Electronic Notebooks

Join the authors and friends of Not Your Usual Suspects for an occasional series of posts about their world of reading, writing and publishing.

Short and sweet, hopefully both informative and entertaining - join us at I-Spy to find out the how's and why's of what we do.


TODAY'S POST: I-Spy Paperless Notebooks...

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A few years ago I read an article about an attorney who had gone paperless in his law practice. The attorney used an electronic notebook: the Microsoft OneNotebook program. Intrigued, I checked my laptop when I got home. Lo and behold, OneNotebook was listed in my Microsoft programs. At first, I set up notebooks to contain research for a  book I was writing at the time.  Rather than filling notebooks/folders with printed material, I copied and pasted online material into labeled sections.

At the conclusion of the book, I realized I didn't have a mountain of paper to file or toss.  Hmmm.  When I began my next book, I decided to set up a full blown electronic notebook. They function like any other paper' notebook. You can have as many sections as you wish; above is a screenshot of the tabs I used for Her Dark Protector. 

Same thing for subsections; have as many as you need:

I now have an electronic notebook containing all the common templates I typically used, including a plotboard. 

The beauty is the 'page' is as wide or long as you need. The section grows with added material.  Photos can be copied as well.  Here's one of the research pages where I pasted a photo of the motorcyle ultimately used in Her Dark Protector.

An obvious benefit of an electronic plotboard is the portability. Grab the computer and go; all your research, charts, etc. at your fingertips. Use different colors, fonts, etc. to help highlight turing points and POV's. As I write/review/revise a manuscript, I'll note them like below.

Whenever I run across an intreresting online article about writing or other frequently used topics, such as criminal investigation, I send it to a special topic notebook.

I've become such a believer in the digital notebook that I now use them at work. With Outlook I'm able to send documents to the case notebook.  Have a document or pdf file you wish you could add to the notebook? One of the print options [at least in Microsof] is to send the document to OneNote.

Don't have Microsoft?  I googled and there are a number of electronic software progams available. In this digital day and age, an electronic notebook is a match made in heaven for organizing writing. Besides, think of all the trees being saved.

:) Carol Stephenson

Award winning author Carol Stephenson lives in southeast Florida with her beloved Shih Tzu. She's an attorney by day and author by night. She's best known for her emotionally drawn, hard-driving romances.  You can keep up with Carol and her books on her Web site at www.carolstephenson.com.       

FUTURE POSTS will cover:

Kindlegraph / the art of research / writing male/male romance / rejection and writer's block / building suspense / writing love scenes / anti-piracy strategies / audio books / interviews with editors and agents / using Calibre.
We welcome everyone's constructive comments and suggestions!

The wonders of technology

This wasn’t my original date to post here but I had an emergency and the lovely Anne Marie came to my aid and swapped. Thank you, Anne Marie!

My emergency? I’m in the midst of a renovation project and while the builders were knocking my sitting room about, my phone line vanished in a huge heap of rubble. All I was left with was a tiny black cable coming into the house from outside. No landline, and no broadband.

No internet connection other than on my trusty iPhone? I’m old, very old, so I should know better, but it was enough to bring me out in a cold sweat. 

When the engineer finally arrived to sort out a new connection, he obviously noted my stress levels and remarked, somewhat sympathetically, that no one copes well without an internet connection. He went on to tell me how he’d tried to explain to his young son how we contacted friends in the days before we all carried phones around with us. He explained that if you needed to phone your friend in the evening, you had to make prior arrangements to ensure said friend was at home to take the call. Young son couldn’t grasp this concept. “But what if he’d gone out?” he asked. “Then you’d tramp the streets looking for him...”. It’s like the boy asking his dad how people emailed each other before the internet was around.

Here in the UK, a TV program called Tomorrow’s World was aired from the 60s for almost 40 years. It was all a bit space-age for me but I occasionally watched it. I remember one episode when the presenter confidently declared that, one day, we’d store our music on something the size of a thumbnail. I looked at my towering stack of vinyl, shook my head at such stupidity and switched off the TV. Hmm. Now I have thousands of songs stored on something much, much smaller. And backed up in the cloud, of course.

As old as I am, I still take all this wonderful technology for granted. Until it isn’t there.

Do you take it for granted? Do you long for a rest from the internet?  Does any of our modern-day technology astound or bother you?

I often think about my dogs as they walk around with my name, address and phone numbers recorded on small microchips beneath their skin. I’m never sure if this is wonderful or a step too far. I also wonder how long it will be before we’re all walking round with microchips beneath our skin…

And while we’re talking technology, here’s my new phone line, clinging precarious to stone that’s been there since 1875 - and will hopefully still be there when the builders have done their thing. :) 

Driven to Distraction

by Janis Patterson

For my birthday last year The Husband gave me a wonderful new car. It has special lights, all kinds of gizmos and enough electronics to run a small city. I love it. I absolutely love it.

As a writer, I hate it, and all like it.

You see, my new chariot isn’t all that unusual. There were a lot more goodies we could have added but didn’t, but even the few we got are enough to make modern cars marvels for their owners – and hell for a mystery writer.

Who hasn’t read (or written) a mystery where the hero or heroine is in a car trying to get away from the bad guys, so they turn into a convenient driveway or forest or whatever, put on the parking brake, turn off the lights and lie down across the seat to make the car appear invisible or at least parked – but of course keeping the engine running for a fast getaway. Once the bad guys speed past, our hero backs out, and speeds in the opposite direction – usually without turning on the lights until they’re way off the bad guys’ radar.

Just try that in a modern car. Lights go on when you just unlock it or open the door. More lights go on when you start the engine. There is no way to just stop the car, engine running, without the thing being lit up like a Christmas tree. Even after the engine is turned off there are still lights, usually on a timer probably so the driver can reach his front door safely – all of which is great for a real life driver, but a trial for a mystery writer.

Worse, even if you can get around the light problem in one way or another, there are the various forms of electronic assistance programs, which are really little more than trackers. In real life they can be wonderful, as in the case of a young friend of mine who recently had a nasty car accident. Before her car had stopped spinning the assistance program was activated, with a voice asking if she needed the police or an ambulance. For her – and all real people – I delight in such life-preserving technology.

As a writer… not so much. How can I have my victim stuck in the bottom of a ravine so long that it can’t be ascertained whether his demise was the result of accident or murder? Or however I want to kill him? I can’t always have my characters driving old cars without all the electronic bells and whistles, and I don’t always want to write in an era before this.

I’m sure technology has always been a trial for writers. Probably some poor writer bemoaned the loss of the buggy whip and the (relatively) speedy pace of the Model T, to say nothing of the instant communication of the hand-crank telephone. Nothing changes, really – just the props. No matter how we try to adapt, how we twist our stories, there’s always a bigger, badder bit of technology just waiting to challenge us. But as writers we will win. We can always out-think a machine.

At least, I hope so.

Just don’t get me started on cell phones!