For starters, as anyone who has ever worked in small-town journalism will tell you, the title “editor” is somethat misleading. Scratch that. Very misleading. The editor of a weekly like ours doesn’t sit behind a desk and dish out assignments to a staff of reporters, send photographers out to get the important shots, and buff up rough copy until it turns into glittering journalistic gems. Sometimes a weekly will have several reporters on staff, but just as often the editor is it. That’s certainly the case where I work, where I am the entire news staff. I report and write the stories. I shoot the pictures. I type, proofread, copyedit and rewrite all the press releases, letters, announcements and so forth that pour into the office. I also lay out the paper (which, believe it or not, we still do by cut-and-paste), and do a few other things to boot. Except for the ads, which I’m not involved with, about ninety to ninety-five percent of everything in the paper each week originates with me, is typed by me, edited or rewritten by me, or had some other type of direct involvement from me.

As you can probably guess, all of that usually takes a fair amount of time. There are many long days, many nights spent covering local government meetings, many weekends, many holidays, and always, always, always the deadline. It’s not your usual creative writer’s kind of deadline, either — you know, where you’re late with the book and call your editor to beg for an extra two weeks, or running behind on the story so it gets bumped back to the next issue of the magazine. This is a deadline that is unmoving, unchanging and absolutely unforgiving. You get the paper out every Wednesday no matter what else is going on in town, in the world, or in your own life. I’ve gone without sleep for two days to get out the paper. I’ve skipped trips to get out the paper. I’ve turned down enticing invitations to get out the paper. I’ve missed family activities and milestones to get out the paper. I’ve written when there were no words left to get out the paper. Once, many years ago now, I even showed up on Wednesday with pneumonia and a fever of 104 to get out the paper.

And here may be the real reason I haven’t written much about my day job, because just talking about it can sound an awful lot like whining. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to whining about my work — I’ve been known to whine about it quite a bit, as a matter of fact — but I usually try not to do it in public.

So, no, I’m not whining. Really. I’m just kind of laying it out, warts and all, for those who are curious.

I don’t always like my day job. Sometimes, truth be told, I really sort of hate it. There are days (or weeks, or months) that I feel myself teetering along a fraying tightrope stretched above a yawning canyon of total burnout. But there are times I actually do kind of like it. It’s never boring, and that’s a big plus. No matter how much of it is exactly the same week after week, there is always plenty that’s new and interesting, too. I’m proud to be part of an important industry and represent a noble species like the weekly small-town newspaper. I’m proud that our particular paper has been publishing for over 130 years; its pretty humbling to be part of a long, unbroken tradition like that. I’m delighted that we’re still independently owned and that we continue to fight the good fight against all the odds: a readership that is quickly aging and vanishing away, an alarmingly dwindling advertising base, an onslaught of competition from dozens of other sources, an onslaught so intense and unrelenting that even the biggest of the big city dailies are at serious risk, to say nothing of the little hole-in-the-wall rags like ours. Whenever I need a little inspiration to finish an impossible article, a little strength to keep typing, a little extra motivation to get out of bed at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday or pull myself together on Monday and start the whole weekly marathon over again … well, then, those things are usually enough to do it.

And that’s the long and short of it. Mostly long, I guess, longer than I thought it would be. But now you know. And you know that the next time I vanish from here for a few weeks at a time, I haven’t gone away for good. I’ll be back just as soon as the news allows.

So, happy birthday to … me, I guess!

And more important, thanks to all of you for hanging around and putting up with my (somewhat too sporadic) outpouring of miscellany and disorder. I hope you found the first year interesting and occasionally worthwhile. It’s been a fun journey so far, and I’m very glad to have you by my side.

My wife took these pictures of our house today, in the midst of our latest “snow event,” which they say could leave ten or twelve inches of new white stuff before it’s finished.

I also enjoy trailers and commercials for books, like this one for Douglas Clegg’s The Attraction:

Part of my enjoyment comes from the trailers themselves, part from the little thrill of seeing books elevated, however briefly, to the status of films, TV programs and laundry detergent. When you see one of these little gems, or flip on the TV and catch a commercial for the latest paperback bestseller, it almost makes you feel that reading has once again become a mainstream activity. Sure, it may be just an illusion, but it’s fun while it lasts.

While you can find lots of book trailers on sites like YouTube, and scattered around other places on the Web, I wish someone would create a central repository. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of places to find movie trailers, sites like this one and this one and even this one. But I’ve never seen anything similar for clips and commercials and trailers based on books. Is there one? Have I missed it? If you know of something, please let me know.

Oh, and if the Doug Clegg trailer caught your interest, be sure to check out the book itself. Also, you can find more information about Doug and his work, sign up for his newsletter, and find free goodies and other fun stuff at his very cool Web site.

But here’s the weird thing: Once I finally dared to stick my toes in the water and cautiously start playing with my account, it turned out to be not so bad at all. In fact, it turned out to be a whole lot of fun. I’ve reconnected with some old friends and colleagues, met some new ones, discovered some interesting games, and found another great, fairly harmless way to waste time online.

If you’re like I was, thinking you should give Facebook a try but reluctant to do it, you should probably give it a shot. I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the people you find there, which includes a large and active corps of writerly types, unknown, fairly known and really famous. And as long as you’re relatively cautious about the applications you add to your page and don’t get sucked into too many vampire, werewolf and “Oregon Trail” games, you’ll probably survive just fine.

If you’re already on Facebook or plan on getting there soon, look me up. We’ll be friends, swap a few wall posts, send good karma to each other, and have a rousing game of Scrabulous.

Just for starters, there is Kim Stanley Robinson’s amazing alternate history, The Years of Rice and Salt, which I waited far too many years before reading.

Then there’s Gregory Frost’s brand new novel, Shadowbridge, a thing of beauty that also happens to be the first of a two-book series.

And I haven’t even gotten to Duma Key yet — although even now it is staring at me from across the room, crying to me, taunting me, urging me to pick it up and dive in.

It’s an embarrassment of literary riches, really. I am a lucky reader indeed. I feel blessed.

Rotring Core Technor

Monteverde Charisma

Quite a difference between the two: the sass and the class. But like every parent, I try to love my children equally.

Already, at least one of these wonderful pens has a story clamoring to get out. When I pick it up, I can almost feel it trembling in my hands, eager to tell the tale. (Hint: it might not be the one you think.)

Read the review, if you’re so inclined. More important, read the book.

Probably the easiest thing to do is refer you to the OOo Web site. A few minutes spent there and another few minutes poking around the page for OOo Writer will probably give you a pretty good idea why I use it, why I almost never fire up Microsoft Word anymore — at least when I’m away from my “day job” at the newspaper. Unfortunately, the newspaper is still a Microsoft Office office. But at home, whether on desktop or laptop, I turn to OOo over MS every time. (Well … almost every time. Late last year, I toyed briefly with MS Office 2007 and really liked some of the things I saw. But when it came time to convert my free trial to a paid license, there just wasn’t enough there to make me take the leap.)

The benefits of OOo are clear. It’s free, but as fully-featured, complete and robust as MS Office or any other office suite costing hundreds of dollars. It’s open source, which is never my sole deciding factor in choosing software but is always worth a few dozen brownie points. It uses open standards, which is a critical issue for me, yet it’s completely compatible with MS. In other words, if you send me a file created in Word, I can read it and edit it without any problems whatsoever, and I can create files that you can open and read.

I love the fact the OOo gives me genuine alternatives for Word (Writer), Excel (Calc) Access (Base), Paint (Draw) and PowerPoint (Impress). Note those words: genuine alternatives. OOo is not a “lite” version of MS Office. It is not a pale imitation or a pared-down copy, looking similar on the surface but stripped of vital functionality underneath. It is as big and powerful as MS, and in many cases even more powerful. In Writer, for example, the use of style sheets is a tremendous leap forward for anyone who needs to format large and complex documents. And for me, just the ability to export as a PDF file with a single click has saved lots of time and more than a few headaches.

Is it easy to make the switch? Definitely. Getting started is a three-step process: download, install, use. You’ll probably stumble on a modest learning curve when it comes to tapping some of the more advanced features, style sheets being one. But the documentation is good. So is the help available on the OOo forums. In my transition, I never ran across any question that I wasn’t able to answer with a brief search.

In short, OOo is an ideal tool for just about anyone, whether you’re trying to make a statement or make a deadline, whether you’re a rebel who wants to thumb your nose at the tyranny of Microsoft or someone who just wants to keep your nose to the grindstone and get your work done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I like OOo so much that I joined their community marketing project (gee, can you tell?). But as with anything else I talk about here, your mileage may vary. You might give OOo a spin and think, “nope, not for me.” On the other hand, you might just feel that little electric thrill of discovery that I felt, the excitement of realizing that you can suddenly do the job better than before, of knowing that you will no longer have to suffer (or pay through the nose) to be a prisoner of propietary standards.

Is it worth a try?

I not only remember it, I actually used it for many years, starting in the 1980s, when I first made the transition from typewriters to computers. For the first few years, it was my only word processor. I went on to experiment with other products, but Wordstar remained my primary means of getting thoughts from my brain onto the screen, and from there onto paper. After seven or eight years, I finally moved on for good, flirting with a succession of mistresses that included Ami Pro and Word Pro, Microsoft Word, and finally OpenOffice.org’s Writer.

I’m not as nostalgic about Wordstar as I am about, say, my old typewriter, but there are days that I miss its simplicity, its outstanding performance, and most of all, its do-one-thing-and-do-it-very-well design. I sometimes wish that I could go back and use it again, just for fun, just for the memories.

If you poke around the Internet, you’ll find that some people are still using Wordstar, including a few well-known writers. One in particular, the great Robert J. Sawyer, has written several times about his love for Wordstar. This piece, more than a decade old now, makes the case that Wordstar may have been the best tool ever invented for creative writing. It’s a fascinating read, even if you never heard of Wordstar and couldn’t care less about all the technical stuff. More recently – just a few weeks ago, in fact – Sawyer posted a shorter piece here, noting that the novel he’s working on now is the 18th he’s written with Wordstar.

Rereading Sawyer’s original essay, I find myself agreeing with almost everything he says. I am not a touch typist, not by a long shot. I am probably the world’s fastest three-fingers-and-a-thumb typist, which means I may not have enjoyed all of Wordstar’s benefits to their fullest. But it occurs to me that the software’s design almost certainly helped turn me into the kind of computer user I am today – that is, a user who relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts, avoids menus as much as possible, and tries to touch the mouse only when absolutely necessary. The keyboard is the conduit from the mind to the page. Every use of the mouse, no matter how brief or how unconscious, is a roadblock that interrupts the creative stream.

It’s no secret that word processing programs – even the best of them, like OOo Writer – have become huge, bloated behemoths. They have gained incredible flexibility and functionality, but at a price. They have strayed far from the goal of early programs like Wordstar, which was to give average writers what they truly needed to be effective. They have become gargantuan bulldozers, capable of carving out lakes and moving mountains, when most of us can really create far prettier gardens with a simple spade.