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Oh, Brother: Selecting the Right Printer for Your Home Office Needs

August 28, 2013 0 Modern Writer v1.0 , , , Permalink 0

Cabinet InteriorMy wife and I share a home office, and recently, the All-in-One Kodak printer we purchased last year has started acting up.

Its wifi connection to our router is temperamental; and coupled with the fact that we replace its expensive ink cartridges at an alarming rate, we are looking for a new printer.

However, I have a few criteria that this new printer needs to address:

  1. As I prefer editing on paper, I need the printer to be cost effective. Since ink cartridges are a necessary evil, like gasoline, I’d like the new printer to print at a cost of three or four cents per page.
  2. I hope to have a rough draft of my novel completed sometime next year, so I’m anticipating that I will print approximately 320 pages per draft. I need a printer designed to handle lots of paper. Our current printer can only hold 25 pages at a time, so I always need to reload the paper tray before the print can continue.

Additionally, my wife has other criteria of her own:

  1. She needs the printer to also function as a reliable scanner and fax machine. (Late night runs to Kinko’s are no longer a viable option for us!)
  2. Aesthetics are important, so the printer should look at home on a bookshelf among our other possessions. (We would like to stash our printer and router and wiring out of view.)
  3. Space is also a concern to us. We’d ideally like the new printer to fit in a space measuring 17″ x 13″ x 19″. (This rules out most laser printers for us.)
  4. Price. We want to stay under $500 for the actual printer. And the ink cartridges should be reasonably priced, too, since they will be a regular expense. I don’t know how many of you have been bamboozled into buying a “cheapo” printer, like us, only to find out that its ink cartridges were ridiculously overpriced… [Shaking my fist at the sky]

After doing a little bit of research online, I have found a printer that meets all of our needs and more–the Brother Business Smart Series Inkjet All-in-One MFC-J4610DW. Note to Brother: How about simplifying your product names?

 

 

As writers, properly investing in a good printer can increase our productivity and lessen stress and frustration. (Oh, first world problems!)

What do you consider when buying a new printer? Have you found the right one for your home office needs? Please send me a comment below.

That’s it for this week. Until next time, write and print your heart out!

 

Photo credit: Thomas R. Stegelmann / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Choosing a Good Job to Sustain Your Writing Life

July 24, 2013 2comments General Advice , , , Permalink 0

The Casual VacancyWe’ve all heard of success stories like James Patterson’s rise to fame and fortune. The same can be said of other writers like Stephen King or E. L. James.

But unfortunately, for every J. K. Rowling, there are millions of working writers we’ve never even heard of.

I have a touchy topic to discuss with you today, so I apologize to you in advance if you take this the wrong way. I don’t want to discourage any of you to pursue your dreams. But I don’t think this will come as any great shock to you:

Realistically, most of us won’t be able to live strictly off of our own writing. As writers, if we’re going to be in it for the long haul, we need to find jobs that will allow us to make enough money for us to live.

So, to address this, there are two important aspects to consider when choosing a good job to sustain your writing life:

  1. A good job should allow you to create or maintain a writing routine.
  2. A good job should not drain your inspiration to write.

We all know people who work long hours and come home exhausted, too tired to do anything but watch TV, especially in this economy. I had a friend who worked as a copy editor, and when he was done with his day at the office, he didn’t want to work on his fiction. He spent all day working on other people’s manuscripts, and it sucked all the joy out of writing from him. The job wasn’t a good fit if he wanted a writing life.

I’ve heard of writers working as graveyard shift security guards, scribbling their thoughts on pads of paper, reaching for paperbacks from out of their back pockets. That could be a better fit.

From the outside looking in, my allergist has working hours that would be a great fit for the writing life. He never arrives to his office before 10:30 a.m. And he hardly ever stays past 5:30 p.m. He schedules no work on Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays. He never takes his work home with him. And he makes bank. You should see the invoices that he sends to my insurance!

The best work I’ve found for myself is in teaching college writing. The pay might not be as great as other professions, but I enjoy standing in front of a group of students and sharing what I’ve learned with them, while embracing and encouraging them to be the best writers and people that they can be. I can be passionate about it because I love writing. I can share tips and strategies I’ve gleaned from other writers, and my students appreciate my efforts because they are in the class to improve their abilities.

I particularly love teaching at the college level because my students don’t have to be there. Some high school students approach class as if they’re serving jail time. But in college, when a guy picks his desk in the back of one of my classrooms on the first day of the semester, you can’t tell me that he isn’t making sacrifices to be there. He is dedicating time and energy and resources. I’d be willing to bet that if he’s honest with himself, some part of him wants to be there, and that part of him wants to be a better writer! I love working with these students. It inspires me and energizes my writing when I am able to witness someone’s marked improvement, sometimes over the course of year or longer, if the student takes multiple courses with me.

My whole point is: Like college athletes, writers need a backup plan. You might never find work that you love in the same way that you love writing, but hopefully, you will be able to find work you love in a different way–not less–and it will afford you the lifestyle needed to write your heart out!

 

Photo credit: Little, Brown and Company

Establish a Writing Routine

July 17, 2013 0 General Advice , , , , Permalink 0

72:365 - And Your Point Is?I can’t emphasize enough just how important it is to establish a writing routine, if you haven’t already!

Years ago, while I was still a student attending writing workshops, I wrote whenever the “inspiration” struck. I’d sit at my computer and churn out sentence after sentence whenever I felt like it. And since I was still a student–and I had ample free time to do what I liked–this habit worked well for me.

Well, fast forward a few years.

Now that I’m married, I teach at two colleges, and I desire to lead a somewhat healthy social life, my writing has, at times, been placed on the back burner.

(My on-again-off-again workout schedule also plays a role in this, too! Ha.)

I thought something like, “Oh, I can get back to writing whenever–during the summer and winter breaks.” But as life goes, something always came up–trips to Disneyland or Vegas, or last minute dinner reservations, etc. And another year would pass this way, and I’d have very little writing to show for it.

I don’t regret the way spent my time over these past few years. I just wish I had established a writing routine into my lifestyle.

I have one now, which I sort of alluded to at the close of an earlier post.

I write for at least two hours, six days a week on my living room sofa, whether I read for leisure or not. The time I used to watch TV, or surf the internet, or button-mash video game controllers has been replaced with writing and reading. (For the most part, at least!) For another way of thinking about this, check out the following brilliant YouTube clip from Darryl Cross:

As people, we need to make time for the things we prioritize in life. As writers, writing should be one of them. A daily writing routine will help with this. If you haven’t already implemented a writing routine in your life, start one today.

Stay focused. Stay disciplined. And, above all else, write your heart out!

 

Photo credit: Helga Weber / Foter.com / CC BY-ND

Close Your Email and Turn Off Your Notifications!

June 5, 2013 2comments Modern Writer v1.0 , , , Permalink 0

When I was in junior high school, I enrolled in a journalism class; and by virtue of being in this class, my teacher assigned me to write an article on something mundane. The rising costs of gasoline? Carpooling? And so I sat at my typewriter, punching keys, watching their metal legs extend and retract. This was how writing was done.

I often think of those days while writing.

We live in a completely different time. Floppy disks are no longer floppy (if ever used at all!). USB flash drives have gone from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0. And to trump that, it seems like everyone utilizes cloud services of some kind. And yet, I can’t help feeling that something has been lost. In the past, a writer might have experienced procrastination as illustrated in the following YouTube clip:

 

 

Ha! But now, on top of procrastinating, writers today face new complications spurred by increases in technology.

At any given time, I can be writing for my novel, or writing for this blog, and I can receive a friendly ring from Apple Mail, or an alternate chime from LINE. Instantly, my mind stampedes. Who wrote me? What did they say? If I divert my concentration from my writing for one second, it’s game over. And most of the time, it is. So I can’t emphasize enough, in this day and age, when we need to be writing, we need to close our email and turn off our notifications!

Recently, I’ve started writing immediately after just waking from sleep. Before I ever speak to anyone, using my logical mind, I try my best to carry my dream state directly to my writing. (This is also more easily achieved late at night.)

NetbookAnd I use a netbook. This is important. I use it strictly for word processing. For me, my MSI Wind u100 is only psychologically associated with writing.

After I’ve finished my writing for the day, I eat breakfast and hop on my desktop computer to receive my regular email and notifications. And then, and only then, do I begin the rest of my day. I figure nothing is so important that it can’t wait for me to finish my word count for the day.

 

I’ve found this strategy to be really effective for me. I hope sharing it with you will help increase your productivity, too!

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve that you’d like to share? If so, please post a comment below. 😀

And, as always, write your heart out!

 

Photo credit: Sergey Galyonkin / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

Letters to a Fiction Writer

May 15, 2013 8comments Books on Writing , , , , Permalink 0

Letters to a Young Fiction Writer

Recently, one of my students asked me if I could refer him to a few good books that would help him improve his stories. At the time, I remember referring him to Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Writes a Story and Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. (So as not to get off topic, I’ll blog about these two in future posts under this category.) But I’m not sure if I ever mentioned Frederick Busch’s Letters to a Fiction Writer.

Letters to a Fiction Writer was one of the first books I read on the craft of writing fiction and “the writing life.” I’ve read and reread dogeared passages from it through the years for comfort or inspiration. So it only seems appropriate that I’d share a quick overview of this book with you in hopes that you might be comforted and inspired by it, too.

In Rosellen Brown’s “You Are Not Here Long,” she writes:

The poem, the story, the novel in the hand, they succeed or fail on their own terms, by being fully what they intended to be or not–and ultimately what they wanted to be, how large, how challenging, how original, will be judged as well. Whether they sell–and if you write books, how well they sell–is so little correlated (if not inversely correlated) with quality that in the end it is only your sense of satisfaction that will define your success.

I find this particularly comforting, especially when I receive rejection letters or emails. Janet Turner Hospital addresses these rejections directly in “Letter to a Younger Writer Met at a Conference.” She writes:

When rejection slips or rotten reviews come in, I tell [students]: have one stiff drink, say five Hail Mary’s and ten Fuck-You’s, and get back to work.

LOL. I love that quote!

Lastly, in “To a Young Writer,” Joyce Carol Oates (one of my favorite writers) writes:

Don’t be discouraged! Don’t cast sidelong glances and compare yourself to others among your peers! (Writing is not a race. No one really ‘wins.’ The satisfaction is in the effort, and rarely in the consequent rewards, if there are any.) And again, write your heart out.

This last quote speaks to the theme of this entire blog. It’s my hope that you write the fiction that you need to write, the stories that come from somewhere deep down. Don’t let anyone or anything stop you! Write your heart out!

 

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