Blackout Apologies, The Fight, and the Future

January 19, 2012January 18, 2012 | Mac

I’m sorry. It was probably wrong of me to publish a new post which was Virtual Novel Writing Studio – Scrivener on the same day that I was planning to participate in the internet blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA. What can I say… I lost track of the details… I missed that this protest and the next blog post were scheduled for the same date.

Apologies aside, I’d like us all to reflect on the fact that freedom of speech, collage, and mashup are central to art, digital art, and cultural discourse. Art, whether it’s a movie, a song, or a book, is not merely a vehicle for collecting wealth, it is also a cultural artefact. That said artists need to make a living. Irrespective of the grey area in my non-expert opinion this proposed legislation has gone much too far. Here’s a great video –

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/31100268]

If you’d like to know what you can do to join the fight, click the black “Stop Censorship” ribbon in the top right corner of Exploring-Art.com. I am pleased to hear that the largest online protest in history has had some results. As always consider the fight far from over until the legislation is abandoned. Again I’m sorry for the outage but it was important to me.

I have lots of great things planned for Exploring-Art.com, which you will hear about in the near future so stay tuned!

Mac

Virtual Novel Writing Studio – Scrivener

January 18, 2012January 18, 2012 | Mac

As you know one of my implicit and poetic New Year’s resolutions was to get serious about writing… practice the art, improve my abilities and create. It’s a multi-front undertaking about blogging, school, journalling and because I am a ridiculously enthusiastic individual, it is also about writing a great Canadian novel.

The subject of the novel is super secret but it’s starting out as a piece of creative non-fiction, which means research, organization, time-lining, outlining and other structural undertakings. I like this as it plays to my professional background – a project manager. However it quickly starts to get messy in a regular word processor. You quickly arrive in a situation where you have multiple word documents such as an outline and a draft that need to be kept up to date separately, not to mention the meshed network of file folders for research, notes, drafts and other related files. So this got me thinking, there must be an app for this… and sure enough courtesy of Apple’s OS X App store I found Scrivener, and it is perfectly tailored for the job. The price tag was a little disconcerting at first at $44.99 so I headed over to the developers website to see if they had a demo and they did…

After installing the demo and reviewing some instructional material including a very helpful video, I started importing over all of my miscellaneous files into the Scrivener app. That done I felt at home in my very well organized virtual writing studio, so I purchased a version through the app store, and I’m happy to report that the upgrade from the demo to the app through Apple was seamless. My work was not disrupted, my files were not corrupted. Since then I’ve even penned the first page of my opus.

Watch out world! Mr Campbell and his partner Dr. Scrivener are on the case.