration in Congress, the issues driving the legislation aren’t gone. This article from Fast Company describes the experience of David H. Springer. Dave started writing erotica so he could get access to porn sites. Apparently, he has a knack for it, because he’s published several works on Amazon under names like Oediplex and TrojanSnake. Dave found that one of his works, retitled, had been sold by someone named Luke Ethan. Luke, it turns out, is a Kuwaiti guy who won’t give his real name because the religious code in Kuwait doesn’t appreciate your first amendment right to write about sex. The Kuwaiti guy says he bought Dave’s book as part of a package after joining a hacking web site. When Dave complained to Amazon, it pulled Luke’s version of the book, but told Dave he’d have to work out the problem with the person who infringed the copyright. Luke claims it wasn’t him. It was the guy who sold it to him. In this case, the book that was plagiarized netted less than $600, so Dave’s probably not going to do much about it.

Although Amazon pulled the book, it still got its cut of what sold. For Dave, that was pennies. Overall, it’s a lot more. The law seems to favor Amazon, for now. And the Amazon agreement is seemingly contradictory. In one clause Amazon says it will pay the missed royalties, but in another, it says it is indemnified from damages. A cynical person will say that Amazon has arranged things so it can claim it’s doing what’s reasonable to combat piracy, while continuing to profit from it. Nothing is stopping “Luke” from getting another Amazon account (his was terminated) and republishing the same book under a different name. Amazon will make some money, then remove it again.

But Amazon’s opposition to SOPA and PIPA makes sense, too. If even one instance of copyright infringement were found, credit cards could be forced not to work with the entire site and it could be removed from search engines. Considering Amazon doesn’t have a brick and mortar business, that would be a big problem.

Houghton-Mifflin to Publish Amazon Imprints for Bookstores

Amazon is a direct competitor (and potential eliminator) for bookstores like Barnes & Noble. But it now has a way to get its titles in the door at its competition. Houghton-Mifflin has agreed to publish print versions of Amazon’s adult titles for distribution. The publishing company’s new imprint New Harvest will carry books by authors such as Timothy Ferriss, Penny Marshall, and Deepak Chopra. The move seems to get around a policy decision that prevented Amazon titles from appearing in B&N stores, though B&N can still refuse to stock the books. Amazon’s move to prevent others from selling its books is aimed not only at BN.com sales, but also at sales of e-readers other than the Kindle (though an eventual Kindle app for Nooks would not be a shocker).

Attitudes Toward Publishing Mein Kampf in Germany Evolve

It’s not illegal to publish Mein Kampf in Germany, but the Bavarian Government holds the copyright and tends not to allow anyone to publish. While the effective ban says much about Germany’s past, a change in attitude about publishing the book says as much about the technological advances of the present and the future. Although you can’t buy a recently printed copy in Germany, you can read it in German through Google. In addition, the passage of time and changes in attitude are softening opposition to the book. A new opinion seems to be coalescing around the idea that the book represents horrible ideas, but those ideas should see the light of day. The role of the Internet in this battle is interesting and perhaps relevant to the overall industry. According to German law, the copyright will expire in 2015, and then anyone can read it.

For the purposes of this post, we don’t care. But we can help you outline in cool and user-friendly way by using Word’s outline view.

What is outline view?

Outline view allows you to use the heading styles set in the Word document to create a hierarchical structure within a document, making it easy to list bullet points below chapters.

In the outline, you can move easily from level to level and build an informational hierarchy.

Getting to Outline View

Note: Before you start, you’re best off using a new document and using this for outlining purposes only. In most cases, building your outline into an actual manuscript is much more work than just writing the manuscript in a separate document.

To get to outline view, click the View tab and select Outline.

Using Outline View

You can move from one outline level to the next by pressing the Tab or Shift+Tab keys, or clicking the arrows in the upper left corner of the window.

You can contract a section by selecting the higher-level outline item in that section (for instance, Chapter 1) and clicking the minus button. You can expand it with the plus button.

And you can move a section up or down in your work (like moving chapter 1 after chapter two) by compressing both chapters, then selecting chapter 1 and pressing the down arrow button. The up arrow button works the same way, but moves you up.

It might be a little trickty at first, so if the outline doesn’t do what you want it to do, remember to use your undo button.

They came to mind as I faced a struggle recently and worked my mind around it. I don’t write about faith here typically–not the venue. But here, it’s appropriate. As I believe, God wants me to do my best and He can handle everything above that.

See, myeand the Lord, we got an understanding.

I love to quote movies, song lyrics, almost anything and stick them in my work. They’re called Easter Eggs. They’re homage, self-amusement, or even an attempt to build an inside relationship with your readers who notice them. They seem like good, harmless fun, if you don’t let them get in the way of the story, and you don’t completely rip someone off.

For instance, unless you’re shooting for parody, it’s probably not the best idea to close a climactic kiss off scene between your protagonist and his high-maintenance girlfriend by having him say “Frankly, dear, I don’t give a damn.” That would be a little obvious, and readers would perceive it as a big rip off.

Also, if you’re writing a fantasy story in a pretechnology period of knights and sorcerers, a reference to Jedi mind tricks isn’t likely to work.

So what are the characteristics of a good Easter egg?

1. It should be subtle and only register with a portion of your readers. If it’s too obvious, it’s not really an Easter egg. For instance, “the first rule of fight club” isn’t really an Easter egg because most people understand the reference. “Me and the Lord, we got an understanding,” would be an Easter egg because only a subset of people, usually around my age or older with excellent cinematic taste would recognize the reference.
2. It should fit the character you’re using it with. For instance, an atheist, a seven-year-old, or a devout priest wouldn’t be likely to use that kind of line. It should fit so well and be so subtle that if you don’t recognize it, you don’t realize it’s there.
3. It should be fleetingly brief. Anything long would cause issues with the flow of your story and turn from an Easter egg into plagiarism. It would also violate fair use rules.
4. It should fit your audience. If you’re writing cozies about crime-fighting house pets owned by a retired librarian, even if you could find a way to include the Blues Brothers reference without disrupting things, no one would get it.

Do you add Easter eggs? Would you? Are they a fun sideline, cheap ploy, sign of immaturity (like that’s a bad thing), unprofessional?

In fact, a plainer hat would probably be more interesting. For instance, the hat displayed below is a Brooklyn Dodgers hat I wear to exercise. As you might notice, I sweat a bit when I exercise. But this hat might be interesting if you were to just find it without knowing my backstory for it.

For one thing, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles 54 years ago. That means someone wearing a Dodgers hat must (1) be old enough to remember and idolize the team as it existed before the move, (2) have no understanding about the logo on the hat or (3) be an annoying baseball geek like me.

For another, that’s a lot of sweat in that hat. The State of New York is actually bidding on that hat because there’s enough salt to clear the roads for three weeks. Maybe it’s an exercise hat. Or maybe it’s a work hat. Or maybe it’s a hat someone wears walking cross-country to raise money for something.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to write about the origin of this hat (or another distinctive item of your choosing). Time limit: 25 minutes.

I work out with a group of people on Tuesday nights. A friend of mine named Daniel showed up at last night’s workout (I’m writing this on a Wednesday morning) and we talked about various things. At one point, he said, “I don’t know how you do the writing you do. You just sit down and do it and have something every day. It takes me forever.”

I considered telling him about my superhuman skills and moral superiority, but decided not to. Instead, I alluded to the workouts we’d just done. There’s a move called a an oblique pushup. You get in pushup position, then while you’re doing the pushup, you raise your right knee toward your right elbow.

I can do maybe two of them, and when I do it, I look like a dog with a lame back leg. Then again, I’ve only been trying to do oblique pushups once a week for maybe six weeks. It’s no wonder the people in the video can make it look pretty and powerful and I make it look like I need a trip to the vet.

I’m like that guy in the back of the picture. I got the basic stance down, but I look at the push up and…I’ve got the basic stance down.

It’s the same thing with writing. I’ve been doing this blog for almost three years. Before that, I did another blog for about six months. After you do something a lot time, you start to get better at it. And after you’ve done something you’re decent at for a long time, you can make it look easy.

So, if you’re starting, and you feel like you need a trip to the vet (or the nearest watering hole) after you try to write a simple blog post or a chapter of your work in progress, that’s okay. Next time that happens, just think of me trying to do an oblique pushup. Last week the neighbor came by and said, “You know the humane thing would be to just put him down and end the misery.”

Dude, I’m out of shape, not deaf.

It gets better, but you have to keep at it.

I like first person because it gives you insights to what’s going on in the protagonist’s head, and because it provides ample opportunity for humor. A god-like third-person narrator seems like a jerk when he notices a large person taking a third trip to the buffet line. In the hands of a skilled first-person narrator, this observation can be poignant, sad, or the kind of joke you laugh at, even though you know you shouldn’t.

If this was me, this wouldn't be clams. It would be eclairs.

The problem with first-person narration is it’s hard to keep consistent in a 300-page manuscript. There are days when I sit down and become that narrator, and the words and observations are crisp, biting, and appropriate. I hop deftly from point to point like one of those tree monkeys you used to see in Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

And some days, the tone isn’t there. It’s more analytical or it’s not as snarky and light. But maintaining that constant, entertaining internal dialog is key to a first-person narrative. The reader’s basically renting space inside the protagonist’s mind for several hours, so it better be an entertaining place.

The key is to really know your protagonist. Know his or her voice, what he or she likes or doesn’t like. What scares him, what sets him off, what he thinks is funny. If your narrator is a bastardized version of yourself, you’re probably okay–except maybe not.

Your internal narration can shift from day to day, even hour to hour. For instance, in the mornings, I have a hard time with brightness and sunshine. It’s not that I hate mornings–I really don’t–which is good because God calibrated my body to never sleep past six o’clock. But I don’t see happy things in mornings, and a light, gently sarcastic touch is hard for me at that time of the day.

If you’re writing in first person, in addition to all the other revision stuff, you need to make sure your protagonist doesn’t sound like the light rock morning deejay for fifteen pages, then like Sam Kinison for the next fifteen.

So sayeth I, the center of the universe.

According to one unidentified industry insider, Amazon may be drawing down on the Big Six.

Standard disclaimer: The opinions in this article are mine and are not necessarily those of the Florida Writers Association, its leadership, or its members.

According to Pandodaily.com, that’s the last line in a long e-mail from a publishing insider (full text here). The insider is convinced that Amazon is trying to spend the New York publishing industry out of existence, using an approach similar to the one the US used to exploit the USSR’s internal weaknesses in the 80s. Spend an enormous amount of money and make your competition bet it all to keep up.

Publishers can’t afford a $1 million royalty. Amazon can. Publishers can’t afford to take a big loss on books. Amazon can. Publishers don’t have something else to fall back on to pay the bills. Amazon does.

One could argue, as Sarah Lacy, the author at pandodaily does, that publishers are lazy, going with the sure thing, that they lack innovation. And while that might be true, if Amazon’s approach is to spend the Big Six out of existence, that could be considered a predatory business practice. And if it happens that way, the publishers, be they lazy, scared, or just stuck in an old business model that doesn’t work, will petition the Justice Department to bring an anti-trust lawsuit on their behalf.

Either way, a model in which Amazon is the path to publication isn’t healthy. Anti-trust laws exist for a reason and predatory business practices are one of them.

In its defense, Amazon is doing things traditional publishers aren’t doing. There’s a reason Seth Godin, JA Konrath, and others are going to Amazon. They’re getting more money, but that’s not the entire picture. A document was recently leaked from Hachette indicating why publishers are relevant.

Among the points, one directly challenged by the insider in the nando article, is that Hachette finds new, unique voices. It acts as a venture capitalist for writers, pledging advances to fund the writing process. They sell and distribute books and help authors build a brand and protect their intellectual property.

Konrath responded that publishers should stop saying they’re relevant (when you have to tell people–even internal people–that you’re relevant, that’s not a good sign). He says they should actually be relevant. While Konrath’s first point deals with paying authors, the rest do not. They deal with time to market, marketing, and fighting piracy. Konrath says publishers should stop because the pirates will always win (everywhere but Pittsburgh).

In other words, it wasn’t just the royalties that lured Konrath to Amazon. It was the overall business model.

This fight has many rounds left, but the pando article certainly caused a number of waves. The tea leaves seem to say that publishers must become more nimble to survive. But where there’s turmoil, there’s always opportunity. And that is good for authors or would-be authors.

Maybe President Obama and Marco Rubio were frustrated because they couldn’t use Wikipedia on Wednesday. Or maybe it was the outpouring of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion bills in the Senate. Google, Wikipedia, and many other sites were partially or totally blacked out to protest the bill. Powerful Republican Congressman Daniel Issa of California has indicated that the House Bill will not make it to the floor for a vote. Although no such statement has come forward about the Senate companion, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (sometimes referred to as ProIP or PIPA), Florida’s Marco Rubio is one of four co-sponsors who have withdrawn support for the bill. And the Obama administration has announced it will not support the bills. That having been said, many are still concerned the SOPA will rise like Spock in the non-bootlegged version of Star Trek III I watched last year. Lamar Smith, the bill’s primary sponsor, has vowed to recast the bill and to “find ways to combat online piracy.” Depending on what the next version of the bill contains, there are worse outcomes. Note: The pinheads in Washington, our elected officials waited until after I wrote this to withdraw the bills. Pinheads. If they craft a better bill, this will be interesting because the coalition in opposition won’t be there, as it was this time. 

Megaupload shut down; found and employees charged

Meanwhile the Justice Department has shut down the file-sharing site Megaupload and indicted its founder and six others with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy. Megaupload is a “locker” site which allows people to store and transfer large files. Many of those large files are movies, television shows, books, computer games, and other software. The Justice Department estimates that nearly half a billion dollars of what it calls “estimated harm” has occurred because of the site. Two other similar sites, Rapidshare and Mediafire were unaffected. As part of the action, the government also seized $50 million in assets and 18 domain names. For a copy of the indictment, click here.

The holidays were good for Penguin

Pearson, the British publisher that owns Penguin books, has raised it 2011 earnings guidance, estimating a 10% increase in adjusted earnings per share. Pearson said that rapid growth in digital products and investments in developing economies have fed the rise. Strong sales at the end of the year also fed the growth.

Disclaimer: I don’t have a Mac, and the budget doesn’t allow me to get one just so I can write blog posts, even if I could take the write-off. If you have a Mac and you want to chime in, that would be most welcome.

For the most part, fiction doesn’t include pictures. But even fiction writers sometimes don’t write fiction. And if you write non-fiction, you may have to embed pictures into your work. And since Word is the tool most people use, we’ll cover how to get a picture into Word.

Inserting an existing file

If your picture already exists as a file, you can insert it into a Word document by clicking the Insert tab and clicking Picture. After you find and select the picture file, click the Insert button.

Although you should use whatever picture format is required by the person receiving your work, Word can almost definitely accommodate it. Word supports Windows Enhanced Metafiles (.emf), Windows Metafil (.wmf), JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg), Portable Network Graphics (.png), bitmaps (.bmp), graphics interchange format (.gif, .gfa), compressed Windows enhanced metafile (.emz), compressed Windows metafile (.wmz), compressed Macintosh PICT (.pcz), Tag Image File Fomrat (.tif, .tiff), WordPerfect graphics (.wpg), computer graphics mode (.cgm), encapsulated PostScript (.eps), Macintosh PCT (.pct, .pict).

Copying and Pasting

Let’s say you have the picture already posted to a web page. You can copy it from your page and paste it into Word. The copy step will vary depending on your browser, but it’s going to be pretty close regardless what you use. Find the picture, then right click it. In Firefox, select Copy Image. In Word, place your insertion point where you want the graphic and click Paste.

Of course, if you’re doing work for money, your picture should not be a copyrighted image or you should have permission to use it.

Working with your image

After you get the image into Word, you can do a number of things to work with it.

Resizing the image

If you click on the image, you’ll notice circles on the corners squares in the middles of the image. You can click these shapes and drag them to change the picture’s size. The circles, on the corners, resize both the height and width. The squares change either the height or width.

If you want to make sure the picture keeps its shape, use the circles in the corners. If you need to change just the height or width, use the squares in the middle.

You can also change a number of properties about the picture by clicking the Picture Tools Format tab.

The highlighted icon, Position, allows you to wrap text around your picture.