RayBenjamin.Com » Writing

New Book Project – Catch a Falling Sky

rben13 — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:50:53 +0000

Well, I’m fifty pages into my new novel, so maybe I’ll finish this one and be able to start sending out query letters later this year. I’m pretty happy with how it’s going, so far. Below is just a taste:

Peacock Valley, Pavonis Mons, Mars – 2589 A.D.

A hole in the sky.

That wasn’t what Jake Carpenter expected to encounter when he’d set out flying that day. He’d just wanted to enjoy the sensation of riding the thermals over Lake Burroughs, hitching a free ride until they broke against the top of the sky at the membrane that covered the Pavonis Mons Caldera and protected Peacock Valley from the frigid temperatures and near vacuum normally found at the summit of the third largest volcano in the solar system.

He was just reaching the top of a thermal, almost eight kilometers above the valley floor, when he noticed a strange cloud off towards the northwestern wall of the valley. The cloud was right up against the sky membrane, and it looked like it was pinned in place, roiling and squirming like a trapped thing. He’d never seen anything like it in all his years of flying.

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Hope to post more later.

Using a Latin Dictionary in Open Office

rben13 — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:47:44 +0000

I write science fiction, and I use Open Office to do my writing, since I don’t have the money to shell out for Microsoft Office and can’t find any compelling reason to do so if I did have the money. Overall, I believe that Open Office is just as good as MS Word. However, as with any piece of software, sometimes it isn’t immediately obvious how to do something.

A lot of terms that are used in science and in science fiction are from Latin, and I got tired of having to check each one and add an exception to my spell checker for it. So, I went looking for a way to teach Latin to Open Office.

I found the answer in a posting here:

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5814

To summarize, you grab a Latin dictionary file here: http://www.drouizig.org/oo/la_VA.zip

and put it into:

If you use Windows:

C:\\Program Files\\{Your Open Office Directory}\\share\\dict\\ooo\\

If you use Linux:

[HOME]/.openoffice.org2.0/user/wordbook

Then, you can set the language of a selection of paragraph, or even the whole document, by selecting:

Tools->Language->For Selection …
Tools->Language->For Paragraph …
Tools->Language->For all text …

It worked like a charm for me.

FreeMind

Ray — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 02:08:35 +0000

I just recently downloaded FreeMind, which is mind-mapping software. I’m using it to help me sort through the plot of my novel. It’s a pretty handy program for any kind of brain-storming. It’s really hard to explain all the things it can be used for. It can be used to create almost any kind of free-form database.

One of the nice things about FreeMind, if you’re a technical sort, like myself, is that the latest version, currently in beta, supports scripts written in Groovy, a powerful scripting language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This allows you to extend the capabilities of the software quite a bit. One group has developed a way interface FreeMind with a project tracking system, so they can use mind mapping to brain-storm solutions and generate estimates.

Since the program is written in Java, I’ve decided to join the developer team and see if I can add a few features I’d like to have. They mostly have to do with improving the utility of scripts and improving the user interface.