I have to confess to what may be unusual, perhaps even aberrant, behavior. I am convinced it must be strange, because clearly so many writers of blogs, sales letters, and even books, point it out.

Yet I feel there may be something to learn from it, and so I am willing to expose myself to the public eye, in the hope that someone may somehow benefit.

Here it is: When I read a blog, a sales letter, or a book–I read alone. Nobody is seated next to me, peering over my shoulder. It’s just me and the reading material.

I know it’s weird. I know it, because almost universally, writers keep addressing me as part of a crowd: “Some of you may think….” or “Most of you have probably…” It’s hard for me to keep from looking over my shoulder to see who else is with me.

So I have a few suggestions for anyone who might care to address that anomalous personage, the lone reader:

• In place of “some of you,” try “some people”
• Instead of “most of you,” consider “most readers”
• Rather than “all of you,” perhaps “all readers” or even “all my readers” might work

Yes, we must be a minority. But I feel strongly that we, too, deserve to be directly addressed by writers.

What do you think? Comment below.

It’s Prezi.com, and it gives me a new way to think about presentations–and about brainstorming and planning.

Here are its salient features:

• It’s Web-based.
• You work on an infinite canvas.
• You click and place text, which can be colored, styled, rotated, etc.
• You can also click and place pictures, pdfs, and videos.
• You click and create a “path” to tell a story.
• The story can include zooms. So words and pictures can be tiny and huge, and smooth zooming traverses between them.
• If you can picture Prezi from these bullets, you are a powerful visualizer. This presentation tells the story much more clearly:

Evernote is a note-taking program that can run on your PC, your Mac, the Web, and your iPhone/iPad. You can create notes in various ways:

• Click on “new note”; type into the note
• Go to a Web page in your browser; click on the Evernote elephant icon, and the url and/or the page are stored in an Evernote note
• Select something on your screen, and click on the elephant in your menu bar or system tray
• other ways, depending on platform

What’s the big deal about Evernote? What makes it so useful to a book-writer?

• You can create or access your notes on any of the supported platforms. Capture a note on your PC, and moments later it’s available on your smart phone. Or on a public-access computer.
• You can capture Web pages with their urls, or just their urls.
• You can tag your notes and group them in different notebooks.
• You can email a note as a pdf or export it as an html page.
• Evernote will look for text within any pictures you save as notes, and let you search the text.
• You can capture a picture from your smart phone’s camera directly into Evernote.
• You can capture an audio note on your smart phone by speaking into your smart phone.
• You can scan text and images directly into Evernote.
• You can send material to on-line scanning services and have the scans delivered directly to your Evernote account.

And did I mention that it is free? Check it out.

If you follow the method I describe in my free book, “The Simple Secret To Writing A Non-Fiction Book In 30 Days, At 1 Hour A Day!” (click on the link at the top of the blog to get it), you’ll create the detailed structure of your book before writing andy of it, down to the level of subchapters.

A subchapter is only 300-600 words long. So if you find yourself with just a few minutes, you can pick one and ZipWrite it (also described in the book), without having to think much or plan. You just write. And it fits in the overall structure.

So here I am at a conference I host with my friend Brad Holtz each year (www.cofes.com). It’s the end of the first day, and I am zonked–and I haven’t written my blog entry for today. What’s a committed blogger to do?

What I am doing is writing about this pressing situation in hopes that my reader–that’s you–will find a lesson in it that will serve them in their book-writing efforts.

Now, you can’t structure a blog the way you do a book. It doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end; it’s kind of a journal, ongoing. But you can always write about what’s going on just now. And because this is simply what’s happening in my life at the moment, it “fits,” at least in the sense of being part of a coherent chronology.

Is it helpful? Useful? Comment below and let me know. (By the way, if it’s not clear where to comment, click on the name of the blog post to go to its page. There the “Reply” box is clearly in evidence.)

Stephen Covey’s second habit of successful people (from his 7 Habits of Highly Successful People) is, “Begin with the end in mind.” Besides the fact that it echoes similar admonishments in the wisdom of many cultures, I have always been fascinated by the dual meaning of “end” in this statement. “End” can mean “terminus,” final point. It can also mean “purpose”–”To what end?”

Both are relevant to book-writing. You should think through the process to its last stage, and you should also think it through in terms of its purpose.

Here are 5 specific ways to do this:

1. To whom are you writing? Who is your audience? What  do they care about? What language, what terminology will be familiar and clear to them? This is a biggie, and worth spending time on.
2. Problem/solution. What “pain” are you addressing in your reader’s life? What are you offering to address that pain? Does the book’s title reflect the problem or pain it addresses, so that readers will be able to easily identify it? Are you able to offer clear steps to resolve the pain?
3. How will the book be published? Are you going after a publishing house? Will you self-publish? Might you use print-on-demand, like Lulu.com or Createspace.com? Will you create a matching website?
4. How will your book be promoted? How will you let people know of its existence? Ads? Press releases? SEO? Joint ventures?
5. What role will the book play in your business? Will you sell it “back of room” at your talks? Will you sell in bulk to meeting organizers who retain you to speak? Offer it on your website? Put it on Amazon.com? Will it serve as an invitation to explore your other products and services on your website? Can it replace your business brochure? Will you give it away as a “thick business card”?

If you address these points before you begin your book project, your work will be focused and your results will be to your liking.

I downloaded Dragon Dictate for the iPhone a few weeks ago, tried it for a few minutes–then wrote it off as fatally flawed. First, I spoke into it, and it understood me fairly well. I tried it again, and was further impressed. But the third time, I spoke 3 or 4 sentences–and after a while, it came back and said something like, “Sorry, couldn’t understand you.” I looked around to see where the voice file was. It wasn’t to be found.

So I thought, I get this great idea; click on Dragon Dictate; speak it into the phone; go back to paying attention to whatever I was doing (hopefully not driving). Then when I look at the phone again–it’s gone without a trace.

I didn’t delete the app, but I went back to using one of the many voice recorder apps for that purpose. Yeah, I have to type it if I want it typed–but at least I have it. (Actually, I speak directly into Evernote, because that syncs with my other computers without me having to do anything. And I can easily tag the recording, too.)

I had some downtime while waiting somewhere yesterday, so I tried Dragon Dictate on my iPhone again. It had been updated a couple of times.

While it still doesn’t save the recording, its speech-to-text seems to have been sped up and significantly improved. Just to test its boundaries, I said:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithey toves
Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son–
The jaws that bite, the claws that snatch–
Beware the jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Here’s what Dragon Dictate yielded:

What’s really, and the sleeping toll
good guy here and getting pulled in the way.
I’ll miss see where the parables
and the mobile rats out great.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son;
the jaws that bite the clause that snatch.
Beware the chuck chuck burn and shut
the from you spend your snatch.

When you’re done giggling–I chortled for quite a while–you’ll probably be as amazed as I am. This app did an incredible job of making sense out of nonsense.

It’s far from perfect. But did I mention that it is free? So when you are in the ZipWriting part of my book-writing process, you might try dictating pieces into your iPhone.

A few years ago, I lost the sight of my left eye due to a detached retina.

The most obvious loss of sensory ability was stereoscopy–seeing things as three-dimensional. It took me a long time to regain my ability to park, and I still occasionally pour water outside a glass instead of inside. (I do better with wine because of its color). I’ve learned to compensate in a variety of ways.

This morning, in the shower, I was looking at the row of Armenian tiles on the wall. They have a beautiful pattern that I’ve always loved. Suddenly, the pattern took on depth for me; the lighter portions seemed nearer, and the darker, further away.

Shower tile

I noticed that there was some steam in the shower; that I wasn’t wearing my glasses; and that I was rocking unconsciously from one foot to the other. All three of these circumstances seemed to be contributing to the effect.

When I stepped out of the shower, I put my glasses on. The steam had dissipated. And I could see the 3D effect, but I had to defocus my eyes a bit, and rock from one foot to the other.

Apparently, my brain is compensating for the lack of binocular vision by using the different angles of view caused by my rocking to create a 3D sense in my mind. (I’m using “brain” and “mind” very loosely here; I actually see them as “hardware” and “software.” But that’s a topic for another article.)

What’s the application of this observation to book writing? Simply this: The more realism you can insert into your writing, the more your readers will like it. You can do this “binocularly,” by showing what you are writing about–describing relevant details as seeing them all at once.

Or you can show what you are talking about “monocularly,” describing your scene–or even your concept–from a sequence of different views. Some readers will relate more to sequential, rather than synoptic (seeing all at the same time), detail.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

–Ray Bradbury

I wrote yesterday (see entry directly below) about the need for a book writer (any writer, really) to work their “writing muscles” by writing daily. Now I want to add a bit of advice: Begin with a cluster.

I’ve discussed clustering (here and here), so I won’t repeat the instructions. I just want to remind you what clustering does for you:

• The stuff you know, think, and feel seems to be floating at different levels in a viscous fluid. The closer to the surface something is, the more accessible it is. When you cluster, all that you know about the topic at the center of your cluster comes to the top, where you can find it easily.
• Clusters sometimes grow like fractal flowers, branching off in unexpected ways, surprising you.
• If you write first thing in the morning, you have easier access to all the great stuff your subconscious worked on all night. Sometimes dream sequences are recalled; often forgotten or unnoticed associations are brought forth.

Warning: I’m not saying to write your book this way. That’s all in the process described in detail in the free book you can get here. This clustering-and-writing is about a daily workout to make you a better writer. The process of writing a good book is simple and structured. But the stronger your “writing muscles,” the better your good book will be. You can make it great.

If you want to eventually run a marathon, you must run daily. If you want to be ready for any kind of activity, you have to train your body and mind to it by frequent practice.

In Outliers, a wonderful book about what it means to excel, with speculations on what it takes, author Malcolm Gladwell points out that real mastery–whether of swimming, hockey, the violin, or rock music–takes about 10,000 hours of practice.

Now, you may not have that level of mastery in mind for your writing. And you really don’t have to have it, to write a good book. But the more you write, the easier it gets.

If you’re worried about your grammar or sentence structure–don’t. Today’s email- and SMS-trained readers are looking for content, not perfectly constructed sentences. They want authenticity; they want to hear the real you, “speaking” in your true voice. (If your spelling and grammar are truly atrocious, get help. Take a course or find a virtual assistant who can write for you.)

Of course, “true voice” is something to which serious writers aspire, and it can be elusive. Don’t obsess over that either. Just write. Daily.

My cousin is a runner. She’s 58, and feels incomplete if she doesn’t run daily. Running is not only easy for her; it scratches deep itches.

I feel that way about writing. When I don’t write, I feel as if something is wrong, as if I am not fully expressed. Not everything I write is wonderful, but I can do enough of it, easily, so that I can find good stuff in it.

That’s the facility I want you to have with writing. When the prospect of writing a blog post, a book subchapter, or a sales letter does not fill you with dread, but rather gives you anticipatory tingles.

Part of my method for writing books is ZipWriting; reading about how to do it may help you. It’s in the free book you can get here.

My friend Freddy Clarke plays the guitar–very well. VERY well:

There is so much for a book writer to learn from watching Freddy’s fingers. They do the right thing at the right time. This kind of musicianship doesn’t just happen; it is the product of many hours of practice, good genetics, and talent.

In some ways, writing is easier. You can become a writer of good books by following my method (get my free book, see tab above). But to become a good writer of good books, you have to refine your craft.

Freddy’s performances inspire me. (See him perform in the SF Bay Area.)