Q: My tools for formatting disappeared from the top of my MS Word (2003). Where’d they go and what do I do?

A: They do disappear at times, for no good reason. Here’s the simple fix:

• Right-click in the toolbar area at the top.
• Select Format or Standard.
  
• Make sure they’re checked. That’s where 99% of your tools live.
• This is true in all MS Office software

Questions you want answered? Leave a comment here and I’ll answer it within the next thirty days.

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, an Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, an IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Great tips for soon-to-be great writers

When you read your story, does it sound off, maybe you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you’ve done something wrong? Sometimes–maybe even lots of times–there are simple fixes. These writer’s tips will come at you once a week, giving you plenty of time to go through your story and make the adjustments.

I have a huge bookshelf of self-help books for writing. If I get stuck, I roll my chair around to face my floor-to-ceiling shelves and explore tips from Donald Maass, Bob Mayer, Strunk and White, James Frey on whatever my problem-du-jour is (last week, it was ‘story arc’ because my agent said he was rereading my mss to review the story arc.). These books are a wealth of information and take a long time to digest. I thought I’d take a few of my favorites and distill their highlights.

Today, I’ll focus on the highly-respected Janet Burroway Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (Longman 2003), the first book I ever purchased on how to write. It’s full of ideas, suggestions, and tips, so I’ve picked eleven that made a difference to mean. If you enjoyed this book, please add the thoughts that grabbed you by the throat and inspired your writing under ‘comments’:

• The process of discovering, choosing, and revealing the theme of your story begins as early as a first freewrite and continues …beyond publication.
• John Gardner points out that theme ‘is not imposed on the story but evoked from within it–initially and intuitive but finally an intellectual act on the part of the writer’.
• Very few writers know what they are doing until they’ve done it.
• Novelist John L’Heureux says that a story is about a single moment in a character’s life that culminates in a defining choice
• Mel McKee states flatly that ‘a story is a war. ‘It is sustained and immediate combat.’ He offers four imperatives for the writing of this ‘war story’: 1) get your fighters fighting, 2) have something…worth their fighting over, 3) have the fight dive into a series of battles with the last battle … the biggest and most dangerous…, 4) have a walking away from the fight
• A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.
• Generally speaking…almost every occurrence of such phrases as ‘she noticed’ and ‘she saw’ should be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen
• Your fiction must have an atmosphere because without it your characters will be unable to breathe
• It’s the job of the writer to create a world that entices you in and shows you what’s at stake (from fiction writer Nancy Huddleston Packer)
• One of the most economical means of sketching a character is simply to show readers a personal space that the character has created, be it a bedroom, locker, kitchen, hideout, office cubicle, or even the interior of a car.
• Rather than thinking of point of view as an opinion or belief, begin instead with the more literal synonym of ‘vantage point’. Who is standing where to watch the scene?

Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-sixth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman.  She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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by Alan Glynn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

British author Alan Glynn’s third thriller “Bloodland” (Picador 2011) is about a rising star who’s death captures the imagination of the nation (if not the world). The fun begins when struggling journalist Jimmy Gilroy is asked by a publisher to write her story. He is warned off by people he respects which makes him dig into her death to find out why powerful people would want her story stopped.

What he finds is a vast conspiracy that almost destroys him.

The most appealing part of what might otherwise be a mundane story (beautiful starlet dies in a car crash, nation feeds on the story–think Princess Diana) is the author’s voice. It is a mix between a somewhat dark stream of consciousness and a non-formulaic approach to the wild ride of a thriller. It kept me reading despite the wealth of characters I had to sort through and the complexity of the plot Glynn wove. It made me wish I had the ebook so I could search. If not for the back summary, I don’t think I could have followed it.

But that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-sixth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman.  She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Mark Twain’s Critique of The Deerslayer

So peeved was Mark Twain by critics’ acclaim of The Deerslayer that he unspooled them with delightful attention to detail.  Twain said, “In the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115.”  And:

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In The Deerslayer, Cooper violated seventeen of them. These seventeen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.
2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.
6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo’s case will amply prove.
7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.
8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.
9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.
10.  They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer this rule is vacated.

In addition to these large rules, there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

1. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
2. Eschew surplusage.
3. Not omit necessary details.
4. Avoid slovenliness of form.
5. Use good grammar.
6. Employ a simple and straightforward style.    …   …   …

Cooper’s word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn’t say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate word. I will furnish some circumstantial evidence in support of this charge. My instances are gathered from half a dozen pages of the tale called Deerslayer. He uses “verbal,” for “oral”; “precision,” for “facility”; “phenomena,” for “marvels”; “necessary,” for “predetermined”; “unsophisticated,” for “primitive”; “preparation,” for “expectancy”; “rebuked”, for “subdued”; “dependent on,” for “resulting from”; “fact,” for “condition”; “fact,” for “conjecture”; “precaution,” for “caution”; “explain,” for “determine”; “mortified,” for “disappointed”; “meretricious,” for “factitious”; “materially,” for “considerably”; “decreasing,” for “deepening”; “increasing,” for “disappearing”; “embedded,” for “enclosed”; “treacherous;” for “hostile”; “stood,” for “stooped”; “softened,” for “replaced”; “rejoined,” for “remarked”; “situation,” for “condition”; “different,” for “differing”; “insensible,” for “unsentient”; “brevity,” for “celerity”; “distrusted,” for “suspicious”; “mental imbecility,” for “imbecility”; “eyes,” for “sight”; “counteracting,” for “opposing”; “funeral obsequies,” for “obsequies.” …

The Deerslayer a work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are—oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.”

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-sixth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman.  She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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Q: My desktop icons (those little pictures that allow you to open a program) are all different. What happened?

A: I get this question a lot. Push the start button and check who the log in is. That’s the name at the top of the right-hand side of the start menu. It should have your log-in name. Any other, log out and log in as yourself and the world will tilt back to normal.

This happens a lot in my lab because I have separate log-ins for different grades. Students being students often forget to log out. I teach even the youngers how to check for this problem and solve it.

Truth be known, lots of adults have this problem, also. They’re used to sitting down at a computer they share only with themselves. When tech comes and does something on it–say, fixes a problem–and they don’t log out, my teachers are also lost

Questions you want answered? Leave a comment here and I’ll answer it within the next thirty days.

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, an Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, an IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller she just finished. Any ideas? Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab.

Great tips for soon-to-be great writers

When you read your story, does it sound off, maybe you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know you’ve done something wrong? Sometimes–maybe even lots of times–there are simple fixes. These writer’s tips will come at you once a week, giving you plenty of time to go through your story and make the adjustments.

I have read several of James Frey’s how-to books on writing–How to Write a D*** Good Novel and How to Write a D*** Good Thriller. Although I write thrillers (and I’ll get one published if I ever get the rewrites done for my agent), there are a lot of general rules about constructing novels that apply across the board whether you write thrillers, romance, YA or novelettes. Frey points these out in a pithy concise manner that even those of us with short attention spans can get. Here are some of my favorites from his 176-page book, How to Write a D*** Good Novel:

• “For most writers, and certainly all beginning writers, character biographies are a necessary preliminary step in the making of a novel.”
• Even though “Human beings sometimes do foolish things… All of your central characters, both protagonists and antagonists, should at all times be clever and efficient in handling the problems you have presented them.”
• quoting Raymond Hull: “The strength of the conflict is not just a product of the protagonist’s strength” but is a product of the “strength of the opposition” as well
• “The art of writing the dramatic novel is the art of holding the reader gripped in a slowly rising conflict.”
• “Does every dramatic story have a premise [a statement of what happens to the characters as a result of the core conflict in the story]? Yes… There is no formula for finding a premise. You simply start with a character or a situation, give the protagonist a dilemma and then meditate on how it might go. Let your imagination run.”
• “A story is a narrative of consequential events involving worthy human characters who change as a result of those events. In a dramatic story, the only kind generally worth reading, the characters will struggle.”
• “Where…do you start your narrative of consequential events involving worthy human characters? Usually, you begin just before the beginning.”
• “Aristotle said in the Poetics that the length of a drama should be such that the hero passes ‘by a series of probably or necessary stages from misfortune to happiness, or from happiness to misfortune.’ Twenty-three centuries later, Egri says the same thing when he insists that a character should ‘grow from pole to pole.’ A coward becomes brave, a lover becomes an enemy, a saint becomes a sinner–this is growth from pole to pole.”
• “Think of a climax as the target and the rest of your story as the flight of the arrow.”

Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-sixth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman.  She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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In the world of writing contests, there are a few details that set this one apart:

• There is no entry fee. If you’ve entered contests in hopes of getting feedback to muscle up query letters, the cost of this approach quickly spirals out of control. ABNA skips entry fees, provides no comments until quarter finals. To me, that makes sense. If it’s not good enough to get through, then agents won’t be interested anyway
• Submittals are read primarily by Amazon Top Reviewers, not professionals. I have no judgment on that; just throwing it out there
• Two Grand Prize winners of a full publishing contract with Penguin.
• You can’t enter a published novel, but you can enter a self-published novel. That’s unique.

So, are you inspired? You must have a completed novel (which I do). Here are other requirements:

• The full/complete version of your manuscript must be between 50,000 and 150,000 words (check)
• The Excerpt must be between 3,000 words and 5,000 words (check)
• A pitch statement (cover letter/summary) must not be longer than 300 words (check)
• Other registration information such as name, contact information, book title (check)
• You cannot win if you don’t appear at the awards ceremony. This entails a 3-5 day trip. Interesting detail, innit?

Here’s a list of contestants who were published subsequent to entering this contest. It’s impressive. It would seem that although only one person can win, contestants with strong novels get noticed and snagged by publishers.

This is about the only contest I enter, which I will do again on January 23rd. If you’re also participating, feel free to post a link to your preview for others to visit. I’ll definitely check it out.

Share under comments if you’re entering. See you on the forums!

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller Any suggestions? Contact Jacqui at her writing office, WordDreams, or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

by Byron L. Dorgan and David Hagberg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Even if Amazon Vine hadn’t sent Byron Dorgan and David Hagberg’s Blowout (Forge 2011) to me to review, I would have read it because of Hagberg’s name. His stories are always good reads with fast-paced plots, well-defined characters and enough surprises to keep me turning pages. With titles like Kill Zone, Assassin, and Twister, readers know their about to loose a couple of days of their lives to reading.

But I almost quit on him this time. To get to the good stuff, I had to endure lectures on global warming I’ve already read in too many newspapers and detailed science coming from the mouths of characters I wasn’t sure I trusted. Global warming is politically-charged enough that just discussing it will make you love or hate the character. And Hagberg-Dorgan made that Shakespearean mistake (remember: Me thinks he doth protest too much) of trying to convince me for page after page (after page) that the country’s energy policies were as screwed up as an earthworm in the wrong hole. If I agreed with him, he’s preaching to the choir. If I disagreed, he’s making me angry.

Finally–after eighty pages–Hagberg-Dorgan settled into the story line and I met the main character.

Eighty pages into the book? That’s pretty late for a thriller. Hagberg has an entire column of publications to his name. He knows better.

But I digress. Finally, after eighty pages, the wild ride I’d been waiting for started. The plot revolves around America’s insatiable appetite for energy. When American scientists get close to solving the problem with clean energy that doesn’t rely on foreign oil, unexpected forces try to stop them. This is where small town lawman Nate Osborn (who is also a medically-retired Medal of Honor winner) and new journalist Ashley Borden become the unlikely pair who must stop the enemy. The characters are well-constructed and endearing, clearly created by the man who gave us super-hero Kirk McGarvey. The politics is disgusting (a good choice since something like 80% of Americans distrust politicians) and the stakes couldn’t be higher. The problem is credibility. To believe the series of events postulated in this story could happen, I have to buy into the belief that a whole lot of people in power are more than self-serving, but downright evil, that we’ve reached a tipping point where the good people in power can no longer stand against the bad.

And that’s why I gave this great writer only three stars. The politics is something I try to escape in thrillers so that lost one star. Then the bigger-than-life Medal of Honor hero was not enough to offset the incredulity of so many evil-minded people running our nation. That lost the second star. If I was grading solely on the power of the writing, Blowout would get a five.

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman.  She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller that she just finished. Any ideas? Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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I am a writer. I write.

Colleague or The Neighbor They Never See. I am all that–don’t get me wrong–but now I’m also

a

writer.

The thing about saying it out loud is, it’s done. I can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube. Now, I AM a writer, no matter how I make money to pay my bills.

It feels good to say it. And after forty+ years of knowing myself, I can tell you it fits. I graduated from college and got an office job and became an office manager, then bought a dance studio–boy that was hard work. 24 hour days and then I lost it to a crook.

Let’s skip that part.

Bruised and battered, but it’s hard to stay down if you’re basically a positive person so I got a husband and an MBA and two children two dogs and a two-story house and a job I don’t remember and then rose through the ranks and became a high-priced manager responsible for installing cell phone antennas on rooves

…then my mom got sick.

And died.

That woke me up. Life is short. I lost my job but I didn’t care anymore. Then my angelic husband got me an interview to teach technology at a local private school which is where I’ve been ever since.

But it’s not who I am.

I am a writer.

I feel it every time I sit at the computer and peck out a character profile and a story arc and find the hook and sit back to see it all explode. That keeps me going. I started writing when I had an unquenchable urge to understand where we came from.

It started one million years ago when no records existed so I had to eke info out of the rocky landscape known as the Cradle of Mankind. Africa. There I met a Homo erectus girl named Lucy and we became friends. She showed me how to survive in a time when thin-skinned, flat-toothed, furless mammals weren’t supposed to. I loved her story so much, I shared it.

Unfortunately, agents didn’t love Lucy.

I tried to forget her as I wrote a more conventional book about terrorists and submarines and bigger-than-life ruggedly handsome heroes. Which is when life happened. My husband lost his job and my kids needed money for college, so I wrote a series of tech books. Those were easy. They were my life. No need to figure out the paleogeology of prehistoric Africa or the machinations of sonar and subs. I thought they’d be work, something to help pay the bills before returning to the stories I loved. But they were fun, also.

Putting words on paper in a way people understand is fun.

I wanted more so I started a blog on technology, then one on writing and science and the Naval Academy and that blossomed to guest posts and ezine columns …and always, the writing remained fun.

Which is when I knew I was a writer. Who else could sit in front of a computer for hours on end with a silly grin on her soul?

How about you?

–reprinted from Write Anything

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller Any suggestions? Contact Jacqui at her writing office, WordDreams, or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Q: My internet toolbar disappeared. All I see at the top of the screen is, more of the page I’m on. No tools. What do I do?

A: Push F11. You can hide the internet toolbar or unhide with F11. It’s that simple.

Questions you want answered? Leave a comment here and I’ll answer it within the next thirty days.

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, an Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, an IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s seeking representation for a techno-thriller she just finished. Any ideas? Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab.