“Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

This is going to be a bit of a brain dump, there will be a lot of that until I hit some kind of stride. This is literally the most I have written in MONTHS. My RV is parked in the driveway, I have an impossibly short window of time  to do an immense number of things. It’s beautiful to be beyond that Dark Place.

I’ve been on an interesting sleep schedule, I’m allowing myself to stay awake as long as I want because I have so much to do; Lately I’ve been working all night till about 9-10 AM then sleeping until 3-4PM , repeat. It’s working surprisingly well, it’s amazingly freeing to be able to do this.

The first surprise about freelancing is how much you can do when you are stripped of the excuse that you don’t have the time. There is a certain amount of psychic agoraphobia tied to this vast open space of time  that I myself must regulate and make use of.

Honestly it feels like an opiate, a constant state of last minute-ness. Working in the middle of the night certainly helps to give it that last minute feeling.  This is a topic I’ll come back to, the concept of procrastination as an extreme sport.

Sometimes I think I could stay up indefinitely if it weren’t for eyestrain. I’ve also found it immensely helpful to have a wonderful puppy to sleep next to me, I think he’s sleeping for me and feeding me extra energy. He’s amazing at sleeping, he’s like a sleep technician, a slumber artisan, a cuddling virtuoso.

Kipping in his yoda shirt #mantisfeets

I call this one “The Nimbus”

Periscope Ear

A kangaroo leap into the arms of Morpheus

Lap warmer

Wow, I’ve doubled my total podcast count and the hits just keep on coming. This is unprecedented.

This week we banter about Rango and the storytelling techniques within, discuss writing in videogames, I leak some vitriol regarding Avatar and James Cameron and we discuss books and special features. Hope you enjoy.

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Links in this episode:
The Brainstormer by Andrew Bosley 

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I found an accountability buddy and podcast co-host in my friend Dave Hilden.

He’s writing a graphic novel series with his cousin who works at Jim Henson Co. He’s a pinball afficianado and all around hilarious dudefella.
More of Dave’s antics can be found at his three blogs:
Words Making Sound
Crap That Dave Says
Crap That Dave Dreams

It’s our first time so bear with us if there are awkward silences that weren’t edited out. In this podcast we ramble about writing, graphic novels, childhood, and why we don’t always like the things liked by people we like. It makes more sense when I’ve had more sleep.

We hope you enjoy it.

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I would like to do another short story podcast, I think that iteration died because the second suggestion wasn’t very useful. If there’s a topic you’d like to see, let me know in the comments.

In other news, I’m moving my email from Gmail to Google Apps so if I’ve missed an important email from you, please re-send it to drwicked@writeordie.com

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Recently I was interview by Glyph a.k.a. Foxee for her blog Near Miscellany, here’s an excerpt:

Has the software come together quickly or has it been a long process of development?

I’m a bit like Sherlock Holmes without the opium when it comes to creative endeavors, I have periods of manic productivity which punctuate long stretches of inaction. The online version of Write or Die didn’t exist in September 2008 and was finished by October 25th, 2008. The same goes for the desktop edition, that came together in October 2009. It will likely be the same way for the iPad version I intend to write. Everything’s been finished just in time for NaNoWriMo. I need to be right up against a deadline to have any hope of finishing anything. I expect I’m not alone in this.

Read the rest of the interview.

I had some important and pressing things to do recently so naturally I had to find something to work on while I was procrastinating. I decided to tackle the editing process.

I created a new tool called EditMinion.com.

EditMinion helps you refine your writing by searching your text for some common grammatical, spelling and diction mistakes that spellcheck won’t catch. It looks for adverbs, bad dialogue attribution, commonly misspelled words and ending a sentence with a preposition. It will also count how many times a given type of mistake is found.

It’s obviously no replacement for a human copy-editor but it will give you an idea of what areas you might need to focus on revising in your writing. If there are features you’d like to see implemented, please feel free to comment below.

Every year it seems I get a better web address. From the ridiculously cumbersome “lab.drwicked.com/writeordie.html” (what was I thinking !?) to the somewhat better writeordie.drwicked.com. At one point last year I even tried to get an Irish domain name so I could have WriteorD.ie, which would have been really confusing to explain to people.

But now, it’s as if I’ve come home, thanks to a gentleman named Brett.

Welcome to WriteorDie.com

The site is essentially the same but the address has changed, now that it’s easier to say, please tell your friends You may notice over on the right-hand navbar that there’s a new button. That’s part of my deal with Brett. He operates a CafePress store which just so happens to sell merchandise with “Write or Die” on it.

Just so we’re clear, the store is separate from the site and Brett is fully responsible for the store but I endorse what he’s doing.

So use the energy that you’re saving by not typing “.drwicked” and buy some gear. Thank you as always for coming to the site and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see in this space.

There might be a few niggles to iron out as with any domain change, please let me know immediately: leave a comment below, get me on Twitter @drwicked or email doctorwicked@gmail.com