Housekeeping

There are a few issues that have accumulated over the past month due to inattention. So I figured I'd throw them into this single post.

The Moby Dick project: Yeah, I'm done. That post should be out this weekend. After I write it. The first sentence of the post? "That was awesome." More later.

Rebecca asked "This may be a silly question, but are all pc/laptop based books considered e-books?"
First, few questions are silly, and this is not one of them. As with most things computer, the lines get more blurry as you dig deeper into the subject. The working definition for an e-book I like to use is "any longer electronic document that can be read with software on a computer or with a stand-alone device." Length and file format (.pdf and .mobi, among others) seem to be the only loosely consistent definitions of what is and isn't an e-book. It seems mostly to be in the eye of the producer; if you believe your document is long enough to be an e-book and is in an appropriate format, it is, from what I can tell. Wikipedia has as good a definition as any.

Also, your issues with printing from MyScribe may be related to digital rights protection. Check out the FAQ, particularly the last few entries. If MyScribe allows you to bookmark places in the text with a short title for the bookmark as Calibre does, however, you might want to bookmark a passage with a number or keyword and have that appear in a short passage you write in another text document. Or if you like something a little more formal, you could always keep a personal wiki for your subject. Lots of exciting options there, including multiple users.

Tweetless: And finally, why aren't I Twittering? A couple of people have asked me about that, and it isn't for lack of considering it. I'm trying to reach a milestone in my novel project, an overall chapter list of what happens in the book, so that I'm not wild-goose-chasing my own tail down blind alleys in frantic pursuit of red herrings when I sit down to write. It's one of those things that only appears counter-intuitive until you need to take the next step and don't know where your foot should go. Not only will that document serve admirably as a to-do list and a task scheduler, it will give me something to tweet about (and post about) when I do jump into Twitter. Which I will. Just not yet.

Next post? The Moby Dick post-mortem: What Happens When You Poke The Sea-Bear.