Category: Medium
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Are You a Plotter or a Pantser?
There are two types of writers of novels: plotters and pantsers. Plotters (sometimes called outliners) are plot focused — they outline their entire novel, often scene by scene, before beginning to write it. Their outline is a skeleton of their novel, letting them see the big picture and keeping their writing on track. Pantsers, on…
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The Self-Published Author’s Book Cover Design Guide
The Face Your Book Shows to the World Self-published authors are used to doing things in-house. Over the course of a typical business day they can wear many hats: writer, editor, marketer, salesman, secretary, Web designer, and bookkeeper. The addition of one more — book cover designer — doesn’t sound unreasonable, except that one has…
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On Clichés and Formulas in Romances
People often criticize the Romance fiction genre for its formularity — conventions that can make stories predictable — but the truth is it’s not just Romance titles that are formulaic. The majority of what we read and watch also follows a formula. I’m not just talking about the three-part structure of movies and books (inciting…
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Welcome to iOS 13
On September 20, 2019, Apple Inc. released its new iPhone 11 series of mobile phones, an important and impressive update. The three new phones from Apple — the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max— vary in size and capabilities, but all feature the bezel-free, all-screen design introduced two years ago in the…
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All Your Digital Movies, Together at Last
The digital media revolution has been a game changer for movie watchers. Physical media like Blu-Ray discs still exist, of course, but digital media, whether streamed or downloaded, is the future. The benefits of digital media are plentiful. Digital streaming services like the subscription-based Netflix grant anyone with an Internet connection access to thousands of…
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How to Force a Public Wi-Fi Login Page to Display
Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee shop chain, may not have invented free Wi-Fi, but they sure did popularize it. Starbucks rolled out the service back in 2010, and since then so many restaurants have followed suit it feels at times that the U.S. is blanketed in Wi-Fi (it’s not). Starbucks’ influence extended to a subsequent and related…
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The So-Called Death of the Headphone Jack
Until fairly recently, the 3.5 mm headphone jack was ubiquitous, a nearly-universal standard in portable audio equipment. It had been that way for decades, until September 2016, when Apple announced that none of its phones going forward — starting with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus — would include an audio headphone port. With space in new…
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Are You a Mac or a PC?
We’ve all heard it said before: Mac users and PC users are just different. But is it true? Before we get to the crux of the argument, let’s get some housekeeping out of the way: we’ll define a “PC” as a computer manufactured by any of a dozen companies that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating…
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An Apocalypse to Die For
It’s no coincidence that the opening credits of season one of the Netflix series The Rain are reminiscent of AMC’s The Walking Dead. The two shows are strikingly similar. Both are post-apocalyptic character-driven dramas in which humankind has been decimated by a virus. Both center on a group of disparate strangers struggling to coalesce into a functional group. Both…
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The Unlikely Case of the Brick-and-Mortar Store with Lower Prices than Amazon
Americans love Amazon, and have demonstrated this affection with their wallets, making the Seattle-based online superstore extremely profitable. Each year, in fact, Amazon gets bigger relative to other online retailers, as consumers award it a larger share of their total online shopping budget. This means that each year, Amazon amasses a little more power, and…
Paul Goddin 