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Thanks everybody! I use Open Office on a MacBook Air. I preferred Word for a lot of little reasons, but for all intents and purposes, my life hasn't changed a whole lot since switching. I originally thought of changing over to Pages, especially back in my more ambitious days when I thought I would make UTILITY into the first great digital novel, but I've since realized that seeing as how I'm no exceptional talent at graphic anything, doing any DIY stuff is not going to make my work any more appealing to anyone. There are plenty of distinctive things I've been doing with UTILITY that make it digital-friendly that are perfectly doable in Word/Open Office.
After reading your post, I just went ahead and backed up all of my writing files again, haha. I used to use a Maxtor external harddrive, which is supposed to be compatible with Mac, but it has a bug in it that makes your laptop basically unusable when you have it installed. For now, I zip my document folders and put them on Google Drive, which isn't the perfect solution, but as far as I can tell, it works just fine until I run out of space (up to 86% now).
ONTO THE UPDATES!
#1: I literally had a dream that an agent sat down and workshopped the letter with me. So of course I sat around in bed for an hour thinking of why it sucks at making my awesome novel sound awesome and how to make it better. I just sat down and started a new draft from scratch, but I have the previous one so close to memory that it's still much of the same. I don't know, I think it's better? Whatever, I'm gonna send it to a few agents.
Oh, and I've also been collecting enough things I want to do with the manuscript itself that I might go in and start tinkering.
#2: Sent "The Was" to 6 publications. They take 3+ months to respond, so I'm just gonna keep blasting a bunch of publications, and if no one bites by the summer, then I'll blast to a bunch of second tier publications where I have an advantage (Philadelphia Stories, health-related lit mags, etc). If that fails, then I guess I'll just assume it's not a very good story. So the process will be pretty different from querying agents.
#3: Lol, yeah "Predisposed" is soooooo on the backburner right now. Let's replace my 3rd goal with all of this stuff with my flash pieces:
So remember when I said I wrote a 200-word flash fiction piece? Well, I've actually drafted a couple of related flash fiction pieces, and I think I want to tie them together and make a flash fiction triptych. What's that, you ask? Well I just made it up. It's two very short pieces (<500 words) to open and close it, with a "centerfold" piece (~800 words broken into 4 parts) in the middle. I think it's gonna be pretty awesome, but we'll see. I think it'd be ambitious to think that I'll have something ready to send by the end of the month, but as a writer, having too many next steps to work on is a good thing!
I'm still working on polishing the flash nonfiction piece I dug out of the drawer, but as much as it amuses me, it's not nearly as good as anything else I'm working on now, so that'll probably hit the backburner too.
Look at me, having stuff to do and doing it. Maybe this Op was a good idea.
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