Geoffrey Allan Plauché

On September 11, 2012, the document editor in Google Docs (now part of Google Drive) finally became useful to me for use in writing groups. The web app has long had a feature that enables users to create, reply to, and resolve comments in a Google document, much like the commenting system in Microsoft Word. But the Android app lacked these features until now.

Why You Should Use Google Docs and Drive in Your Writing Critique Group

No longer will I have to sit in front of my computer to read (not as pleasant as reading on a tablet) and comment, or read on my tablet only to return to my computer periodically to record my reactions (to the best of my memory), or switch between documents or apps on my tablet (a pain). Finally, I can open a writing-group partner’s chapter on my tablet, sit back and relax and read through it, and insert my reactions as I have them directly in the document — all without having to be anywhere near my laptop. This being Google Drive, the rest of the writing group will be able to see my comments as soon as I save them.

If you do all of your (early draft) writing in Google Drive anyway, most of what follows may not be all that useful to you. All you need to do to use Google Drive in your writing group is share your document with the other members and enable commenting. No need to email Microsoft Word documents or RTF files back and forth. No need to print out multiple copies of your story, exchange them with your group, and then receive multiple marked up copies back a week or more later. Just share a link, and everyone’s comments will appear in your single document.

Google Drive and its office suite, Google Docs, are perfect for online writing groups, but writing groups that meet in person can also find them useful.

If you prefer to use a different word processor for your writing, you can still use Google Drive in your writing group to share documents and comment on them. There will just be more steps involved in exporting and importing your files to and from Google Drive. Below I’ll lay out the steps for doing this, with a focus on the Scrivener for Windows app because it is such a fantastic writing tool and the process involved with it is a little more complex than, say, for MS Word.

Before launching into the tutorial, allow me to first plug our community forums. If you’re a liberty-loving fiction author or aspiring fiction author, you may be interested in exploring and participating in a set of forums we created just for you. In these, you can discuss the craft and business of writing, participate in writing groups, and showcase your work.

[continue reading…]

On September 10th at 8 PM EST, Laissez Faire Books will be hosting what I assume is going to be a Q&A-type event on their blog. Wendy McElroy posted the announcement and will be moderating the event. J. Neil Shulman, Prometheus Award–winning author of Alongside Night, and graphic novelist Scott Bieser, will be participating.

The event is meant to celebrate and publicize commencement of the shooting of a movie adaptation of Schulman’s novel. Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda, Kull the Conqueror) will star in the movie as Dr. Vreeland. Alongside Night is billed as “a prophetic movie about the economic and social collapse of society. At its core, however, Alongside Night is an optimistic vision of rebellion and the triumph of freedom.”

Head over to the LFB blog for more information and McElroy’s review of the novel. [Update: And her new interview with Schulman.] Come back to read our interview with Schulman.

[continue reading…]

If you tried to watch the livestream of the Hugo Awards event at Chicon 7 (Worldcon) last night, you were in for a rude surprise. The feed cut off, never to be restored, just as Neil Gaiman was giving his acceptance speech.  Why? i09 has the scoop, but fingers the wrong culprit.

What happened was that the Hugo Awards showed clips from some Doctor Who episodes and a Community episode prior to Gaiman’s speech. UStream’s copyright enforcement robots detected this and shut down the feed, as they had been programmed to do. io9’s editor-in-chief, Annalee Newitz, lays the blame on UStream. Its copyright enforcement robots are too dumb to realize that not only did the Hugo Awards have permission to show those clips but that, even if they had not, showing them would have been fair use anyway.

Is it UStream’s fault that its copyright enforcement robots are unable to distinguish between illicit copyrighted content and copyrighted content the user has permission or a fair-use defense for airing? Should UStream spend more money on smarter robots? if it’s even possible to code smart enough robots to do this? I don’t think so.

[continue reading…]

For the month of September we are reading and discussing Emphyrio by Jack Vance:

“The plot revolves around a young man, Ghyl Tarvoke, who hails from from the city of Ambroy located on the planet Halma. Halma’s ruled by unseen, mysterious Lords who run the planet as a giant welfare state. Workers are paid a stipend for their labor and all forms of mass production or duplication (including printing) are strictly, and I mean strictly, prohibited.” When Ghyl’s father, a wood-carver, is executed for processing old documents with a camera, Ghyl rebels and decides to bring down the system.

A recent edition of the book can be purchased for Kindle at Amazon.com. Your purchase via our affiliate links will help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound. If you prefer, Barnes & Noble has the book as an epub. There don’t appear to be any dead-tree editions in print, but new and used copies of old editions can be found.

Join us as we read and discuss Emphyrio. I’ve already started a thread on Vance’s idiosyncratic prose style.

You need not have voted on this month’s selection to join in the discussion, but you do need to be registered and logged in on this site to access the book club’s dedicated forums.

August Recap

Everyone enjoyed Matthew Alexander’s libertarian science fiction novel Wĭthûr Wē, both for its writing quality and for its uncompromising Austro-Libertarian content. The general consensus seems to be that Matthew did a very good job at the difficult task of incorporating the philosophical, political, and economic elements into the plot without coming across as too preachy. The novel rivals some epic fantasies in length, however, so it does take some courage to begin reading and perseverance to get through.

A couple of forum participants compared Wĭthûr Wē favorably to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. One observed that Matthew presented the other side’s arguments more fairly. Another liked that, unlike Rand, Matthew illustrated how our ideals could be realized and that the main protagonist in Wĭthûr Wē is a more fully realized human being than Rand’s concretized ideals, such as John Galt.

[continue reading…]

In the interest of full disclosure, here are the books we received in August. One of them is a self-published novel by John Hunt, whose serialized thriller published by Laissez Faire Books we are reviewing weekly. The others are from forward-thinking Angry Robot Books.

I recently joined Angry Robot’s Robot Army program. It has the most reviewer-friendly system I’ve seen so far for distributing advance review copies (ARCs) of upcoming publications in multiple formats, arranging interviews with authors, and more. Reviewers are also rewarded with free copies of published books. [Update 10/01/12: Angry Robot switched to using NetGalley, which is not as convenient as the more informal proprietary system they had been using.]

[continue reading…]

This month we’ve been reading and discussing Matthew Alexander’s libertarian science fiction novel Wĭthûr Wē in our book club. Over the weekend, on Sunday, we held our first Lightmonthly Read Author Chat with Matthew. The turnout wasn’t quite what we’d hoped for, but it was our first event — a successful proof of concept that we will build on. Matthew read a couple of early chapters from the new novel he’s working on, The Preferred Observer, and then we had a nice, long conversation with Mike DiBaggio and Michel Santos. Thanks, guys, for joining us.

If you missed the Google+ Hangout for whatever reason, you can watch the YouTube recording below:
[continue reading…]