Hi. I’m Dale Cozort, guest blogger.
I recently had a science fiction novel called Exchange
How did I use open source and free writing tools to write and promote those books? First, I do most of my plotting in Ywriter, which is free, though apparently not open source. I like the structure of YWriter, and use it to develop characters and locations as well as the plots themselves. I do most of my writing these days using Write or Die (see the links section for the online version). I set it for twenty minute sessions and try to write 450 words in those twenty minutes. Most times I don’t quite make it, but I come close. I like writing in a series of sprints because it keeps my inner editor in check while I write. It works well for me. I’ve written over 80,000 words for each of the last three NaNoWriMo months.
I do have a website at www.DaleCozort.com. It’s partly for promotion and partly for my alternate history essays. I started out using NVU as my HTML editor, then switched to Kompozer. Both are open source, as is Filezilla, my FTP program. I use Scribus, an open source desktop publishing program, to create newsletters for promotion, and use Gimp and sometime Pinta for the graphics work. Once in great while I even find a use for TuxPaint, the open source kids’ painting program. A free e-book program called Calibre helped me help the publisher debug a couple of glitches in the e-book version of Exchange.
I’m sure I’m missing some open source tools I use from time-to-time, but those are the big ones. I could do all of those jobs with proprietary tools, but the cost of keeping them all current would be prohibitive. I hate to admit it here, but while I do sometimes use OpenOffice, I usually use Microsoft Word because my work standardized on it and I need to be able to support people using it.
So what about the resulting book? What is Exchange about? It’s set in the near future. Our reality is experiencing a series of Exchanges. Basically, with three hours warning a town-sized chunk of our reality switches places with a same-sized chunk of a reality with no humans but a lot of fierce animals. The two chunks stay in the wrong reality for a week or two, then snap back where they belong. If you wander off the Exchanged chunk and stay there, you’re stuck in the other dimension.
It’s an interesting concept because you end up with an empty world that should be infinitely exploitable, but is surprisingly hard to exploit. You can’t get enough resources into an Exchange zone in three hours to make a viable colony in the other reality, and international agreements prohibit governments from sending people across on the piece of the other reality that has been our reality for a week or two. The agreements are backed up by international observers and the fact that Exchanges can be detected all over the world, so other countries know when and where one is going on.
A big concern: diseases and vermin spreading from the alternate reality to ours. The military and National Guard send teams to protect anyone they can’t evacuate and keep animals from the other reality from getting to our. They also send autonomous solar powered drones into the other reality so they can radio back information if they get within radio range of another Exchange.
That’s just the background. The story itself pits computer guru Sharon Mack against some very high odds as she tries to get her kidnapped daughter back from a group of crazies who want to settle in the other reality with no preparation. That means she goes up against fierce predators, escaped convicts, a marauding street gang and a cult, not to mention an ex-husband. They say to make your characters struggle, and I certainly do that.
If you have any questions about open source or writing or Exchange feel free to ask. I’ll check back every once in a while and would be happy to answer any questions you might have.
