06 September 2013

Notes - setting up / (final) chapter title page / (final) Dead 1 / review


           You are up early but Carol has already set the sprinkler and is watering the front grass. Later, you are planning to mow. Blue skies today or so it appears presently. You will leave for blood work within the hour and are contemplating the two manuals you'll have to tackle today, Apple Page and Mariner software, Story Mill.

** **
StoryMill 4 is flexible and intuitive. Use it as your no-nonsense place to write and revise, with its distraction-free full screen and powerful annotations, or as your complete database of every character, location and scene that makes up your novel. You can also set a daily writing goal and keep track of it using the Progress Meter. There are also handy tools to help you keep track of clichés, and monitor how many times you use a word. There's a single place for all your research – add pictures, tags, files and links, or make notes for any item in your project. It's all right there within easy reach!
From - Writer's Store Review
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         0748 hours. I do not need or intend to use much of the material. Lord, can you imagine a database for every character, location and scene? I don't need a Progress Meter, but there are other tools that should be helpful such as tracking clichés and monitoring word choices. That alone should be worth the price (at least it is to me) for the software. And, maybe I'll find other practical uses for it. Apple Pages is actually better for final draft novel writing than Word.

** **
All your documents. On all your devices.
With iCloud, you can create documents in Pages on your Mac and access them on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. And vice versa. You can edit them from anywhere — on any device you use. Changes you make on one device are automatically updated on all your devices. And suddenly, any place is the easiest place to work.

There’s more to the story.
Any word processor can help you type. Pages gives you all the tools you need to write and to perfect your writing. Now you can view your document full screen. With one click, clutter disappears so you can focus on what you’re writing and make changes without distractions. Organize your ideas in Outline mode. Create an outline with multiple levels, expand or collapse topics, and drag and drop to promote or demote items. Mail merge takes your data from Numbers or your contacts from Address Book to create personalized letters, invoices, and faxes. And in Pages, you can insert sophisticated equations into your lab reports with MathType 6 and add professional bibliographies to your research papers using EndNote X2.*

When it’s time for comments and feedback, change tracking makes collaboration with anyone easier, clearer, and more concise. And it’s always easy to find your place. Next to your document, you see thumbnails of all your pages and sections, including changes that have been made. Quickly copy or delete a section. Or drag and drop to move sections around. Scroll through thumbnails to preview your document or enlarge them for a better view.

It’s an easy read. In any format.
Pages makes it simple to share your documents with colleagues and friends. You can open Microsoft Word files in Pages and save your Pages documents as Word files. With powerful graphics and formatting tools, it’s easy to make Word documents look great in Pages. You can also save your Pages documents as RTF files or as plain text. Or export them as ePub or PDF files — both formats are compatible with iBooks on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Using the email option, send Pages, Word, or PDF documents right from Pages using OS X Mail.

Turn your documents into ebooks.
With iBooks, you can store and read documents you create in Pages on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. For reports or books with lots of text, export to ePub format. ePub is an open ebook standard that works with just about any e-reader. Send your ePub document to iBooks via iTunes, self-publish it on the iBookstore, or send it in an email to friends and colleagues. In iBooks, you can select a font and size that are easy to read. The text automatically reflows to fit the size and orientation of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch screen. For graphics-rich documents with more advanced layouts — newsletters and brochures, for example — export your document as a PDF file. This keeps your document looking exactly like the original, no matter which device you’re using.

From - The Apple Store
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         Sometimes working on the iPad is easier when spot-checking for the use of better words. It is great to be able to make changes on iPad and find the changes are already made when switching back to MacAir. I certainly can't complain that I don't have the tools to work with. Tools that weren't even around back when I began Braided Dreams.

         This shouldn't be so difficult, boy. Mostly it is a mental adjustment; and you are working your way into it. When you see articles that might be used in books two and three save them in their appropriate files. We'll keep a look out.

         Doug sent you a note yesterday on Thinking In Numbers by Daniel Tammet. First, here is comment on Amazon:

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The irresistibly engaging book that "enlarges one's wonder at Tammet's mind and his all-embracing vision of the world as grounded in numbers." --Oliver Sacks, MD

THINKING IN NUMBERS is the book that Daniel Tammet, mathematical savant and bestselling author, was born to write. In Tammet's world, numbers are beautiful and mathematics illuminates our lives and minds. Using anecdotes, everyday examples, and ruminations on history, literature, and more, Tammet allows us to share his unique insights and delight in the way numbers, fractions, and equations underpin all our lives.

Inspired variously by the complexity of snowflakes, Anne Boleyn's eleven fingers, and his many siblings, Tammet explores questions such as why time seems to speed up as we age, whether there is such a thing as an average person, and how we can make sense of those we love. His provocative and inspiring new book will change the way you think about math and fire your imagination to view the world with fresh eyes.

From - Amazon dot com
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Hi, Dick,
I received my "Thinking in Numbers" today.  Here is an excerpt from
the Preface:

"Typing out the story of my formative years, I realized how many choices make up a single life.  Every sentence or paragraph confided some decision I or someone else--a parent, teacher or friend--had taken, or not taken.  Naturally I was my own first reader, and it is no exaggeration to say that in writing, then reading the book, the course of my life was inexorably changed."

What do you think?
Doug and Nancy

** **

         I am excited to read this book which Doug said he will loan to me when he and Nancy have finished it. Strangely, I feel I have an ever so slight mental kinship with the man from the few words I have read about him and his books. Time to go for blood work.

         Post. - Amorella


        1105 hours. I have been working on the Chapter Title page and I made a variety of changes in red then stumbled upon a key and command and lost it. I know better, in here, to assume anything.

         Now you are wondering if you were into pride or arrogance or into the essentially captivating power of words as you were changing the script. - Amorella

         Yes, Amorella. I do get caught up in the power of words and some times I am as swept away and lose the cleaner, crisp thought.

         Take a break. Let me place your fingered thoughts and we'll see what happens. - Amorella
         Now you have a final chapter title page you better live up to, boy. Add and post. - Amorella
***

Chapter One
Slavery

            The Supervisor has a little saying:
                                    Ring-a-ring o'rosies
                                    A pocket full of posies
                                    "A-tishoo! A-tishoo!"
                                    We all fall down!
©
                                    We rise from clay
                                    On judgment day
                                    Be we dead or still alive.

            Dead Merlyn memorized this little ditty to be the stem of four embellished anthologies within each chapter. Each word a thought condensed into an ever-changing cast of shadows horizontally lined by Merlyn, the seventh century Scottish bard whose transcendental human spirit now floats in these books between the Living and the Dead. This well-known poetic stem is wrapped by a plague of fears into the brain stem of all living human backbone. Dead Merlyn, a dream of human dreams, stands as hard stone and as a tall hailing a beacon of human liberty unlike any ever seen to those who have lost their sight, to those with an imagination to see within one's own shade and beyond through the seemingly natural boundaries. Those who do not have the will to read will regret this experience.

***

          Lunch at Penn Station and now you are waiting for Carol at Kroger's at Tylersville and Cox Roads after a stop at the bank.

         1402 hours. I just caught and corrected an error in the 'final' draft above.

         Good, I'm happy for you boy. - Amorella

         Perfect is as Perfect does and I'm not there yet, Amorella

         You haven't expressed the 'intensity of feeling' after completing that chapter title page. - Amorella

         1406 hour. The emotion rolled up from the depths, a shout from a man of ice surrounded by fire.

         Better than I anticipated, boy. That's where this final draft has to come from, the depths. If it is not real to you it will not be real to the reader. No theatre, the natural human depths, which is more than anything you can conjure up. We will do one segment at a time. No more, no less. Understood? - Amorella

         I do. I like this attitude Amorella. I agree, one segment at a time. Each posted as completed.

         Yes. Each will develop its own tone. We'll see how this goes. - Amorella

         1414 hours. It will be like putting up one brick at a time.

         No, boy. We are taking the bricks out, one at a time. Later, dude. - Amorella

         1416 hours. The interior bricks in my own wall are going to come down and as such I will be freer. I have never been so ready for such an endeavor. This work is starting much better (psychologically) than I anticipated; to loosen myself from my own shackles is a spiritual emancipation within my existential self. If this is what the works are really about I'm all for it.

         Your secret thought here is that this work is a rebellion against your lower nature, and it does not, in your mind, to appear natural to psychologically rise up from what you once were. Do not be afraid of such natural thoughts. Human beings are built to rise up and grow, and you are no exception. - Amorella

         1607 hours. Sitting in the shade facing west here at Rose Hill we completed "The Dead 1".

         Add and post when convenient. - Amorella

***
The Dead 1 ©
            This Merlyn. The date is 15 December 2009. I have been here entangled between the Living and the Dead since Orndorff's book Merlyn’s Mind was published in May 2008. Your twenty-first century Earth is not the Earth I left in the seventh century. This is for me is as a quantum entanglement between your Heaven and Earth.
            I am Merlyn's Supervisor and I am, through no fault of my own, entangled also. I shall remain Nameless throughout for your own good. Merlyn resorts to a green flat billiard table mind with six standard pockets but Merlyn cannot know which is the pocket to the heart and which is the pocket to the soul. No one knows how or why the secret tunneling exists to heart and to soul. Here is Glevema another nearby spiritual entity in "The Dead" segments. She speaks not only to Merlyn, but to all the Dead and Living of the human species. She is the ancestral mother of all living human beings and her voice rolls up and out of the spine humans are born with.
            “Merlyn, you are indeed entangled between me and our descendants. We, the Living and the Dead, are presently entangled and marginally bound also."
            Merlyn felt the smoothly rolling and solid black mother of 8 balls in his tabled mind whisper, 'Life is armor for the spirit.' Unconsciously known, the concept invisibly moved on across his green felted table to strike at the bumper boundary of Merlyn's soul-pocket, spin, then run the green only to fall into Merlyn's heart-side pocket where Mother rolls unceremoniously into darkness. 
            'Mother vanished; I am left sick at heart,' popped at the diamond cue ball mark as a cautionary yellow 1 ball in Merlyn's mind and stopped, invisibly at the near center of the table.
            Always the 8 ball, Mother reappeared from near left pocket and rolled to a sit on the diamond shaped white cue mark. "Merlyn," commented Mother in slight irritation, "it is confusing to be so mind-placed on your thinking table."
            A quiet nearly invisible smirk rose as a newly visible burnt orange 5 ball near the far side pocket.
            Mother, caught his slight reflection on the ball.
            Resting on the mark and cued, Mother further commented, "You have been on Earth for almost three years and are still adjusting to the twenty-first century."
            The reality behind Mother's statement shocked Merlyn's mind into a full table sixteen scattered balls and he found himself sitting on his favorite large piece of granite, a slab resting in the meadow-of-his-mind, staring at a petite and beautiful womanly spirit with the darkest eyes. Her long curly black hair swirled over her magically feminine arms and legs, fingers and toes. She appeared as he wished, a legendary Celtic faery without wings or wand. Such are the images and abstracts that come from one's depths, the depths that cross the divide from the Living to the Dead.
            With a wizard's re-presence in his mind's center, Merlyn queries, "Are you our once original ancestral Mother, Glevema, the granddaughter of Panagiotakis, or are you her later ancient Greek, and look-alike twin, Sophia?" Merlyn knew, and without waiting for the fellow spirit's response he asked, "Are you Sophia the Greek during the time of the First Rebellion in HeavenOrHellBothOrNeither?"
            "I am Glevema, your ancestral Mother of the Dead and all those presently born and living on Earth." She stood slim, dark skinned and royal at her former living height of five full feet at less than ninety pounds.
            Merlyn stood, bowed slightly in the humility of his error and whispered to into the ear of the Living, "m'Lady."
            Amused, Glevema politely asked, "When did you last see Sophia?"
            Merlyn responded, "She was in charge of constructing a bridge across the River Styx." It was only hours ago, realized Merlyn, that I was delivered by the human spirit, the presence of heartansoulanmind, to witnessed the beginning of the Rebellion of the first fully conscious ten-thousand human spirits in Elysium, the Place of the Greek Dead. The First Revolt happened during the earthly time of the great Greek storyteller, Homer, who lived in the ninth century BC  (900-801BC). A brief and passing thought encompassed itself and rotated slowly in the shape of a solid green 6 ball to the center billiard table . . .  'Wait,' thought Merlyn, 'Today is the Earth date, 19 August 2012, a Sunday. I am Dead and Living both at once. Mother is right. I am still existentially unprepared to be an entrapped spirit within a living body. How is this here-and-now metaphysics?'

***


         2145 hours. I have added the sections completed to Story Mill. One of the helps is it counts the number of times a word is used in the selection, so far I see no overuse, though I am not sure what constitutes the overuse of a particular word. It is a check though.

         You had half a peanut butter sandwich for supper while Carol had an open-faced cheese sandwich. You finished a series by watching the two last episodes of "Crossing Lines". You both hope it returns. You wonder if you could complete "Brothers 1" tonight, but you are tired. I suggest not. - Amorella

         I feel like I could be doing something constructive.

         Make another Page document and add the corrected manuscript to it was we go along that way we have both the last draft and the final copy on iCloud. - Amorella

         I feel the work is more secure doing this. Is there anything else I should be doing?

         Continue the proofing and editing as you are. I sense there is a level of reading automaticity (used in judging student papers) returning into play, this should prove useful in more efficient editing. Keep in mind that while you observe the use of words you are seeing a focus and will know whether it is positive or negative. For instance the top words used so far are Merlyn 16 times; dead 13 times; living 12 times; mother 11 times and human 8 times in about 928 words. None of these appear an overuse. Plus, none are verbs. 'Am' is the first verb used 6 times and 'have' is used 5 times. The Mariner software keeps you aware. All for tonight, boy. - Amorella

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