Learn to write 101 - Kimberly Jackson (robert munsch read aloud .txt) 📗

We're also mindful of the fact that Apple is doing a lot of innovation right now, and we want your help to stay on top of all the coolness that's coming out of Cupertino.
Digital Photography, Digital Video, and Design
When Perl programmers start making mock "Switcher" commercials at our Open Source Convention, we know that digital video has hit our core audience dead center. We've gotta be there. This is also the future. And of course, once you start messing with photo and video, you'd better learn the principles of effective design for rich media.
Consumer Applications and Operating Systems
O'Reilly is not just for hackers any more. With the success of the Missing Manuals, we're looking to raise the sophistication of the average user. But even beyond the Missing Manuals, we are looking to provide Hacks, Pocket References, and Pocket Guides that will take users of consumer operating systems and applications to a new level of expertise. After all, almost everyone has to use Word and Excel at least some of the time. Knowing how to get the most out of these programs is the best revenge. We're particularly interested in developing some advanced books on Excel and Access. And, in addition, we're looking at some books on web sites that are so widely used that they can be considered "killer apps" in and of themselves.
Adobe's developer and design/dev technologies
Adobe's engagement platform continues to grow, comprising AIR, Flash, Flex, ActionScript, Acrobat, and even the Creative Suite. Many of these tools and technologies also work in conjunction with open-source standards and tools; we're interested in how developers and the growing legions of designers doing IA and development are using Adobe's products to build rich media solutions. Our titles in the Adobe Developer Library address many topics in this area, but we're always looking for more perspectives.
Information Design and User Experience
Getting the presentation layer right is critical to building successful products and services; *design* itself has a whole new meaning (Experience design? Interface design? Service design?) well beyond the make-it-look-neat mandates of a decade ago. As well, *how* we consider data and information and present it to a world of interconnected users--thus making it possible for a social web to discover innovative (or just fun and intriguing) uses for that data--is the next wave in computing. What do you have to teach the rest of the world about this growing space?
Wireless Networking
Networking has always been a cornerstone of our publishing program; Unix administrators became network administrators by reading our books on the topic. We're interested in most solid technical networking proposals, but we're particularly interested in wireless development. We want to write about the hard part of the networking infrastructure. Wireless security is also a key topic. We also want to think about the user interface implications of wireless, including new concepts like "rendezvous" and the way that peer-to-peer and wireless are going to change user expectations of how applications ought to work.
Web Services
Our Web program has covered the major protocols and topics (CGI, HTTP, HTML, and so forth), but it seems to us that we're entering an exciting new area of development: web services. We're interested in the next level, the way applications are distributed and delivered across the net. Of course, XML-RPC and SOAP, with their associated technologies, are already overhyped, but new developments are taking place every day. We believe that we really are engaged in building "an Internet operating system", and that the ways that people build services out of distributed components and data sources is going to be a major new focus of the computer industry. We expect to see more Napster-scale surprises in the future, as people figure out how to put the Internet to new uses and build new rich-interface clients with Internet back ends.
Security
Our security program started with Computer Security Basics in 1991. We've built a whole security program since then. As the Internet becomes fundamental to all business operations, and as new developments like peer-to-peer, web services and wireless come on to the scene, security is more important than ever. Sensitive data traveling over public or shared lines is a key part of most businesses, an area that causes many sleepless nights to system administrators and businessmen. We want to tell our readers how to protect their data in these powerful but dangerous environments.
Software Engineering
We're entertaining proposals for books on UML, Design Patterns, XP, Aspect-Oriented Programming, and so forth. We're also seeking to strengthen our line of C and C++ books, and we're specifically interested in proposals for a C++ Cookbook. We're also interested in programming books that go beyond just being a "how to" book, and that impart hard-won programming wisdom to newer programmers.
Bioinformatics and Other Applied Sciences
Bioinformatics is the application of computer power to problems in genomics and the life sciences. We believe that bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and other applied sciences (as well as underlying disciplines such as machine learning) are going to be one of the major growth areas for the computer industry in the 21st century. MIT talks about "the three Os: bio, info, nano." We do too.
Big Picture Technology, Social Impact, and Geek Culture
Technology is changing the world. Our goal is to document those changes not just with hands-on books for practitioners but with ones that help the general public to understand the implications of technology. This includes books like Database Nation, which serves as a wake-up call about "the death of privacy in the 21st century," The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a seminal work of the Open Source movement, and Free as in Freedom, a biography of Richard Stallman. We'd like to do selected additional books like these. Some of the titles we wish we'd published (but that went to other publishers, because we weren't actively pursuing them) include The Cluetrain Manifesto, Emergence, and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.
In addition to these single-author works, we've done a number of successful anthologies, such as Open Sources and Peer to Peer, which showcase key leaders, concepts, and projects in important new areas.
In addition to these serious works, we're potentially interested in "geek culture" titles like Smileys and User Friendly.
What We Don't Know
We know there are topics out there that, in spite of our editors' best efforts, some of you will know about before we do. Let us know what interests you, and why. Surprise us; we're insatiably curious about interesting new technologies.
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Chapter 2


My advice is about doorways, windowsills, and entrances and exits generally, but also bathrooms, boxes of tissues, sinks full of dishes, ice trays that need refilling, and so forth.


You'll find this kind of thing bunched up around your characters—just as a matter of absolute necessity, for instance, the better-left-unmentioned doors and windows have every room your characters inhabit completely surrounded, unless you've set your tale in a sarcophagus or generational spaceship or some other kind of sealed container—much as you discover such material lying at the edges of attention in your own everyday lives. The comings and goings, loosening and tightening of faucets, shittings and pissings and nose-blowings of everyday circumstances. Keep them at the periphery, in the subliminal range, unless you really want to try to make something of them, and then you'd better make it good. I'm trying to tell you to ignore transitions. Skip to the good stuff.


The sex and death, the monkey shines and money shots, the spit-takes, the epiphanies and pratfalls. The epiphanic pratfalls. What you'd remember when you forgot all the rest—forget the rest on your reader's behalf.


Write like you'd read—and notice how much you customarily skip as you read. Raymond Chandler said that when he was at a loss for a plot development he'd have a man walk through a doorway with a gun in his hand. Good advice I've heeded a hundred times or more, but it wasn't the doorway, it was the gun that might solve your problem.


Arrive without coming in, and leave without leave—leave before you leave, if you get my drift. End the scene with the glance at the door, if even the glance. And there's probably no writer who ever paused in his commitment to realism to consider how often a nose blown or a bladder emptied didn't quite rate mention.


Realism goes just so far. It's sort of like Chandler's gunman: unless you're blowing blood out of your nose, don't even reach for a tissue. A tissue full of nothing but snot is a dog-bites-man story. And so, having said his piece, the weary veteran wished the fresh novices good luck, and went out the door, shifting slightly to the left so as not to collide with the guy on his way in with a gun in his hand.


Wrimos, it’s Week Two: a notoriously tricky time in the month-long noveling process.


You’ve committed to your characters and this story you are developing. And you’ve written enough in these seven or so days that, if you’re starting to hate one or the other (or both), it feels too late to turn back.


But I come to you with good—no, great—tidings of noveling joy.


If you’re bored with, annoyed by, sick of, divorced from, totally over, or hurling tomatoes at your characters or plot, there’s no need to turn back, and zero reason to start over.


Erin Morgenstern told us in last week’s pep talk that when she got tired of her NaNo-novel, she sent her characters to the circus. And look where she is now!


This past weekend, my über-prissy main character was making me nuts with her stuffy, uptight behavior and old-fashioned judgements. She was meant to be irrepressibly optimistic; almost annoyingly joyful. Somehow she came out just annoying. I couldn’t bear to spend one more paragraph with her. And that was seriously slowing down my word count.


For the sake of my novel and my sanity these next three weeks, I quickly realized that I needed to let my MC’s freak flag fly. Within sentences, she had cast off her government-issue uniform (and with it, her insufferable inhibitions) and I had her flash-dancing to the Hair soundtrack on LP. Weird, but effective.


That alone hasn’t completely fixed the trajectory of my novel, but it sure helped me hang in there for the next 5,000 words.


If your novel has you down, don’t give up. Get kooky! Add an element (or an apple cart’s worth) of the unexpected and the outlandish to your characters and storyline alike.


We’re here to help with that, too!


This week, you’ll be getting a hefty NaNoVideo dose of Tavia’s world-famous dares. (These always provide helpful fodder for spicing up a soggy storyline.)


Author Jonathan Lethem will also be sharing his approach to keeping it interesting in novel town. (Spoiler alert: He lays down the gauntlet.)


If you're still up for even more ideas, visit the 100% non-boring Young Writers Program Dare Machine. (I just got dared to give my main character a disgusting habit. And I am going to do it! With relish.)


Word is out that the leaders over @NaNoWordSprints are laying down some epic challenges, too.


Before we write one more word of these normal, natural, rational, believable, and therefore dangerously snooze-worthy stories, let’s add some hot sauce!


C’mon, pour it on there.


I dare you.


one of my favorite subjects are food, trees, shrubs, tall grass, . . . food. But that really