Ah, author-generated marketing! No, not really. This sort of thing is too expensive to be part of any sane business plan for promotion.

But spending money on swag like this is a chance to affirm your faith in your ability as a writer and your certainty in your future success.

They’re conversation pieces. Your friends will see them and ask what the hell you are up to. And you owe it to yourself to get comfortable about sharing your writing progress with your buddies and colleagues.

And they are wicked fun.

Here’s a mug with some tease copy for the novel I’m writing now. Do you ever wake up with cool descriptions of your novel in your head? I do, and I write that stuff down.

Here’s the other side.

Here’s a pin with a graffiti catchphrase from the novel. The main character keeps finding this scratched into park benches and spray-painted on bridges, etc.

Sort of like “Frodo Lives!” or “Who is John Galt?“

This is the biggest, cheesiest hack in all my html history. Why the hell can’t I space these stupid pictures properly? Argh!

And this mysterious glyph on my book bag is a QR code, a two-dimensional bar code that usually encrypts website URLs, although they can encrypt any text (such as your latest short story). I’m strangely drawn to them — I think they look like Egyptian hieroglyphics. If you have the right app installed, you can point your iphone at one, and be taken to a website. This one, of course, sends you here.

You can create them for free here, and proofread your work here.

Lastly, here’s a t-shirt I can wear to Write On The Sound conventions and NILA Residencies. Wearing my blog on my sleeve, more or less.

(By the way, if you want a brilliant and Zazzle-free way to promote your published novel, check what marketing genius Seth Godin suggests. And if your novel is electronic, then check with Lindsay Buroker, who proposes something similar.)

Just in case, here’s the pitch from their website:

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

The parts in that pitch that I enjoy best are “word processing” and “completely free of charge.”

The next time your trial version of Microsoft Word expires and The Man wants your money, tell him to buzz off and take a look at www.openoffice.org.

I do most of my writing with Openoffice. Here’s a review from PC Mag and another from Computerworld.

If you’ve got a great idea for a novel about an orphan who learns that he’s a wizard, you may want to have a beer and rethink things.

It’s a bit of a horrifying scenario: you run your precious plot outline past someone at a cocktail party and she says, “You know, I just read something exactly like that…”

But there’s no escaping it. You have to know what novels have been written that are similar to your idea. But you have no titles or authors to search for, so Amazon is useless. How do you find them?

Try the search function at Library Thing.

You’ll see an entry field for works, another for authors, but then, something really cool — tags.

Suppose you’re thinking of writing a police procedural about a jaded cop who has to deal with a gargantuan medieval dragon in the sewers of New York. Has it been done? Will it remind agents and publishers of something that came out last year?

I typed “cop” and “dragon” in the tags field. Library Thing zipped through its 4.5 million logged titles for any tagged both “cop” and “dragon” by its members. Zero hits! Then I tried “police” and “dragon” and came up with one hit: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett.

I’d better take a look at that, to make sure I don’t step on Terry’s toes.

I tried “cop” and “dragon” in Amazon’s book search and got 113 hits, including non-hits like Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon (#4) and Naomi Novik’s Throne of Jade (Temeraire, Book 2) (#8). Lots of false positives to sort through.

I tried it again for “New York” and “dragon,” getting no hits on Library Thing and two thousand useless hits on Amazon (the first was a guide on dragonflies, published by the New York Academy of Sciences).

Good enough for me. I’m checking the Pratchett book (I don’t read enough of him, anyway), and putting “Cop vs. Dragon” in my novel queue.

Some rock out.

I used to need total silence, the better to concentrate my sweaty furrowed brow on my writing. Lately (okay, since Nanowrimo), I’ve been writing to music.

But it can’t be any music. It has to be just right. The wrong groove can distract, make your chase scenes dry, your exposition dull, your love scenes comic. I searched for a long time for the right tunes. I’ve made playlists on Youtube, and found favorite bands that no one’s heard of on Jamendo.

But the winner, hands down, is Pandora Radio.

They’ve sorted music by characteristic, the rascals, so they can identify and play songs similar to the song or artist you enter. For example, I’m listening now to a mix by Paul Oakenfold called Como Tu. This song has “attributes” such as:

trance roots
four-on-the-floor beats
disco influences
beats made for dancing
straight drum beats
a repetitive song structure
epic buildup/breakdown
lots of cymbals
a tight kick sound
inventive instrumental arrangements
acoustic guitar layering
subtle use of piano riffs
synth swoops
affected synths
synth heavy arrangements
extensive studio production
trippy soundscapes
prevalent use of groove

… among others. I don’t know what most of it means, but Pandora seems to think I like that sort of thing. They could be right.

Give a listen, let it speed up your fingers, and may your writing have a tight kick sound and a prevalent use of groove.

I used to use Dictionary.com, because it was the first reliable online dictionary I stumbled across and it had a nice thesaurus and etymology feature (citing Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary).

And my Firefox could handle the damn pop-ups.

But the advertisements there have gotten flashier and flashier, and nowadays they make me dizzy. So…

Here’s a great little dictionary by Phil Crosby — clean as the Google homepage, with code designed to get your definition to you lightning quick. It’s called Ninjawords. (At first, I thought it was words about ninjas, but no. The dictionary is fast like a ninja, get it?)

Once you’re on the page, you can add it to that search bar at the top right of your monitor. Click over and try some of your favorites.

Desultory, perhaps? Ecdysiast? Bon mot?