Author: Lin Robinson

Linton Robinson was born in occupied Japan, schooled in Asia, and is now a 20 year resident of Latin America. Robinson is an award-winning journalist and noted photographer, with credits in top markets. His syndicated columns were cult favorites in the nineties. Learn more at his blog and his Amazon author page.

Writing From The Right Side Of The Heart

Source: CDC.gov

My recent absence from this site has a really good excuse: I was in the VA hospital for a month following open heart surgery (valve job) and ensuing complications. It’s nice to be back. Really nice, believe me. And I hope you won’t mind me sharing some writing insights occasioned by the perspective of a twelve hour trip into the Valley of the Shadow. There are lots of good ways and bad ways to wake up, but I’d suggest that it’s hard to beat cresting the surface of consciousness and coming to realize that you are in an ICU bed and sighing to yourself, “Made it!” Because it wasn’t a sure thing, and that statistical reality speaks to the only thing that really, truly, puts a life into perspective: that whole matter of ceasing to be alive. There will be some changes made.

And I don’t mean the kind of changes like my shiny new Unobtanium alloy aorta valve (with it’s requirement to take dangerous blood-thinning pills the rest of my life) or the snazzy $25,000 pacemaker setting my pulse at a nice even 70 bpm as long as the batteries last. Or even the MAZE procedure in which (SF writers will just love this) they used frozen gas and taser technology to create a maze of scars on the surface of my heart, thus raising a series of levies to channel the wildassed electrical fields into rhythmic channels, like the Corps of Engineers’ eternal struggle to tame the Mississippi. I’m not making that up. Maybe they were. But what I’m talking about here isn’t medical wildness, but a cold-eyed Horseman’s assessment of my so-called writing career. Continue reading “Writing From The Right Side Of The Heart”

Banners, Buttons, And Beads

As promised, this tutorial will cover the making of buttons, logos, banners, and other graphic types needed by writers. Not as sexy an issue as covers, but very necessary. And it all applies: if you can create a cool-looking logo, you can create a cool-looking title and byline. In fact, if you examine this collection of images I think you’ll see that the difference between a “logo”, a “banner”, a “button”, and even a “title” is pretty abstract. What you’re seeing there, top to bottom, are: the title for an online serial, my personal logo I use for many things including “signatures” in mailings and forums, a custom SmashWords buy button, a dragon social media avatar, a Twitter button in custom colors, three RSS buttons to match three different sites, and a website header. All basically the same thing, using the same resources and simple skills.

And you’ll love this: it’s a lot easier to do these things. Your chances of learning, fairly quickly, to create good-looking, useful graphic doodads is virtually 100%. And there’s better news than that for those less than comfortable with all the talk of installing and learning graphics programs: you can do it all online without having your own programs, and it’s easier to do that way and at least as high quality! Cool, huh? Continue reading “Banners, Buttons, And Beads”

“Out There” Is In There

My posts here are generally informational, but I want to take up space with something of a more personal nature, though it might strike chord with some of you. Since we all know not to start with the weather, I’ll start with a dream.

This dream was decades ago, but I try to keep it in my thoughts. I was the MC or ringmaster for a show of some sort. And things weren’t going so good. Some underlings came to me saying that they needed special food and toys for one of the players. They hauled him in and it was this amazingly dorky little RainMan geek, not even verbal. He shambled out onto the stage and stood there, then let out this peculiar squawk. And the crowd went wild. This fat, pimply, four-eyed little gooner was what they came to see. I took it all in and told the handlers, “Look, we’re not exploiters here. Give him whatever he wants, keep him happy. Treat him good.” Continue reading ““Out There” Is In There”

Your Own Graphics Factories

One salient fact about doing graphic design–in this case making your logos and covers and other pictures writers need to go with their thousand words–is that you need to have a graphic program to do it with. This is actually not a problem, but it’s not hard to run into advice and situations that make it seem like a problem. As with so many other things that writers have to learn aside from writing these days, a main issue is knowing what to avoid.

As promised, I’m going to tell you about the programs to do this stuff with, and a bit on how to maximize your use of them. The programs I suggest are all free, or at most very cheap. Let me say a word about programs that aren’t free and cheap. The first thing you always hear when asking about doing your own artwork (or googling for suggestion on how to do something) is Adobe Photoshop. This is a professional program that costs anywhere from $300 to $1000. Most would say that getting what you need runs around $700. That should be enough to convince you to skip it and look elsewhere. But it’s worse than that. It’s a hard program to use, and is set up kind of awkwardly and bassackward. I used to use it and considered it a pain in the butt. For awhile I only used it to bevel type and the “smudge” tool. Now I don’t even have it installed. Almost anything you need to do can be done easier with free programs, and often better. And PS has some glaring problems for people like us. For one thing, its vector structure makes it really bad at shrinking picture size. As one example of what I mean, on Paint.net I can just keep hitting Ctrl Z (just like in all Windows programs, notice?) and delete changes one by one, all the way back. In Photoshop you get one “redo” then have to go into the history and fool around with that. Not a huge human sacrifice, sure, but something you have to learn. There are big thick books on how to use Photoshop. It’s got learning curve like Rosie O’Donnell has hip curve. Continue reading “Your Own Graphics Factories”