Many of you are probably aware of the less-than-ideal situation at Red Rose Publishing. It is so critical to do your homework, especially when you're dealing with small presses and/or e-publishers. (With the big NY publishers — in general they deal with agented authors and they tend not to get into Jerry Springer-esque situations…)

Talking to other writers doesn't always help because they either don't know (too new to the publisher) and/or are reluctant to be 100% honest at times. In the case of RRP, they had a non-disclosure clause so many RRP authors kept their mouths zipped.

I recommend the following resources for anyone considering submitting works to e-publishers / small presses.

• Preditors & Editors
• Absolute Write: Bewares, Recommendations & Background Checks

I heard about AutoCrit from Marie-Claude Bourque. So I've decided to try it.

For those of you who aren't aware, AutoCrit is a brainchild of Nina Davies. She has two books published with Wings ePress and Cobblestone Press. (Dream Gypsy, which is listed under her “Books” hasn't been published as far as I know.) She's also an editor, though I don't know who she edits for or what authors she's worked with.

Anyway…back to AutoCrit —

The website claims:

If you are writing a book, the AutoCrit Editing Wizard will dramatically improve your manuscript. I guarantee it.

Unfortunately I think the claim that AutoCrit “will dramatically improve your manuscript” is somewhat exaggerated. If you're an intermediate to advanced writer with decent line-editing skill, AutoCrit won't do much for you. But if you're fairly new and/or terrible at line-editing, it'll be a valuable tool until you're no longer a beginner.

AutoCrit will not help you identify character issues, plot holes or the general flow. It won't help you with punctuation either. It's meant to be a mechanical tool designed to help you identify basic line-edit problems involving repeated words and phrases.

It also cannot be installed on your computer. So you have to continue to pay for your membership so long as you want to use it. But as I said, it's only good for beginners, and I think most people will grow out of AutoCrit within a year or two at the most.

Free Reports —

Overused Words Report:

It's pretty basic and checks for the number of times you've used the following words (only):

• could
• feel/feeling/felt
• had
• have
• hear/heard
• initial conjunction
• initial ing
• it/there
• just/then
• knew/know
• look
• ly adverbs
• maybe
• smell/taste
• that
• was/were
• watch/notice/observe

It highlights the ones it thinks you've overused and advises you on what to do with instructions like: Remove about 4 occurrences.

Repeated Phrases Report:

This report looks for repeated phrases. It's slightly different from repeated words since it looks for groups of words that have been repeated.

Sentence Length Variation:

It basically draws a bar graph with dots to illustrate how many words you've used on each sentence. It may be fun to view, but it did absolutely nothing for me since my sentence length is all over the place, so it's not like I'm going to go back and try to change anything. This is useful for people who write a lot of sentences with a similar number of words back to back. Otherwise not that useful.

Paid Reports (Orange) — To view these, you need to have at least the Gold membership.

Repeated Words Report:

This is pretty useful because it highlights words that you've repeated too closely together. But again if you're a decent line editor, you won't find it all that helpful.

The report just highlights the words, and it's up to you to figure out how to fix them (or decide if you even want to do anything about them in the first place).

Dialogue Tags Report:

This is completely useless to almost all intermediate to advanced writers, who won't write tags like “He ejaculated!”. It just highlights dialogue tags like “he said” and so on. Not very helpful unless you tag every dialogue, in which case you need to study some how-to books on dialogue.

First Words Report:

Shows the first word of each sentence. Again, not very helpful unless you have a nasty habit of starting most of your sentences with the same word.

Names and Pronouns Report:

This highlights proper names and pronouns. Not very helpful for writers with a basic grasp of grammar. This is for people who have some serious issues with syntax, in which case, IMO they ought to be reading Strunk and White.

Repeated Phrases Summary Report:

This merely lists the phrases you've repeated and the number of times you've repeated them. No highlights. I'm not sure what purpose this report serves, especially if you've already addressed the issue in the free repeated phrases report.

Combination View of Overused & Repeated Words Report:

This merely highlights overused and repeated words in ONE report. Nothing new.

Paid Reports (Blue) — To view these, you must buy the Platinum membership.

Cliché Finder Report:

I had really high hopes for this one, but this report didn't find that many clichés. I have no idea how many are in the database, but seriously, you're better off looking for them yourself.

Redundancy Finder Report:

This report shows things like “stand up” or “sit down”, with the remark that “up” or “down” respectively are redundant. It may be, but sometimes it's a stylistic choice.

Homonym Highlighter:

For people with a good grasp of English, this report is virtually useless. But if you're struggling with “they're”, “there” and “their”, this will probably help.

Readability Suite:

MS Word already has this function built-in. It basically checks for how “readable” your manuscript is, using the formula based on the number of words in a sentence and the number of syllables per word. It won't look for whether or not your story is gripping or interesting or whatever. Moderately helpful.

Pacing Monitor:

This works for stories written in 3rd person POV in past tense only. It highlights parts that are “descriptive” or “introspective” and so on. To be honest, I don't think this is useful at all except for beginners. You're better off doing Margie Lawson‘s EDITS on your manuscript to address pacing issues.

***** ***** *****

Professional membership BTW doesn't allow you any more reports. You can upload your entire manuscript in one file, instead of having to copy paste.

The only paid report that I found somewhat useful was the repeated words report. The rest are more or less time-wasters (for me personally). But beginner writers may find AutoCrit a valuable tool.

If you want to try it out, feel free. You can get full refund so long as you cancel within thirty days, no questions asked. (I've tried it already.)

I have two coupon codes for AutoCrit:

• twitter —> 10% off
• fb5010 —> 50% off (I have no idea when it's going to expire, but it's not going to be valid much longer…)

Since I've been suffering from RSIs galore over the past few weeks, I decided to invite Alex Nordach, author of Target Tendonitis, for a brief interview. Hope this helps anyone else out there with tendon pain!

NL: Hi Alex, and welcome to the blog. Can you tell us a little about your background?

AN: Thanks for having me, Nadia. Sure, I can give you a quick overview. I've been involved in the health and fitness industry in one capacity or another for more than three decades. In that time, in addition to the usual knowledge about exercise and nutrition, I've developed some expertise about tendon pain. What causes it, and more importantly, what to do to fix it. I'm not a doctor, but I feel confident in saying that I know more about current research in the field than most medical professionals.

NL: Sounds good! I know I've been having a terrible time with my forearms and wrists lately… Any advice for writers who sit at the keyboard for hours a day?

AN: Well, any kind of RSI (repetitive stress injury) is due to an accumulation of small stresses, and so is most tendon pain. So one thing to do would be to change things like the height of your chair, your distance from the keyboard, which hand you mouse with, and the height of your wrist pad on a regular basis. Doing any or all of these will slightly change the angle you type at, and therefore will change the stress on your muscles and tendons. It's not a cure-all by any means, but it will go a long way toward preventing pain from occurring in the first place.

NL: Are there any nutritional strategies you can use to help prevent or cure tendon pain?

AL: It really depends on the type of pain you have. Everyone thinks that any kind of tendon pain is automatically “tendonitis”, but the fact is that most cases of tendon pain are actually tendonosis. The difference is that tendonitis means that the tendons are inflamed. (In medical parlance, any kind of “itis” means inflammation.) Tendonosis, on the other hand, means actual fraying and degradation of the tendon, and can be more serious. If you have tendonitis — inflammation — there are some really good supplements you can take to help out. One of the best is Repair Gold, made by Enzymedica. Other than that, just adjusting your diet so that it has more in the way of good fats (fish oil, olive oil, etc.) will help out with general inflammation.

NL: I like that point about tendonitis versus tendonosis. That would explain why icing and taking aspirin hasn't really helped me with my pain.

AN: Yeah, exactly. Those are both treatments for inflammation, but if you've had your pain for more than a couple of weeks, you probably have some sort of problem with the tendon itself. So icing and NSAIDs (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) like aspirin and ibuprofin aren't going to help much. Unfortunately, most doctors are so used to calling tendon problems “tendonitis” that even they don't make the distinction as often as they should. It's been estimated that as much as 95% of tendon pain cases are actually tendonosis, no matter what they might be called.

NL: What about stretching? Is that good for tendon pain?

AN: Stretching certainly won't hurt, and it would be a really good idea to take a break from typing once an hour or so and get up, stretch your forearms out and walk around for ten minutes or so. But stretching is more a preventive measure than something that you can do to cure yourself if you already suffer from pain.

NL: How about cortisone shots?

AN: I don't recommend them. First of all, they don't work for everyone. Second, their effects only last a short while. Third, if you get more than two or three in the same spot you run a risk of weakening the tendon, which of course you don't want. Finally, cortisone shots are for inflammation, so they might help if you have tendonitis. If you have tendonosis, though, they won't do any good at all. In that case there are specific exercises that you can do if you're already suffering from pain, and that's what I cover in my book, Target Tendonitis.

NL: I see. Okay, that's good information. Where would someone go if they want to learn more about the subject?

AN: Well, you could check out my blog at the Target Tendonitis website. I'm happy to answer questions there if you have any. I also have articles up on various websites around the Internet, but if you want one-stop shopping most of them are collected at http://www.ezinearticles.com. Just do a search for Alex Nordach and they'll come up.

NL: Great! Thanks for the interview.

AN: My pleasure, Nadia.

You must must must must must get all html, css & graphic files, etc. from your designer even if s/he uploads them to a server for you. This is especially important if you haven't bought your own hosting service and therefore don't have ftp access information, etc.

If you don't do this AND your designer disappears on you and/or you don't want to use her to make every little change (or god forbid, your designer is an a-hole who's decided to hijack your site and hold it for ransom), you are totally screwed unless you're tech savvy. 99.9% of people are probably doomed to go through the horrible time-consuming exercise of getting all their files back by using the “view source code” command on their browser. And they better hope that their designer didn't code in PHP because PHP sourcecode is hidden if you access the file via a browser.

Remember: html, css, graphics files (jpg, gif, etc.) should be a part of the deliverables. You paid for them, so you're entitled to them. Specify this clearly when you hire someone.

BTW — the list of designers I can now recommend has dwindled even more. In case you're wondering, I wholly recommend Frauke from CrocoDesigns and Tara O'Shea from Fringe Element. I've worked with them both, and they're excellent professionals. (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with them in any way.)

I've been on a bit of a YA reading binge recently. Okay, that really means I read like four YAs in a row, which to some of you may not be a lot, but is to me, especially since I'm in the midst of a big brain-draining revision. (I love revision, though it's grueling, thank you very much!)

Anyway, in some of them, the setup of the world (I read mostly paranormal and/or SF YAs) makes me snort out loud. It's primarily because the authors say their world has this set of rules or that, but none of them adequately address the unintended consequences of each set of rules.

Since I'm feeling lazy, I'll copy-paste Wikipedia's definition:

In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not (or not limited to) the results originally intended by a particular action. The unintended results, not recognized by the actor, may be positive or negative. The concept has long existed, but was named and popularised in the 20th century by the American sociologist, Robert K. Merton. The law of unintended consequences is an adage or idiom warning that an intervention in a complex system invariably creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes.

…

Unintended consequences can be grouped into roughly three types:

• a positive unexpected benefit, usually referred to as serendipity or a windfall.
• a negative unexpected drawback, occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy – e.g. while irrigation schemes do provide people with water for agriculture, they often increase waterborne disease which can a have a devastating negative health effect, such as schistosomiasis.
• a perverse effect, that may be contrary to what was originally intended (i.e. when an intended solution to a problem only makes the problem worse). This situation can arise when a policy has a perverse incentive and causes actions contrary to what is desired.

Every new policy and rule almost always changes the characters' individual motivators and artificially creates winners and losers. For a example, outsourcing manufacturing in the States made a lot of goods very cheap, so consumers won, but many who worked in factories in America lost their jobs. (This is a big oversimplification, but you get the idea.) The new economic dynamics caused a strong downward pressure on blue-collar workers' wages and standard of living, among various other unintended consequences.

So I find it hard to buy into a scenario when every new rule, etc. does exactly what it was designed to do. It feels like the author just doesn't understand how economic incentives work or doesn't want to dig deeper than the surface.

P.S. As for the cartoon…I kinda feel that way about the way our government officials tried to help the small folks on Main Street.

Outlook is a marvelous piece of software that not only takes care of emails and contacts, but also manages to-do lists and various appointments and tasks.

However, if you don't do some basic maintenance on your personal folders files (*.pst), you'll experience a significant degradation in performance even if you don't have virus or other issues on your computer.

In order to keep your Outlook running optimally, you should do the following regularly:

• Compact the pst and ost files. (Compacting the ost files isn't applicable for people who aren't using an MS Exchange server.)
• Scan the pst and ost for errors and repair them. (Again, the instructions on ost files aren't applicable for people who aren't using an MS Exchange server.)

Hope this helps!