writing

Trying OnlyOffice after years with Microsoft

Microsoft has increased the price of its Microsoft 365 Family subscription again, which has nudged me to rethink whether I still need it.

I am keen to explore alternatives that feel lighter, more accessible and less tied to the bigger companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Corel.

So I have started testing OnlyOffice – a free, cross-platform suite that immediately surprised me with its clean design, generous scaling options and effortless compatibility with my existing documents.

This is the start of a tentative experiment to see whether it could replace Microsoft 365 for me.

My song is perfume

Today, I finished editing and designing my late Mum’s second book called My song is perfume.

This book of poetry is the second volume of writings that I have compiled and edited from the nine-hundred or more (A5) pages of writings that I found on Mum’s laptop after her death in August 2020. The first volume was her autobiography Rosalie: In her own words (2022), the next volume will be a collection of the very many short stories and other creative writings that she penned. Nestled between is this short book of poetry.

User stories change people

Last year, while searching for a video on YouTube—that definitely sounded more purposeful than what was probably closer to the truth, “while I was mindlessly scrolling through social media”—I came across a video by story analyst, speaker and UCLA Extension Writers’ Program instruction and author Lisa Cron called “Wired for Story”.

This quotation (at 44′ 05″) stood out for me:

A story is about how what happens affects someone in pursuit of a deceptively difficult goal and how that person changes internally as a result.
Lisa Cron

It stood out for me, not just because I’m fascinated with stories and because I am in the process of a long writing project, but also because in my day job we use something called ‘user stories’.

I shared Lisa Cron’s quotation with a former colleague one day during our weekly one-to-one and we quickly started considering how this might speak to our discipline of writing user stories within software development teams.

My new book: I like to write back—a collection of silly replies to unsolicited email

Look! I’ve made a thing!

What do you do with unsolicited emails? Ignore them? Delete them? Let your spam filter swallow them? What if you were to reply to them?

That’s exactly what I did in October 2009. Fed up of people wasting my time sending me emails about search engine optimisation opportunities, or who wanted to place adverts and guest posts on this blog, instead of rolling my eyes, tutting loudly and deleting them, I wrote back.

You can download a free copy in PDF, or buy a paperback copy on Lulu.com on my books page.

Things we know but don’t know we know

I came across this ages ago and it’s stuck with me ever since. Apart from the actually remembering the order of the words bit.

Which is kind of important. But I guess I could work it out because, after all, it’s something we know but don’t know we know until we do it.

It’s from this passage from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth about how to order adjectives:

Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.

Look! I’ve written it out.

Oh, alright, I’ve copied and pasted it. I’m going to write it out now:

Opinion
Size
Age
Shape
Colour
Origin
Material
Purpose
Noun

Or OSASCOMPN for short.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31