Day 31: ah’Taconschientee Appointment

After my first bonus post last night I was expecting to rock the keyboard this morning with competence and verve.

I won’t regale you with the whiny Dad events, suffice to say there were events and they were Dad-like in relevance.

Let’s give it a try…

décolletage


Originally uploaded by serni

Think of the most improbable place people could live then skip two to the right and you have the ah’Taconschientee or in the suffixial patois, Shanty.

From a distance, Shanty gleams like a melting drip of a dragonfly’s eye. Nearer you make out the honeycomb of confetti-like solex clinging together and glistening in the sea sun. This could be a stalactite or an icicle.

You trim your flit to hover in a more or less safe zone back from the congested hive of flits, hangers, and sticks swooping and, well, flitting to and from Shanty. It is not hard to swap your fellow fliers for wasps and Shanty for the papery nest. The rear fans of your flit sense your curiosity and wind up a degree. You drift toward Shanty’s center of gravity.

You’re a killer. You have business here. Deadly business.

You chuckle at the melodrama and unzip your jacket to expose your décolletage.

Writing Time of the Day

I really do love the morning.

The trouble is that it comes so early in the day.

For writing it’s great.  For this daily journal it’s been suitable.

Being so close to the start of the work day puts pressure on wrapping up faster than I would like.  I suppose I could use that force as encouragement to get to the point.  To not dawdle on the page.

In the past I have operated well under such limits.  Though well should be understood to mean that I have always completed a task.  I have not always produced quality.

Other concerns I am having are for the production of quantity.  I need to get used to churning out page counts and not just paragraph counts.

Day 30: DarkRoom Review(ish)

It shouldn’t surprise me how often writing tips, advice, and strategies drift to the top of the various aggregators’ lists. The whole world seems to be writing now. Last night I came across something that I’ve hoped for for some time. I am writing in it now.

Not that you could tell.

DarkRoom is a Windows homage to the Mac application WriteRoom. On a Mac it’s a throw back to the Apple][e on a Windows machine its a throwback to DOS or WordPerfect 5.1. A text editor that robs your screen of all the distractions, replacing it with green text on black background. A CRT.

I’ve been able to replicate this look in Windows and Office for some time. You have to spend a while tweaking the environmental settings of the OS and then throw Office into fullscreen mode. I have settings for classic green and neo-classic amber. Trouble is that the plugin menu for Adobe PDF puts a kink in the screen and Office forces you to have a “Fullscreen” toggle menu. You can hide it in the bottom corner, but the magic is tainted still.

With DarkRoom you may set the background opacity down from 100%. Your text appears to be floating mid-air over all the other windows on your screen. I have it set to 75% now. It feels like a jet fighter HUD. That’s teh shit. I wonder what it looks like set to 0%.

Not so good.

First, it doesn’t go to straight 0%–something more like 10% is the nadir. Second, the text looks like it drops off opacity along with the background. Instead of appearing like my text is just weirdly overwriting the spreadsheet I have open in the window below, it looks like somethings broken on my screen.

Let’s see if I can hook you up with a screenshot…

dark room screenshot