(In Teresa Peschel’s “Fed, Safe, and Sheltered,” she talks about the best ways to efficiently heat and cool your house. In this essay, she has more advice on the best way to use vents and other openings to make your home comfortable.) When you want to vent out your house, ensuring a complete air exchange […]
In the process of researching material for volume 6 of the 223B Casebook project, I came across some of Sherlock Holmes art by Frederic Dorr Steele. These three can be found online, but some of others are new to me. They certainly aren’t available at the size I’m displaying them. I’ll share some more next […]
When you’ve met your writing goals, why not take a break and catch up on the best advice from authors? The goal here is not to flood you with tons of information, but compile a curated list of information that I’ve found helpful. Stuff that can clarify this seemingly chaotic industry, or provide techniques and […]
Last week, we talked about creating a worldbuilding wiki to store information. We started with a simple organizing structure using Word’s file and folders, and a slightly more complicated version using OneNote.
Now we’ll look at Scrivener and some wiki programs.
In this post, I want to talk about worldbuilding wiki-style. That is, a way to be proactive when it comes to taking on a massive project such as a space opera series or fantasy trilogy. But first, I want to talk about the bigger skill writers should learn to acquire, and to do that, I have to take a side path.
I love ceiling fans. They let me move air around quietly with a minimum of dust. They don’t get in the way since they’re attached to the ceiling rather than taking up precious floor or counter-top space. They don’t have to be stored during the off-season, taking up valuable space. They don’t have to be […]
I’m still a bit gob-smacked about this news from the recent Baker Street Irregulars weekend, even though it has nothing to do with me. It’s just that I’ve never personally known a member of that august group of Sherlockian superfans before. The speed of going from a Bacon number from infinite to 1 can be […]
In the long term, you can manipulate the temperature of your home’s interior by adding insulation, weather-stripping, planting trees, reroofing with white shingles, adding glass to let in sun, and installing wood-burning stoves. Doing these things will let you better keep the heat outside or inside (depending on the season) so you and your family […]
Part of the fun of working on the 223B Baker Street series is discovering connections among disparate people. Not a direct link, more like a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” situation. So this is today’s “Six Degrees of Sherlock Holmes,” in which we find a connection between Holmes, Charles Dickens, and Rudolph Valentino. It passes […]
When you turn your writing into a business, you need productivity hacks. That’s just what happens when your fluffy dreams get smacked by the damp trout of reality. When writing is still a hobby you indulge in when you feel like it, you imagine what it would be like to be granted the freedom to […]