This CloudAge™ Author's submission tracking

As I discussed in my last post, one of the tools I use in my own work is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool Insightly. My basic operating assumptions are: I need a tool to keep track of the agencies and publishers to whom I submit queries or proposals; I need a tool to help keep track of mailing list subscribers and those who show interest in being kept abreast of appearances or other media events; and, I need a tool to help keep track of my conversations, agreements, events, social media, and other obligations. A combination of packages could work, but I have found that Insightly has features that make it easy to use one tool for all of these purposes*. Some of these tools include:

• Leads & Lead tracking (useful for submissions, as we'll shortly see)
• Mailing list management
• Contact/Customer management
• Gmail and Google Calendar integration (calendar integration requires a paid subscription)
• Mobile Apps (iOS and Android apps both available)

So for a CloudAge™ Author like me, having access to my calendar events and submission status "Anywhere, Anywhen"™ is a huge advantage, and enables me to work out my schedule and plan my time no matter what's going on. I can also keep track of how many rejections I've gotten so far (yes it's sad but that's reality!), where I still have submissions pending, and so forth.

Really, at its most basic, the idea of CRM software is to enable an entity to keep in touch with their contacts. As an author in the present time, those relationships are crucial to success—whether you intend to self-publish forever, want to try traditional publishing, or to publish using some hybrid between those two. Your mailing list subscribers, lecture attendees, or blog readers are your audience, and maintaining an ongoing relationship with them is critical to your efforts. Publishers and agents will be ecstatic to see an author who is willing to reach out themselves to build an audience, and your readers will feel better connected to your work. This benefits all parties.

With that said, let me walk you through my own setup, so hopefully that will spark ideas for you about how to best manage your own situation. I will show you how I set up my Insightly to track submissions. I make only one background assumption: that you have already signed up for an Insightly account.

First, there are a couple of settings which need to be changed or added. Once logged in, I head to the System Settings.

There, I enable Lead Management and add a few custom fields to the Leads module.

The way I look at submissions, they are essentially a Qualifying activity for selling my writing project. Agents, publishers, and/or whatever other organizations to whom I submit queries or proposals are, in essence, Leads for my Author brand. The process of sending the submission is the qualification process for those Leads. With that in mind, I need to keep track of a few pieces of information about Leads that I don't need for a Contact—which would be, say, a blog reader, or a subscriber to my mailing list—like the date the submission was sent, the kind of submission it was, and whether that Lead accepts simultaneous submissions.

After setting up my custom fields, I create an Activity Set for submissions—make sure to check the checkboxes for all options—and then define the individual activities that make up the set.

An activity set is a group of to-dos, events, emails, or other actions that I want to take for each step of the submission process, which I loosely define as: sending submission, marking Lead, follow-up.

I set the reminders for these activities, and a few other parameters as shown, and then go back to the Leads module.

I create a new Lead with the information I have available, from whatever research method I used to discover it. I also include as much information as I can to fill out my custom fields, and then save the Lead.

Once saved, I click on the Lead and do two additional things: first, I apply a tag to the Lead, which ties it to the writing project I'm working on.

Second, I add an activity set to the Lead, which auto-adds the tasks I already created. I set the start date to the day before I want to send the query, and the end date to the date after their "Recontact by" date, and click "Add Activity Set to Lead." The tasks I earlier defined for the Activity Set are added automatically to the Lead, with reminders!

I can go to the calendar in Insightly and see the tasks assigned to me. With the iOS (or Android) versions of the Insightly app, I can receive notifications on those devices about my tasks (with a paid Insightly subscription, it is possible to sync the Insightly calendar to Google Calendar or Exchange, as well).

Now, whenever I am ready to submit a query letter, book proposal, or what have you, I just create a Lead for the Agency or Publisher, attach the appropriate Tag, Add the Activity Set to the newly created Lead, and let my devices remind me when it is time to send. Easy-peasy! Okay, yes… there is a little bit of setup, and a little bit of preliminary work, but it's really no harder IMO than setting up a spreadsheet with the same information, and I have the advantage of automatic reminders for both the initial submission and later follow-up.

One other major advantage to using Insightly is the Personal Email Mailbox: when you create an Insightly account, a personal email address is created; by sending, forwarding, or sending a cc/bcc to this email, it will appear in your Emails tab, and emails sent here can be assigned to Leads, Contacts, Organizations, Projects or Opportunities in Insightly. By remembering to cc/bcc your Insightly Personal Email Mailbox address for all mail you send, and also forwarding any replies you receive to that address, you can keep a complete list of all email communications which are related to a submission. Some other CRM software also offers this or a similar feature. In addition to the emails, there are also tabs under the Leads (as well as Contacts) for attaching files; these can be attached by uploading, or by linking to Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, or Google Drive files.

So that's how I set up my Insightly CRM to help me keep track of my submissions. What tools do you use, and how do you stay on target? Comment below!

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*: just to be clear, I am not affiliated with Insightly and they don't pay me to recommend their product. I have worked with many CRMs over the years, and have found that Insightly fits me the best. It is free at the most basic level, while many others are not; some that are include 1crm (on-site edition can be installed and used for free up to 3 users), Zoho, CapsuleCRM, and others.

The CloudAge™ Author: Tracking Submissions

Ah, (some of) the business end of being a CloudAge™ Author, and wanting to "Write Anywhere, Anywhen™": the publishing! While there are a lot of options now, for self-publishing—see my chap book of poetry, Hooray for Pain!, on Kindle Direct Publishing, for example—many authors are probably still interested in getting published through more traditional routes, at least once.

There are a lot of aspects of the business end to attend to, whether you intend to publish through traditional means, or use kdp, CreateSpace, and/or other Artisanal Publishing (thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the term!) routes. An author is often expected to maintain a social media presence, even if they are not publishing themselves—I see a lot of requirements in current agent submission guidelines to include things like their number of blog hits, facebook likes, twitter followers, or mailing list subscribers (or all, plus some!). For the author submitting to agents or publishers, there is also the Herculean task of creating query letters and/or proposals, submitting them, and keeping track of their status. There are marketing questions: how? when? where?—and answering these questions can require its own book of tasks.

With that in mind, I'm going to be your pathfinder (after a fashion)—starting with query or proposal submissions. Today, we're going to waft through the brume of options for keeping track of the query letters, book proposals, and agents or publishers who receive them. We'll look at some thing you can do as a CloudAge™ Author to help maximize your time, and help keep things from falling through the cracks. In another post, I'll go over some tools to keep on top of your social media, and after that some ways to manage your myriad marketing responsibilities.

Submission tracking: first, let's define some terms. What I mean by "submission" can be anything from a query letter to a book proposal to a draft of a manuscript. By "tracking," I mean keeping a record of all of the steps of a submission, from initial mailing to result, and on to proposal/drafts & (hopefully) eventual contract.

Next, let's talk about what things really must be tracked, and what things I recommend you also track. When you submit, at a minimum, track:

• To whom you submitted (some tools refer to this as the "market", including agent or editor name, if you know it, as well as address);
• What you submitted (query letter, proposal, manuscript, etc.);
• When you sent the submission;
• How you sent it (email, postal mail, fax, etc.);  and,
• Which writing project was involved.

In addition, I suggest you may find the following things very useful to track:

• The agency or publisher for whom the agent or editor works;
• Include, somewhere, details about their business: how they prefer manuscripts & queries, in what genre(s) do they specialize (and, conversely, what they don't accept), etc.;
• Which of their publications you've read or researched; and,
• The agency/publisher phone & fax number.
• Which submission you sent (I'll explain more in a moment);
• The agency/publisher's timeline for reviews (this will be important later);
• Whether they accept simultaneous submissions, and if so, whether you submitted simultaneously.

Also, finally, there are manual, non-electronic ways to do this, as well. I assume that anyone reading this blog is interested in technological solutions to these problems, and so I will focus on those.

When I say "which submission," there are a couple of things to think about. First, what kind of submission was it? Was it a query letter? Perhaps a non-fiction book proposal? Did you send the first draft of a manuscript? That information should be included as part of your submission tracking.

Second, which actual file did you send—electronically or otherwise—and where is it on your computer or cloud service? That is, if you printed and posted a physical query letter with a SASE for reply, not only can it be helpful to track that it was a query letter, but also to put the filename of the document you printed out. Later, when you get a positive response, you can look up the file you used, and learn more about successful query letters. In addition, by keeping track of which file you sent to which agency or publisher, you can help avoid the problem of double-sending—if there's a filename, they've already been sent a submission—or cross-sending the wrong submission.

Finally, it is important to stay on top of the dates, both of submission and the review timeline. This is one area where technology solutions can be very handy: once you've submitted and made your entry, you can have the computer or tablet or smart phone set a reminder for you to follow up on the submission. If the agency says "6-8 weeks," then in about 9 weeks set a reminder (or, your tool may enable you to set one automatically!), and in that reminder link back to your tracking tool. That way you have at your fingers all of the information you need to remind yourself what you sent, when, and why.

Spreadsheet tracking

There are a few different technological ways to keep track of the submissions you make, regardless of kind or destination. First, and probably the oldest of these, is the old-school spreadsheet. The basic format here, is that you open Excel, or Numbers, or Sheets, or whatever else you might have around (VisiCalc or 1-2-3, anyone? Anyone? No?), make columns for the variety of fields you wish to track, and enter submissions as you make them. Some of these tools are free, others are not. Sheets, as part of Google Docs, is a free spreadsheet, and is available on the web and via Android or iOS device. If you have purchased a new Mac in the last couple of years, you can download iWork's Numbers for free to your computer. The iPad version is free to any iOS 8 device sold after 01 SEP 2013, upon initial activation, or is $9.99 otherwise. Excel can be downloaded for free to the iPad (to create new spreadsheets, you must log in with a Microsoft account of some kind, whether Live, or Hotmail, etc.), but it is not free for use on your computer unless you work somewhere with an Office 365 subscription (or older versions, possibly), and then you might be able to install & use it free on your computer & device(s).

• Pros:
• Reasonably simple to create.
• Depending on which spreadsheet program, can make edits from just about anywhere (yay, cloud!).
• Very free-form: Field names, contents, formatting, conditional cell highlights or text coloration, etc. ad infinitum can be tweaked to your heart's (or OCD's*) content.
• Cons:
• Can rapidly become unwieldy—rejection is a real thing, and submitting to dozens or even a hundred agents or publishers is not unheard of, making the spreadsheet potentially several dozen rows long, occupying several printed sheets.
• Edits to metadata may require editing every entry individually, as well.
• No automated way to trigger follow-up.
• Data entry can be extremely repetitive (contrast the DB/CRM option, where information is entered one time, and can be linked to afterward).

If you do choose to use the spreadsheet method, I suggest creating one file for all your submissions, but creating a new "page" or "sheet" for each writing project. That way, you have one place to go for your submissions, and can look at the status of any individual one very quickly. Another option is to create a separate spreadsheet for each submission, or to create one for each month, or year, in which you submit, using pages/sheets for each separate project's submissions during that time frame.

Specialized Submission Trackers

There are some specialized tools available, for the writer who wishes to track submissions. Writer's Digest, via their Writer's Market, is one such tool. A year's subscription is $39.95 (US), with semi-annual ($24.99) and monthly ($5.99) options available; a year's subscription is included free if you purchase the current Deluxe edition of the Writer's Market book, as well. In addition to the tracker—in fact, possibly the more important draw of the site—is a searchable database of agents and publishers, including information about their genres, submission guidelines, website, and much of the information in their book, but in a searchable form. A subscriber can create and save searches, and even mark agencies or publishers, so as to notify the subscriber when the agency or publisher entry is updated.

Duotrope is a similar tool, with a free week trial (subscription for $5/month, or $50 for an annual subscription), and offers similar searchable database tools.
The Writer's Database is a somewhat similar tool; it does not appear to have an internal database of markets available to search, but it will allow you to enter your own (that is, you've done the research, found the agency or publisher to whom you will submit, and then save that entry in your "My Markets" area). It is, however, free to use.

• Pros:
• Designed for writers, as submission tracking tools, and are generally very good at it!
• Contain either a pre-existing database of markets, which is searchable, or the ability to add your own markets.
• Cons:
• Two of three are not free; the one that is free does not have a searchable database of markets.
• No real customization available—you get the fields they give you.
• I did not note any automated way to remind yourself to check up on submissions on Duotrope or the Writer's Database. Writer's Market will allow you to send an email to yourself.
• Only accessible via web browser (I did not see any iOS or Android apps for these sites), which may not be ideal for smart phone or even some tablet users.

Self-created Database

If you code in PHP, ColdFusion, PERL, or other programming languages, have a website or hosting service, and are comfortable with MySQL, Postgresql, or heck even have a copy of Access on your old PC and prefer that, you can create your own database. For most, this is not going to work out (though, if this is your comfort zone, you might be able to make a mint on it, if you can outperform the ones listed above!), but for some, it might.

• Pros:
• Completely customizable—database schemas, tables, web access, connectivity, relationships, can be completely defined by you.
• Essentially limitless in scale—subject to provider restrictions, of course, but if you have ten book projects, and each of them is submitted to fifty different agencies or publishers, you can really track 500 as easily as 5. This will be limited to your ability to code & design, as well, however.
• Follow-up (follow-through?) for submissions can be heavily automated.
• Cons:
• Requires an existing knowledge of, or interest in learning: database design; database administration; programming in one or several of: PHP, PERL, Python, any number of languages for CGI programming (C, Java, C++), or a dynamic website system like ColdFusion; software debugging; UI design; web design; CSS and/or HTML.
• Designing, implementing & maintaining a database, and coding, testing, and deploying the front-end software to access & use it, are often more than full time jobs. If you work, and are writing, you may not have time to also code your own submission tracker!

"Commercial" CRM or CRM-style DB

Finally, there is the option of the Customer Relationship Management (or CRM) database. I use Commercial in quotes because there are several options, most of which do require a subscription payment, but not all. Subscription options for some of these can be as low as $10-15/month per user for tools like Insightly, Base CRM, or Zoho CRM, or go as high as thousands of dollars for a product like Infusionsoft, Peoplesoft, or SAP. I prefer this option, personally—and, in fact, my next blog post in this series will be a detailed explanation of how I have mine set up—and I recommend it for most CloudAge™ Authors. Why, you ask? I'm glad you did:

• Self-publishing (or Artisanal Publishing?), hoping to attract attention and agency/publisher notice on your timeline? You will want a tool to keep track of your customers, media events, even social media. Any CRM worth having around will have tools to allow you to capture your communications with customers, create projects and/or timelines for activities, track income & sales, and schedule tasks—often, with automatic reminders & follow-up timers—allowing you to stay on top of your time without losing all of your sleep.
• Hoping to publish via more traditional methods? A CRM will help you organize and track submission progress, send reminders to you to help you stay on your timeline, allow you to gather information about the agencies and/or publishers you target for submissions, and organize them into groups by writing project.

The way I see it, in the CloudAge™, you must own your brand as a writer first, and if you start by envisioning yourself as a business, using business tools to help keep yourself organized and focused, you will significantly improve your chances of succeeding at it. The great news is that some of these business tools can be free to start with, and as your brand—and income from it—grows, you can expand into more powerful versions of those tools that do cost money.

• Pros:
• For the CloudAge™ Author looking to build a brand around their writing, CRMs are an excellent tool for keeping track of many aspects of business, from projects to mailing list management to income to marketing to event tracking, so incorporating submission tracking is just another part of the business function.
• Automated reminders for submission follow-up: many of these will place reminders directly into your calendaring software (which software depends on the CRM—some integrate with iOS apps, others with Google Calendar, etc.).
• Many of these tools have free apps for iOS or Android, in addition to web or Mac/PC versions, and can be accessed from anywhere with Internet access (yay cloud!)
• Customizable, at least in part; custom fields & field types can be created to help form the exact information-tracking you (not I, or her, or him, or they) need.
• Cons:
• Most options are month-to-month or even yearly subscriptions to use even the most basic functionality (though, some are free at the most basic level), and some can be prohibitively expensive for a writer just trying to make it.
• Learning curve and setup for optimal utility requires an input of time that may be too expensive for some to give.
• At the most basic level, many are restricted in terms of custom fields or other data, and may not offer enough for some without a paid subscription.

Whatever choice you do make, for your submission tracking, I wish you the best of luck with your submissions! In my next blog entry, I am going to show you how I organize my submission (and, even writing projects to some degree) using the Insightly CRM platform.

Also, if you have any other suggestions, or especially if you've had success with technology tools to submit your various projects, comment below so we can all learn!

*: People who suffer from OCD, or ADHD, may find the options in spreadsheet tracking either 1) freeing, allowing them to make very fine-grained formatting changes for each option, or 2) overwhelming, because the sheer number of combinations of text, cell, color, and other formatting options may be too much.

The CloudAge™ Author: Scrivener, and Dropbox

In our last installment, we were discussing how to sync your Scrivener app on Mac OS X using Simplenote, using the built-in tools in Scrivener to connect to a Simplenote account.

If you don't have—or don't like—Simplenote, you do have other options available to you. As we discussed in an earlier post, you can tell Scrivener to sync with an external folder, and that folder can reside basically anywhere on your Mac. If you put your external folder in your Dropbox folder (or a sub-folder of it), you can access it anywhere you can access Dropbox; editing them can then be done in any RTF or plain text editor that can open files from Dropbox.

Caveat: if you plan to use a plain text editor, such as iaWriter (US $2.99), you must set up the External Folder Sync to use plain text, rather than RTF files. Also, if you have an outline already created, or have some idea what your structure will look like, I have found it easiest to make sure the files I think I am going to want already exist, even if they are empty, before I even set up the External Folder for syncing. You may feel differently, and that's okay!

Some of these options include the lightweight PlainText 2 (free, does offer in-app purchases), Byword (US $5.99), and others. In the interest of brevity, I'm only going to cover Plain Text 2 today, since getting other apps to work is very similar.

The gist of getting any particular app to connect to Dropbox, if it offers that option, is to tell the app you want to use Dropbox—usually in the settings for the app itself—and then adding Dropbox as an option there. The app will usually launch the Dropbox app for you, which will then ask you if you want to allow that app to connect. Giving it permission then returns you to the original app, where you may have to wait for the app to sync with the Dropbox files. Also, while many apps offer Dropbox sync by default, others may offer it only as an in-app purchase upgrade.

For PlainText 2 users:
Plain Text 2 offers Dropbox sync as well, and linking it is very easy.

First, open Plain Text 2 and there will be an option along the left edge to link to Dropbox. Clicking on this will ask whether you want to link Plain Text 2 to the entire Dropbox hierarchy, or only to the App folder for Plain Text 2.

In my example, I just went ahead and linked to the entire Dropbox folder, since I might want to edit already existing documents; if you've not linked Plain Text to Dropbox before, this is probably the better option, unless you will go back later and edit Scrivener's Sync to External Folder option to put your project's files under the Plain Text folder on Dropbox.

Whichever option you choose, tapping it will launch the Dropbox app, and ask if you want to allow Plain Text 2 to access Dropbox. Tapping on Allow will link the two, and then take you back to the Plain Text 2 app, where Plain Text will warn you that Dropbox sync cannot be done in the background, and to keep the app open while syncing occurs. Depending on how many files you have, and how much space, this can take a couple of minutes over WiFi.

Once it syncs, you should be able to tap on the Dropbox icon on the left side, and see your files & folders. Tap your way through the file hierarchy until you find the Draft folder you set up in the External Folder Sync in Scrivener. Select the file you want to edit, and go to town!

If you want to create a new file in Plain Text 2 and have it ready to sync, make sure you are in the Draft folder, and tap the "new file" button (the icon at the bottom of the left sidebar, a square with a pencil through the upper-right corner). Then, type away!

In either case, whether you are editing existing files or are creating new ones, changes to the Scrivener project must be synced back. Once you have the project open in Scrivener, click "File->Sync->With External Folder Now" to bring the changes back up (and, also, push down any you may have made while in Scrivener).

Any new or modified files will appear in the Binder in Scrivener, under the "Updated Documents" collection. To reveal the collections, if they are not already visible, click on the Collections button at the top left of the Scrivener toolbar

(And, to reveal the Binder, if it is hidden, click the Binder button on the far left). Now, you'll have a Scrivener project with all your edited, and new, documents from Plain Text 2 on your iPad!

One final caveat, before we part ways today:  Plain Text 2 (like many other editors) will automatically save the file using the first line of the file as its title. This also means that, like many other editors, you shouldn't edit the first line of the file once it's been synced to Scrivener. Until you sync it, you can edit it ad hoc, no big deal. But once it's been synced, it's best to leave it alone. My suggestion is to immediately give the file a first line title that will be useful in Scrivener (Scrivener will later add its own internal information to the title anyway), and then never worry about it again.

If anyone has a question, feel free to post a comment below, or shoot me a note on my Facebook Page (BacilDonovanWarren), or on Twitter (@BacilDonovan).

CloudAge writing with Scrivener and Simplenote

Yes, it's been a while since our last installment in this series, Scrivening in the CloudAge (with Scrivener), so let's not delay any longer with idle chit-chat!

… Except to say that Scrivener seems to be nearing readiness on the iPad, having recently gone into a private Beta test phase. I am going to attempt to become a public beta tester for it, when they make that available, but I will definitely test & review it for you when it is released if I am not able to become a beta tester. And that, of course, the reason for my delay is that I switched from my iPad as my only portable option, to a MacBook Air, and have been unintentionally neglecting the iPad as my writing tool because of that. I am here to redress that imbalance!

So if you're a current Scrivener user, and already have or are planning to install Simplenote (free) on your iPad, here's how you connect Simplenote to your existing Scrivener projects.

First, launch and login to Simplenote on the iPad (create a free user account, if you have not yet done so).

Next, on your computer, open the project you wish to be able to use in Simplenote, within Scrivener on your computer. Next, go into the "File" menu, and select "Sync->with Simplenote …", as shown:

When you select the "with Simplenote …" option, a sheet will appear, permitting you to login to the Simplenote servers. Use the same username and password as you used on the iPad.

Please note that the Project keyword field is mandatory, as this is the method that Scrivener uses to sync with Simplenote.

Next, you're greeted with a sheet to select which documents should sync between Scrivener and Simplenote for this project. By default, this is set to "Select documents to sync", which is the recommended setting. The rationale behind this setting is that you should sync only the documents you will work on remotely, saving space and bandwidth. For example, you might wish to work on text documents within the "Draft" folder (the generic name for the project's main content, whether a short story or a manuscript, etc.), as well as Characters, but not the Places or Setting items.
The settings for "Take snapshots of affected documents before updating", "Insert blank lines between paragraphs", and "Delete from Simplenote any project documents not selected for syncing" are enabled by default. Deselecting "Take snapshots" will stop Scrivener from making snapshot backups of the selected files before uploading, and before syncing back, and is not recommended (that is, leave it selected, that way it will make snapshots of the local file before any changes are uploaded or synced). Inserting blank lines between paragraphs will insert a blank link after any paragraph in the Scrivener document. Delete from Simplenote will remove from the Simplenote service any documents which are present in Simplenote—and are part of the current project—but which are not selected to be synced. As an example, lets say you work on one chapter at a time. You create a new folder for the chapter, and sync that folder and all of its subfiles to Simplenote. Then, after several weeks of editing, etc., you regard the chapter as finished, and sync all your changes back into Scrivener. Next, you work on chapter 2, create the Chapter 2 folder and some subfiles, then mark them for sync to Simplenote. If you then un-check the Chapter 1 folder & files, and leave "Delete from Simplenote any project documents not selected for syncing", all of the Chapter 1 files & folder(s) will be deleted from Simplenote (though, since you've already synced up from before, you will not be losing information). This can be a handy way to stay focused only on the highest-priority items, by removing any files that have already been finished and leaving behind only the ones that are still being edited.

Once you've selected the items within Scrivener to sync, click "Continue" and you'll be presented with a sheet asking about importing from Simplenote. First, it will prompt you for the location in the current project where you'd like Simplenote documents to be placed. This will, of course, depend on what you're doing; if you are using the iPad as a research tool—say, by taking your iPad with you to the library or to wherever you do your research—then you might choose to have Scrivener add Simplenote files to the Research section of the project. If, instead, you are working on only one chapter of your novel on the iPad (maybe you'll be on a business trip and want to work on the new chapter while you're away), you can select that folder instead. There will also be a section to the left where any notes already marked for this project will appear (as you can see, there aren't any for now), and a section to the right where other notes from Simplenote will appear; you can elect to or not to sync any or all of these items.

Once you've selected where to sync these files, and which ones to sync, click Continue and it will sync the files you've selected up to Simplenote, and any you've told it to bring down from Simplenote. It should then give you a "Sync Complete" message like the one on the right.

Next, open Simplenote on the iPad (or iPhone, if you prefer), and you should see a list of notes in the main viewing area, as shown. Here is a brand-new Simplenote installation, with no previously existing files (the only note listed, "Getting the most out of Simplenote", is automatically created when Simplenote creates your login).

Once the files in your new Scrivener project have been synced, you will see those files appear as well. You can see here, the titles of these notes contain not just the filename from the Scrivener file ("Scene" and "Story"), but also the left & right parentheses ("(" & ")"),  left & right straight brackets ("[" and "]"), as well as the Project Keyword ("Testing Simplenote") and a number. In Simplenote, the first line of any note becomes the note's title, and in Scrivener the title is used to sync the files between Simplenote (the "remote"), and the Scrivener project (the "local"). When in Simplenote, remember do not edit the first line of any notes you sync with Scrivener, or those changes may be lost, overwritten, or otherwise mangled.

On the right, you can also see what the Simplenote interface looks like if you have the "notes" pane expanded (click the < at the top left of the screen). This allows you to pick and choose between seeing "All Notes" (that is, everything in your Simplenote account), or only notes with particular "Tags" (such as "Scrivener", which is automatically tagged to any Scrivener-synced document, or "Testing_Simplenote", which is the tag automatically created from the Project Keyword when it was created in the Scrivener project).

When you have been out and about on your iPad (or iPhone), and you are back to your computer ready to re-sync the changes you've made on your project while working on the iPad, you basically do the same steps: Select "File->Sync->with Simplenote …", and make sure that any files from Scrivener you wish to keep synced with the Simplenote project are selected; then, click "Continue" to select any new files that you wish to sync, which you may have created in Simplenote but are not yet in the Scrivener project, and click "Continue" again. This will sync any changed documents (creating a snapshot, first, if that option is selected), then push any new Scrivener documents to Simplenote, pull any new Simplenote notes to Scrivener, and then show you the "Sync Completed" sheet.

Now, you have an updated version of all documents on both Scrivener on your computer, and the Simplenote app on your device!

Please, feel free to post any questions below. Both Scrivener (links to support page) and Simplenote (links to contact page) offer support for their products.

I was your medic

I was your medic
—Bacil Donovan Warren

You might remember me, although I don't remember you,
It's nothing personal, you see—I very seldom do.
I treat a lot of people, and I see more every day;
Now, if the call was really bad, the memory might stay.

Especially if it involved a child—maybe yours?—
Whose face was blue, head slumping down, as we came through the doors.
You held her precious body out for us to lend a hand
"You must save her!" you screamed at us, as we calmly began.

Or was it from this call we ran, a couple months ago;
A flare up at a barbecue; a man who did not know
The gas had already been on, and tried to light the flame,
What I recall most about it: him, screaming out in pain.

As many of my colleagues know, I joke about our work,
None of it is intended to be rude; I'm not a jerk.
It's simply how many of us deal with the deathly ill,
The ugly truth about it, is that many haunt me still.

The agony in faces wracked with fear about the fate
Of a father, or a friend, who seems at Heaven's gate;
A tearful wail as medics fail to work their magic touch—
Sometimes, when I remember them, it really is too much.

And so I work to bury it, so deep inside my soul.
I let it out in little bursts as jokes—that is my role.
But many nights I lie in bed, because I cannot sleep;
The memories of those I've lost—into my brain they creep.

They torture me with thoughts about the things I did, or not;
Was there more I could have done? Just give me another shot!
The second, or the third or fourth, a chance to do again
And step back into history—remembering only then

That nothing that I do or say has made them come alive
I couldn't make it better then, and they did not survive.
So as I lay with the demon Doubt twisting in my head,
I circle into bitter thoughts, just laying in my bed.

One month turns to five or six, Doubt eating me from within
My coping mechanisms can no longer calm the din.
The demon leads me to the gun, I keep for safety's sake;
Ironic how I use it now, the cycle for to break.

I didn't think that anyone would get just how I feel;
I thought I would get laughed about—the medic who can't deal!
It tears my soul apart now when I dwell upon this pain,
I just wish I could have reached out and didn't have to feign

Being well: a happy face, be that medic you all know
Has it all together!—I tell you now, it's all a show.
If only I had taken time, to talk about these fears
I might not now be looking down, your faces wet with tears.

My memorial is over, my friends have said goodbye,
Some of them are back to work, while others will sit and cry.
I was your medic, at one time, but since I kept it in,
I took my life when demon Doubt no longer stayed within.

I beg you now, my medic friends, don't keep it buried down
Hiding under a false face; the station's duty clown.
Talk to someone who can help you deal with this Doubt.
I do not want another soul to accompany me out.


If you are an EMS provider, and you are feeling haunted & brought to the brink of suicide by those demons of Doubt, or the memories of the ones you couldn't save, you can get help: the Code Green Campaign has a lot of resources you can use to help with those. It sucks when we lose patients, but there is hope. You are not alone.

Sci-Fi short story teaser

“Alright, good. Because we can’t take this to the Space Command guys without verifying it.” Steve turned his attention back to the computer screen. “Really, MARVIN? A robot probe with a small wormhole generator? I suppose those magnetic bottle arrays are …” his voice trailed again as the implications swam through his brain. “… Sonofabitch Lance. Write that script and verify. I think MARVIN’s really onto something.”

“Workin’ on it now; what do you suppose is up?”

“You remember all those magnetic bottles we found, the ones that were almost all intact and still charged?”

“Yeah, so?”

“They’re photon holders. It’s a quantum signaling system, tied to the generator that MARVIN detected. It all makes sense now.”

The stunned silence emanating from the tall, dark-complected Lance seemed almost to vibrate, but his face drained of energy. “So, it’s autonomous, and has a small wormhole generator that can be remotely triggered. You’re saying that it can be operated remotely, instantly, by whomever created it, and it’s deep under the Earth, right now?”

“Well, yeah, I think I am. At least, I think I think.” Steve sighed, stared through the floor, and contemplated his options. “Run your script, dude, and let’s see what comes up.”

Free copy of Hooray for Pain! available, for reviewers

As many of you remember, I published the e-Book version of Hooray for Pain! on Amazon last August. The terms of the original publishing arrangement meant that I had to give Amazon exclusive e-book rights for a time, which is now expired, and I'd like to make an offer to anyone who is interested in reviewing the book for the Amazon store:

Contact me via private message on Facebook, and let me know if you're interested in receiving a review copy of the book. The book is identical to the one on the store, with the exception of the cover art. If you don't have a Kindle device, there is the Kindle app on your iOS, Android, PC, or Mac; if you would prefer a different format, contact me via Facebook and we'll work out details.

There is no caveat, but I would like to ask one favor: if you request a review copy, and enjoy the book, please put a review of the book up on the Amazon site: http://bit.ly/hfp_bdw ; if you request a review copy, and don't enjoy it, let me know (and why, if you can), and I'll endeavor to make it a better publication.

Christmas thoughts 2014

Today, I am reminded of the Christmas Eve of 1990. Of course, 3d ACR was already deep in the desert of Saudi Arabia, but several of my troop mates and I were detached on a detail to off-load the new M1A1HA tanks that were coming for The Regiment, and had been living in a warehouse in Dammam (King Abdulaziz port). We'd been there for about a week,  I believe, and since all we were really there for was the off-loading of the new tanks we didn't have much else to do (the ship hadn't arrived yet, so there was really, truly nothing going on). We must have played Spades or Hearts or other card games about a thousand times, trying to keep busy, and of course there was always sweeping and keeping things tidy (this was the Army, after all), but you can only clean things so many times.

By Christmas Eve, the ship with our new tanks had still not yet arrived in port but the 1st Infantry Division had, and they were also sleeping in the warehouse space as they were awaiting their equipment, just as we had when we arrived in-country in late September/early October. It was not always peaches and cream (tankers--particularly Cav tankers--get along with infantry about like lion sires get along with baby male lions, and there were a couple of minor incidents of tankers getting the better of grunts ... which, of course, the grunts couldn't let stand, and that led to a little bit of a fracas), but on Christmas Eve we were all just soldiers a long way from home, and one of the 1st ID chaplains came by and did an impromptu service.

I've always been fascinated by the Christmas eve service. Even as a child, what I remember (and remember liking) best about Christmas was the singing, the lights, the spectacle of the service. It was always quite magical, and the one celebrated by a dozen or so soldiers in a warehouse in Dammam, Saudi Arabia in 1990 was no different. We sang (mostly on-key) some traditional Christmas songs, the chaplain did a couple of readings, and we lit candles and sang some more. Afterward, we went back to our cots and tried to forget that we were 8,000 miles from home--and a million miles from safety--and just reflect on our continued generally good fortune.

The lights. The candles. That's what I recall most vividly about many Christmases. Regardless of your particular religious proclivities, and whether you are a practicing Jew at Hanukkah or a Christian at Christmas or a Hindi at Diwali (yeah, wrong time of year but whatever) or a Pagan at midwinter/Yule--and, even atheist, since the torch of knowledge is still a thing--the lights all mean the same essential thing: Light overpowers dark, and the flame of life gives us hope.

I hope you all have a magnificent holiday season, be it Christmas or otherwise.

Free download day for Hooray for Pain! book on 14 SEP 2014

As many of you may already be aware, my chap book of poetry (titled Hooray for Pain!) has been published by Quixotic Raindrop Publishing, and is available in the Kindle store, on Amazon.

On the 14th of September, it will be available as a free download (normally $3.99), for anyone who wishes to download it!

Have fun, and I hope you enjoy it!

White cloud, survivor guilt, and Memorial Day

White Cloud: (adj, coll.): In EMS, a provider who, when on shift, seems to be followed by an aura of calm, attracting simple & straightforward EMS calls such as uncomplicated psych transports, stubbed toes, and limited numbers of calls per shift. (contrast "Black Cloud", a provider who seems to attract whirling chaos, sometimes seemingly attracting multiple-person-ejected motor vehicle collisions, cardiac arrests, and assorted other complicated, brink-of-death EMS calls while on shift; sometimes called a "crap magnet" or other, more scandalous, phrases).

Survivor guilt: (syndrome): The guilt felt by survivors of a tragic event (combat, hostage situations, natural disasters, etc.), often manifesting as a miasma of "why me? why did I survive when _blank_ did not?" thoughts.

Memorial Day, in the United States, is a holiday set aside to memorialize the lives of those who gave "the last full measure of devotion" to preserve the rights and privileges of all Americans. As a veteran, I find Memorial Day a particularly sobering day, partly due to an acute understanding of the sacrifice made by the fallen. As with many of my brothers and sisters in arms, I also feel a deep regret about having lived while others did not. Survivor's guilt, they call it. A manifestation of PTSD, according to the DSM IV. I don't know about all that, but what I do know is that it's very real, and sometimes disabling.

I have not, myself, been disabled by it I don't believe, although there have been Memorial Days in the past when I certainly tried to drink away the guilt.

I have not, myself, tried (or even really ever thought about) harming myself due to a sinking disgust with being alive when many others died, but I know there are some who have.

One of my best friends from Basic Training, a second-generation Greek-American by the name of John Alexiou, died in a training accident in Grafenwöhr when his tank's loader forgot one of the basic rules of being a loader for an M1A1 tank: never hot-seat rounds. The 120 mm round used in the M1A1 is a combustible case cartridge, designed to mostly disintegrate when the round is fired leaving behind only the base end (and in the sabot round, part of the primer containment section), which drastically reduces the amount of space a spent round takes up after firing. One of the side effects of having a combustible case cartridge is that if handled improperly, it can be set off prematurely. When fired, the 120 mm main gun gets incredibly hot, and the base end (called the aft cap) is often a couple of hundred degrees Fahrenheit when it pops out of the breech; hot enough to ignite the combustible case of the round. The story is that the loader was hot-seating rounds—that is, keeping a round in his lap after loading the first round in the main gun, to cut down how much time it takes to load the second round—and then the aft cap of the first round got stuck in the deflector. The training standard is for the loader to call "AFT CAP AFT CAP" and begin an immediate action drill (IAD) to fix the stuck aft cap by disarming the main gun, and using a (GLOVED!) hand to pull up on the deflector while simultaneously adjusting the aft cap to clear the obstruction. To perform this IAD, the loader must stand, and if you have something in your lap it has to go on the floor of the turret. If that something is a main gun round, and when you dislodge the hot aft cap it bounces into said main gun round, said main gun rounds can cook off.

In this case, that's exactly what happened. The aft cap ignited the case cartridge, and killed the Tank Commander (SSG Carlos Williams) as well as SPC John Alexiou who was in the gunner's seat at the time (I seem to recall the driver was also killed, but that the loader survived and was badly burned, but another source seems to indicate the loader was killed which makes more sense to me).

I did not lose any of my fellow 1st "Tiger" Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment troopers in Desert Storm. One—I believe it was Kelly Ouderkirk, the platoon leader of the scout platoon my tank platoon supported—was injured in a Bradley rollover on the first night of the ground war. That night, one of our approach roads was very narrow, with a sharply sloped shoulder leading down an approximately 15' embankment on both sides, and his driver misjudged the location of the shoulder. Fortunately, he returned to lead his scouts before our major assaults began, and did a fantastic job.

Two hundred ninety-four US service members died during the first Gulf War; one hundred thirteen of them by enemy action. Thousands more have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since, and hundreds of thousands more before. That I survived, and many did not, pops up from time to time in my head, and colors the things I do; what I believe I can do to best assuage my own guilt, and honor the memories of those who have not returned, is to do what I can to make this America one to which they would have been proud to come home.

So this Memorial Day I again resolve to do—in my small way—what I can to keep America a strong nation, one compassionate toward those who are beset by misfortune ("Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses") yet relentless toward those who would seek to destroy it. And for John, my friend who awaits me at Fiddler's Green, I hope you will approve of what we've done here in your absence.