Text Ten

Ten Things to Help with Your Text

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

1. Recover your keystrokes with Emsa Save My Work freeware.

2. The freeware version of iDailyDiary is a note-taking/journaling program has a rich text editor that can insert graphics, URL, Hypertext links and links to other diary pages.

3. Keep your text in user defined categories with Wicked Orange's Notes freeware.

4. Paddy freeware (scroll down) is "a small text file viewer with some configuration options for colors and fonts" that "can also be used with Linux type files."

5. PDF Text Reader freeware converts .pdf files to .txt files.

6. Extract text from .pdf, .doc, .rtf, .chm, and .html files with Text Mining Tool freeware.

7. Text Crawler freeware allows you to "instantly find and replace words and phrases across multiple files and folders."

8. "Easily split a selected text file into any number of text files" with Text Split freeware.

9. Tom's eTextReader freeware allows you to read text files onscreen in book format, select window size and font size/styles, edit the text and bookmark it.

10. Merge multiple text files into a single file with TXTCollector freeware.

"The first book is free" -- for the readers out there, author/playwright Richard Engling has offered his SF novel Body Mortgage for free download here.

Character Quotes

I've been trying to come up with a decent tag line for Evermore for a while now. I'm pretty happy with what I've put together for promo, but I need a better line than the lame very nice one the publisher put on my cover. It's not a book that wants to be tagged, for some reason.

I thought about using a memorable line of dialogue, or something new versus a direct quote from the book. But when I tried to summon Evermore's protagonists back from wherever all my characters go after the book's finished, Jayr put out a Do Not Disturb sign and Byrne triple-bolted the door. Ingrates.

Which made me wonder what the other characters in the series would do to help me promote the novel. Wouldn't it be great if we could get quotes from them?

This novel will make you forget all of your troubles. Or I will. -- Michael Cyprien

You can't pass up this story, mon ami. You'll make me crazy again. -- Thierry Durand

I'm a physician, not a publicist . . . all right. Buy the book before she sends me back to Ireland, will you? -- Alexandra Keller

You're going to burn in hell for touching this. Kidding. Maybe. Go ahead, I'll pray for you. -- John Keller

Buy the book, sil vous plait, before my master sends Alexandra back to Ireland. -- Phillipe of Navarre

Pick it up. Now. Don't make me take off the gloves. --Lucan

Your turn: what quote(s) would your character(s) give for one of your stories?

Catch Up

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, I figure you're all crazy about me now.

I do apologize for my absence. We are all well. Aside from a plethura of technical problems, there are things that come before PBW, like family and work, and for the last week they needed me to be elsewhere. Tom has been upgrading my security software and tinkering on some other things behind the scenes (for which I am very grateful.)

Posting will continue to be sparse as I clean up and catch up here. I hope to have things back on schedule in a week or so. Thanks for all the e-mails, comments and other demonstrations of concern.

So what's up with you guys? Anyone have any news from their corner of the planet?