A few Measly Steps a Day #2

Hi,
I went to my all-you-can-eat Indian/Pakistani restaurant. You may remember that I go there when my writing gets stuck, and somehow, magically, the food jump-starts my writing. I think it's that eating takes my mind off of the negative thoughts. Anyway, it worked. I got about three pages of rough draft done. Of course, they're not great writing, but that's what editing is for. I've been editing soon after writing the draft. It seems to work better than writing page after page of rough work and then looking at it and getting disheartened. Now it's time to get my housework done. I did a load of laundry, and I wrote a list of things to do.

Here's hoping.

I'm not a mystery, horror, sci-fi or pulp fiction fan, so I'm late to the party to appreciated the dazzling quantity of work people like Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, Georges Simenon, and Dean Wesley Smith among others crank out. How's it done?

Delightful, you said you are not waiting to finish to revise but cycling back sooner to tighten up your writing. That what DW Smith described in Writing Into the Dark. He does everything he can to let his creative mind just have a fun time writing. Right now he's writing a short story a day! 1500 words minimum. Even still, that's 6 pages double spaced. And he's thinking he'll turn a few into novels.

I'm tiptoeing back into my own writing (rather than hack work) after, oh, 50 years. Tho I'm writing film script style to meet the culture of my script read group, I'm going to "produce" them on the cheap. There's a Stanford/Harvard law professor, Lawrence Lessig, who has refined an amazing presentation style using Powerpoint and typography. Very basic slides, most with fewer than 7 words. I'm adapting that method to dialogues I'm composing.

There are also AI-powered text to voice apps that will table read for me. Putting them all together—there lies the journey.

Well done, delightful! Hemingway drank and went to bullfights(1); you do Indian/Pakistani buffet. Sounds like a better choice. Now I'm wondering, what do I do to get unstuck?

(1)I vaguely associate drinking and bullfights with Hemingway, but I'm not sure there's any truth to it.

A great, free replacement for MS PowerPoint is LibreOffice Impress. It's part of the LibreOffice suite of programs that includes spreadsheet, word processor, database, art-like thingie.

So download the whole darn thing!

Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft

Typing this on my tiny ipad Mini 7 keypad. My fingers are not any smaller, tho.

In Philly. Chiller than expected but likely to warm up starting tomorrow.

I tried the LibreOffice suite. Since my idea of this production is getting simpler by the day, Google Slides will be my first option.

I have met a student actor a couple of times on the university campus. When dry and warm might invite her to sit with me on a bench and record my text. It’s 10 minutes. We could knock off 2 takes in 30 minutes.

This exercise is benefiting me in a way as I did not expect. I am able to put in words reactions from my own current conversations. My feelings about my own beliefs are deepening. I stumble on new takes on some things and adjust my behavior accordingly.

Tomorrow I will start planning a trip to the opposite coast and when I return, I will resume my writing proj CT and scale up my involvement in it.

In Philly. Graduation party for our nephew. Really more for his mom & her friends.

On my own time I read the script for “A Real Pain” and the analysis of its structure on one of the many sites for screenwriters. All fodder for my dream mind.

TCJ ~ What is a project CT?

Google Slides will make it easy to share with others, whereas LibreOffice documents would first have to be uploaded to a Cloud Drive before you can share them.

Eching Revu2, what is proj CT, @Tart Cherry Jam? Makes me think that either you're writing about Connecticut or you're undergoing a CT scan while writing.

Is Barbara's Club now free? I did a search for "barbara sher scanner day book" and followed the best result to Chapter 1, Exercise 1: Create Your Scanner Daybook | Barbara's Club. I expected it to be behind a pay wall, but it's not.

Then I found this on the home page:
And it seems I can keep clicking Next to move forward....

Just curious.

Patty Newbold took over Barbara's threads and now she's passed it on to someone whose name I've forgotten. I've also forgotten how to get into any of the sites. I know "Hanging Out" is still alive. Mostly I know she's offered classes and discussions on Barbara's books. These have not interested me, mainly because she wants money and I am cheap.

In other areas - my writing is lagging. My gardening is lagging. Everything else is lagging. I need to do something to jump start my creativity. Not sure what that is as I write this. Maybe something will come to me by the end of my post.

Meanwhile - good stuff. I have a healthy, happy tomato plant. This is a big deal because I've tried to grow tomatoes many times and failed each time. A possible project in the future - I want to make a coffee table from a slab of walnut burl. I have the burl. My husband made a table top from it and then left it in the sun for four years. Yes, it looks exactly like you're picturing it. I'd like to bring it to life. Making the base will be the big challenge.

I'm not a facebook fan, but I've been watching the reels on it when I'm bored. There's a guy - you can find him on Blacktailstudios on youtube. There's also a scammer with a similar website. Anyway, he makes tables with burl and epoxy that are gorgeous. They sell for about $20,000 - so don't get too excited. He lives in Seattle. Mine wouldn't be anywhere near as professional as his are. For one thing, I don't have the tools or the patience or the knowledge or the experience. And this might be just a pipe dream, but a girl can dream.

I'm reading a book, "The House of Payne." It's not a great book. I'm not particularly recommending it. But it made me think about my life when I was young and in love. I seem to squash a lot of that "in love" stuff these days.

So onward! I think I'm going to go somewhere to write. Maybe my Indian/Pakistani restaurant. And I think I'll draw and write crazy stuff just to get my creativity going.

I think all writers have this vision of themselves sitting down at the computer and wonderful words coming out one after another. Spoiler alert - it doesn't work that way.

I

Returning to home today. Going west the flight is shorter because the earth is rotating towards the plane. Made a list of trip debacles, large & small. From a lost handkerchief to a missed chance to see a particular Broadway show on Broadway and not a touring company. Absented-minded, embarrassing shame. Yucks galore. Publicly moving on and laughing about it, while inside I keep replaying where I missed the cues and goofed and feeling miserable.

Otherwise, what we did do from our list turned out great. 6 egg creams (paid for 2 vanilla, 2 chocolate and we mixed our own black and white tableside in a 3rd cup. Different days, different eateries). Great food. 2 Broadway shows: Operation Mincemeat about the Man Who Never Was that tricked Hitler into moving troops away from the Allied actual landing ground in Italy; and Promise: a look at the guts of a family falling apart while needing to keep up appearances. We also had deep convos with dear friends and our gift of cash has spurred our nephew to go to the main conference in his field to network.

Returned to SEA from PHL on Alaska. Here's what took place:

• "Short Delay" while they cleaned the plane.
• Boarded later than scheduled. Lining: I did make eye contact with a man in first class. I told him he broke the custom of FC folks never making eye contact. Then a woman looked up and make eye contact.
• AC not really working. The plane was full. Lots of chatty, noisy, or crying children.
• We backed away and sat on the tarmac. Pilot announced we had "weather" along our primary flight path and might be rerouted to an more southern path. Oh, the plane didn't have enough fuel for the southern path.
• Sent back to gate. We all had to get off the plane. With our stuff.
• After about 20 minutes, we got back on the same plane. With out stuff.
• The AC seemed to be working. The pilot announced he was negotiating to get back on the northern route and that we were #12 in line.
• 2.5 hours after we were supposed to be airborne, we left PHL.
• Six hours later we landed. Deep into the night. The light rail just took us to Beacon Hill (about 2.5 miles from home). After using our data plan we discovered that stop just before seemed like it had a bus that would take us to within 3/4 miles of home. This worked out.
• No sooner home, than condo building questions began to pile on.

Welcome home, indeed.

Hi, R. An interesting mixture of fun and frustration. Welcome back from your trip.

Me - NaNoWriMo (national novelist writers' month) closed up shop about a year ago due to lack of funds. I met two internet friends on NaNoWriMo and we've stayed in touch via email. One of them suggested doing a "camp Nanowrimo in July where we set a goal for the month. So that's what I'm doing. It did give me the umph I needed to get back to writing. Before this, I was barely hanging in - not able to write more than a sentence or two.

Also, I took the hedge clippers to the mess in my back yard. I made some progress, but not enough. Blackberries!!! Yuck! I used to have a patch of them that covered a third of my yard. I've trimmed them back substantially, but I didn't get rid of every last one of them. So . . . they're ba-a-a-ack.

Good stuff to you all.

Hi steppers. D, getting that social connection while working looks like enough of a pressure situation to fire up your work muscles. Congrats on finding it.

I'm making great strides on my 10 minute scripts. I've drafted 1 full script and begun another, and have ideas for more. I'm reading for reference the script for Waking Life, and loving it. Feel a fellowship.

Right now my main goal is to find a free ai tool that can read a multi-speaker text. It's called multi-speaker TTS (text to speech). Testing Google's AI Studio (GAIS) at the moment and it's working better than the others. I've looked about 20 apps or sites. I want it to be free (this is a hobby, not a profession) decently voiced, and easy to make my script usable. With GAIS I have a stack of voices to pick from and if I edit out the stage directions it reads and voices pretty realistically.

Bumping up against some limits. It can handle about 2 pages at a time, and I think there's a daily usage limit, which I just capped out on at 8.44 in the morning. I'm downloading sections, much like cans of film, for later editing back together somehow.

I also have a new co-counseling partner, to go with the other arrangements I have for mutual support. I'm up to 5, counting this forum.

There's a bunch of things at the condo to deal with: owners in arrears on payments, leaky faucets, a garage gate that's possibly at the end of it's service life. Welcome back stuff.

Whoa, some people actually buy little pints of blackberries for at least $2.99!

We have some sort of rasp / red-blackberry that grows wild. At first I thought it was poison ivy (three leaves...), but then I saw the berries and noticed how different the leaves are from those of poison ivy. Plus, poison ivy doesn't have those tiny thorns. I've only had a few berries, and they're more tart than store-bought.

Of course you can also buy dandelion for your salad.

Welcome back, Revu2!

I've been using the APIs from Google and OpenAI for Gemini and ChatGPT. This came about because the advice to job seekers now is to ask AI to compare the job description and resume and describe what's missing in the resume. So rather than copying/pasting from my editor to the chat prompt in the web browser, I just run my script. I do the same for the cover letter. Still, it took 1:15 for my most recent job application from "Click Apply" to documenting the application into my spreadsheet. Most of that time is coming up with a truthful cover letter that's "in my own voice." (I do that only for the jobs I'd really like to get. Most of the applications are submitted in order to meet the minimum requirements to stay on unemployment benefits. But that "my own voice" part can be achieved by given more instruction to the AI and choosing the "Remember Me" option.

More tweaks would involve giving the job application link to my script so I don't have to waste time copying the pasting the content.

Without the distractions of work, I've been learning more and playing around with stuff. The learning includes Python, Powershell scripting, tutorials on the use of Orgmode, FreeCAD and whatever else I can find.

My latest project is to create sets of greeting cards using my daughters photos on the cover (with her permission, of course). I decided I want to include a QRCode that links to the photo online on the back of every card. How do you create QRCodes? I was prepared to write a script. But after I downloaded the Python qrcode package, I found that it had a QR.exe that you could run on the command prompt.

But for more complicated QRcodes, such as used for vCards, I'd write a script with the library. Then I can replace the QRcode that's on my business card with the newer, full-featured version. The QRcode on my business card just has a link to my LinkedIn profile.

The fading away of NaNoWriMo is sad news to me. I've never participated -- I prefered NoBloPoMo -- the NaNoWriMo for bloggers. But NoBloPoMo lasted for only about five years and I was sad about its disappearance, too.

I remember Nablopomo. I was writing, you were blogging, Square Peg. I'm having a lot of fun with "Throwaway Child" I keep thinking that I've gotten better and that I'll never have slow spells aka writer's block again. That's when I hit another slow spell.

Square Peg, I can't imagine job hunting today and keeping with all the new technology. I'm sure you have to know it all to stay in the competition.

On the plus side, I have a friend who's almost blind. She's taking tech classes from Lighthouse for the blind. The new technology is making it possible for her to use her phone, connect via the internet to zoom and to do so many things that she couldn't do before. It almost makes me want to quit bad-mouthing technology.

Howdy. I did one of the November dashes ... it helped to get my essay drafted. I found that my writing was a bit too lack and devoted a lot of time scratching for the "diamonds in the dustheap" (V. Woolf).

My 10 minute dialogue is chugging along. Here are the tools I am using. Criteria is free or already owned and works with limited needs to prep my script. Meaning, some of the AI readers required a specific prompt format like: (Voice: Revu).

For voice recording ideas and initial transcript: Apple iOS Voice Memo.

For the script: Highland. It's free and sets up the page in screenscript format.

For the multiple-speaker Text to Speech: Google AI Studio. This tool is nothing short of dazzling. Not happy with one of the voices, so will re-record after I get a table read from my film society.

For editing the audio dialogue: Audacity. Amazing free and open sourced editing tool.

For timing the slides over the audio track: Powerpoint. Had begun on Google Slides, but it can't designate a specific duration to each slide, a crucial part. Downloaded as .pptx and working through the script now.

Goal: Get a rough version done by tomorrow.

That's so amazing, Revu2! If you were into personal branding, you could pitch yourself by summarizing all the workflows onto a social media platform!

Still not ready for a premiere. Here's what I need to fix:

The audacity track is working well. I need to patch in a bit of sound effect for the opening slides and it'll be set for now.

I was able to add it to Powerpoint (ppt) slides & timed to the each moment on the audio track. The powerpoint show works well ... on my laptop.

The hard part has been exporting into a format that youtube accepts (mp4). There are some free services, but as trial offers, then for pay.

I posted an ugly version by recording my screen on a Zoom [free plan] call with myself!

Now I've learned you can record a ppt presentation as you click through the slides. In theory. This would save a lot of time because then I can play the audio and cue through the slides in a single pass. It's like a reverse Foley move. Foley artists have a set of sound makers and watch a movie while adding the sound track. Named after Jack Foley who invented this method as movies left the silent era and morphed into talkies. Back.in.the.day.

Turns out there's a bug and ppt kept crashing.

What I need to do is record the ppt tracked to the audio and then sync them. Aha, iMovie might work. But the version I have onboard is no longer supported. I wondered what became of those alimony payments.

But, reddit led me to the correct version for MacOS Monterey.

So, I'll record the ppt (no sound) as I listen to audio in my headphones on zoom again. Then I'll use iMovie to sync them together. Polish and Publish to youtube.

That's the current fantasy, at least.

Well, I have a decent prototype. Big relief to show myself I can do these on the cheap.

iMovies was the ticket. Their export for youtube didn't open in Quicktime, had to go highest quality (biggest data use) for that.

Easy to learn how to trim off sections and synch with sound track. Turns out I didn't need the sound for the new zoom recording as ppt had timed changed between slides.

Thinking about it now, I won't need the Audacity step next round. I can go from clips from Google AI Studio to mix and align within iMovie. Once the audio track is done, I can pace through my slides on Zoom and sync that recording with iMovie.

Revu, I gave up halfway through your description of different AI applications. Too hard. Kudos to you for know it all.

me - I'm fighting off a massive attack of the lazies. Hopefully this cup of tea will help. It's the only caffeine I have in the house.

Teeth are no better. I'm coping okay, but not something I'd recommend to any one. How is your wife doing, Square Peg?

Meanwhile, the garbage strike is going strong. Not a problem for me. I don't make a lot of garbage, and when I get a couple of bags, I just drive them down to a transfer station. Meanwhile, my neighbors are waiting it out. They say they'll start picking up garbage next Tuesday. No, the strike isn't over. I think the workers are striking over better health benefits and higher wages. Sending them good wishes. Supposedly, the company can afford to meet their demands. But of course, any info I have is just rumor. So wishing the company good vibes as well.

I'm going to do something constructive now.

Me signing off.

Hi everyone:

My update: filed an application for short term disability. Meaning, filed my part. Now the sleep medicine NP needs to fill out her part, which she says she will do next week. Monday was tough because I had a 9 hour long vertigo episode which kept me in bed, but on other days of the week I have managed to do daily exercise. To wit: strength training, recumbent elliptical, recumbent stationary bike, upright stationary bike, treadmill, walking outside, and walking in warm water (this is cumulative over Tuesday through Friday).

I also work on my creative writing project, alternating between leveraging ChatGPT and Gemini. I will try Claude next week, too. Gemini is free for 4 months through the referral link received from my friend, who is a power user. ChatGPT latest model is free from my employer, while I am still employed and on an FMLA. Claude I will be using the free version, but if I find it works best, I will consider purchasing their latest model if they have a paid version, after my 4 months of Gemini run out (at that time I will need to dedice what to purchase).

Overall, I must say that I am getting amazing results from collaborating with AI.

Between long hours of sleep, which is part of my sleep disorder, time in bed due to vertigo episodes, writing, exercising, grocery shopping, cooking, and cleaning, that has pretty much been my week. Oh, and I now have T sessions twice a week. In some of them I read samples of my writing and we discuss them.

P.S. After writing for several days, I switched to idea sandboxing in bullet points, and then switched to working with AI on some issues I had with rendering some of the ideas that come to me in Russian in English. I write in English, but occasionally I think in Russian, and AI helps translate quite well. I am duly impressed.