Nano

The second murder also turned up on a Tuesday.


Fob was out picking up lunch from his favorite deli, which, for some reason, he was at great pains to conceal from Harris. He often went so far as to carry an extra couple brown paper bags from Stop & Shop in the back of his car to transfer the sandwiches into, out of the presumably brown paper bags the sandwiches were given to him out of the deli in. Doc didn't know why he did this, since there were only maybe five different sandwich shops in town, tops, so if he'd really wanted to discover this mystery sandwich shop all he had to do was a little leg work.


Now that he thought of it, maybe that was a test. Fob was giving Doc a mystery to solve. And he'd completely missed the point. Here he was thinking Fob was doing this all for the sake of keeping his favorite restaurant a little less crowded. In fact, this was probably going to come up on Doc's review in two week's time.


The call came in over the radio from the 911 dispatchers again: "Waterfield, the park at the corner of Lake and Main, possible dead body."

"Right. Thanks." Doc hadn't quite figured out the way he wanted to answer those kind of calls. He'd been thinking about it since the last murder call came in, and he didn't have the presence of mind to try out any of his thoughts.


He ran into Fob on the way out the door, coming back with his Stop & Shop bag of sandwiches for himself and Doc Harris. "Just got another 911 call in; corner of Lake and Main. Crowd might be starting to gather."


"All right. Let's go." Fob headed back towards his car, and the two men got in.



All I keep thinking is about Mork from Ork... heaven help me, it's the "nanoo, nanoo" connection. It just won't go away. It might just drive me over the edge. Right over. To the point... of killing someone.


Okay, maybe not that far. But it'd make a better crime novel, at any rate.



disclaimer:

Again, only: NaNoWriMo.

From Q.I. Software: Writer.app.

It's a drafting tool to help you bang out those difficult chapters when your agent has barricaded you in a room with nothing but your laptop and the ultimatum that you are either going to emerge with enough pages for that novel you promised him/her or you will die in that room. It'll lock down your network, it'll mute your sound, it'll turn iChat off. So those are the typical distractions taken care of for you... what about all those damn choices with these fancy schmancy word processors these days? How the heck are you going to concentrate when you can delete everything you've just written? Or move some words around like magnetic poetry? Or play with italicizing that word for hours on end? Well, we've taken care of that for you, too.

Based on Khoi Vinh's idea at Blockwriter.com, it's about a word processor that's more like a typewriter than you've ever... well, okay, if you've used a typewriter, it's a bit like that. But if you haven't, then it's more like a typewriter than you've ever seen. You can go select text with your fancy mouse, by if you type over it you'll only strike out the text... you can only type at the end, so there's no going back, no worrying about editing too much. It encourages you to get writing. Well, not actively. That'd be distracting. It does it in an eminently non-distracting way.

You can save your work as rtf, and open it all up, strikethroughs and all, you can print it out, strikethroughs and all, or you can export it, without strikethroughs, to import into Tinderbox, or Mellel, or Microsoft Word (they don't need our helps with links, to be honest). And then you can polish off the novel, slip it under the door for your agent to verify, and then you're free! Run free! Wait for the thing to get published! Get ready for your big book tour!

So go on, download Writer.app, check it out. It's Mac OS X-only, like all the Q.I. Software stuff, and it'll run on Intel or PPC Macs, if that means anything to you. If it doesn't, it means it'll run on your Mac.

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13 Nov, 2006

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