A long time ago, on the advice of my husband, I switched PDF readers from Adobe Reader to Foxit.
It sucked. Maybe it was the way they had the ad system at the time, I don’t know, but it didn’t pull up the documents I needed without dragging its feet.
So, I stopped using it.
Time went by, and then, due to a recent infatuation with open source resources for small businesses/desktop publishing, and a frustration with most open source PDF readers, I decided to look at Foxit again.
Not only did the updated version work, it worked beautifully! And it has the capacity for creating PDFs! I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m curious to see what kind of product it creates and if it will work better than Scribus, which has impressed me quite a bit.
Enormous momentum propelling me forward, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in ages. I changed my browser.
See, Chrome has always used up too much CPU. I kept telling myself it was so nice to have everything so integrated, but it was getting to be too much. Finally, I switched back to Firefox and haven’t looked back. Yes, Firefox is a memory hog, but that’s actually a good thing. It means I have to close the browser on occasion, and I think that’s the only way I managed to get any writing in today, lol.
And that leads me to my final topic.
I’ve learned that I’m going down the wrong path, writing-wise, when I can’t focus on the story. If my thoughts won’t come together, or I’m struggling to figure out the point of a scene, it’s better just to chuck it and write something else.
Of course, this means that I’m tossing out a couple days worth of writing, but really, I’d rather have that than meander through a pointless scene that’s going to have the same information later in something much more meaningful with a lot more action. So, I’m cutting the scene.
It’s not wasted time. If I didn’t write scenes like that, I wouldn’t realize what worked and what didn’t. I wouldn’t see my own signs that I was getting bored and to try something else. I would just think that, well, writing is work and keep your butt in the chair and never really think about having fun because writing is HAAAAAARD and all artists suffer for their art.
Forget that.
So yeah, I lost a bunch of words today, but tonight I’m working on creating the next scene, the one that uses the same information in a better way. 🙂 Wish me luck!
Amy Keeley 