Wednesday, April 20, 2011

A New Tool: Music and Snowflakes

    I sometimes use an add-on toolbar for my Firefox browser called "Instant Writing Resources Toolbar". (The home page for it is here.) It has some interesting tools on it, though I admit some are more diversions than anything. One useful thing that it does have is a radio tuner to listen to online radio. I often enjoy having background music as I write. The playlist I use in my computer for that tends to be somewhat new age and ambient music. Gentle music without words is what I prefer. I also sometimes use the online players like iTunes radio tuner, Pandora radio, Fire.fm and so on. I think my favorite for this is Pandora. It more easily lets me customize my own stations to listen to, I've used it for a couple of years now and have already gotten several dozen stations there. My tastes can be pretty diverse sometimes. If I'm not writing, I enjoy blues, folk, and, in fact, almost any other type of music you can think of. 
    Okay, rap is out, and there is very little country I like, but bits and pieces of everything from Edith Piaf to Outkast, Raul Malo to Jason Mraz.
    One of the stations on the Writing Resources Toolbar is for a station called "Writers FM with Karl Moore." Occasionally I listen in to writer's interviews there. Today he was talking to  Randy Ingermanson about his "Snowflake" method of writing. Randy has a website explaining it here.
    It looks interesting. I admit I haven't delved far into it yet. He's also selling a software he developed to use the method, but he readily explains the basics, and it seems usable anywhere. 
    Check it out.
    He also wrote the book below.



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