LifeJournal™ Newsletter

We’re celebrating! This month we’re pleased to announce the addition of another member of the LifeJournal family: LifeJournal for Writers.  This most recent LifeJournal edition has the same structure and framework as the original LifeJournal, but the individual features are tailored to writers—from aspiring to first-published to professional.

Chronicles Software Company joined forces with author, essayist, poet, and writing coach Sheila Bender to create this edition. Included in LifeJournal for Writers are 300 prompts that Sheila wrote and more than 1300 writer-focused quotes that she gathered. We invite you to visit writers.lifejournal.com to learn more about the program. You can also learn more about LifeJournal for Writers (LJW) directly from Sheila in this newsletter. She provides some examples of the new program with screen shots of a couple of her journal entries. 

There’s a practical article about how you can expand the original “vanilla” LifeJournal to LJW, or LJE (LifeJournal for Educators). Also in this month’s newsletter we offer tips about best practices for using the calendar in the Journal Explorer.

As the holiday gift-giving season nears, consider giving the gift of any or all of the three LifeJournal programs: the original LifeJournal, LifeJournal for Writers, and LifeJournal for Educators.  They make unique, meaningful, and easily transportable gifts. We also offer a special price if you purchase 3 CDs.

And finally, as we approach Thanksgiving, I’d like to sincerely thank you for words of encouragement, suggestions for refining the program, and “spreading the word” about LifeJournal to friends, colleagues, and family.  Many thanks for supporting our products.

Enjoy the holidays!

Sincerely,
Ruth Folit
Chronicles Software Company

I am enjoying working with LifeJournal for Writers. I know I already know the prompts because I wrote them and collected many, many quotes, but it is fun to retrieve both randomly and work with them, sometimes putting the two together and making a freewrite entry.  Below is an example entry:

Retrieving this freewrite will prove important to me when I start a book review on Didion's book, rework a chapter in my memoir about my grieving and searching for answers to life questions, start a new essay on loss, start a new instructional essay on evocative writing that uses the senses to get experience on the page.

Meanwhile, since I have been getting ready to send out new work to various publications, I created an entry with a link to the file with the writers' guidelines in the submissions journal type.  Below is the entry:

 

With LifeJournal for Writers, I will be able to open a new entry and start writing on any of the new ideas, knowing that by assigning them a topic, I'll be able to keep track of what I am developing, whether I use it for the website populating project or for something else. More than that, whenever I want to work with what I wrote for any purpose, I will find it easily, searching with topics I've assigned--new article, new essay, loss, for instance.

Without having to make decisions about how I'll name files so I can find them and without fretting about whether I will put the files on my desktop or in a special file and without wondering where I've put the submissions guidelines I need to refer to, the process of inventing, writing, thinking about, publishing, and storing my writing is seamless!

LifeJournal for Writers:  Installation, Expansion, and Purchasing

We invite you to download the LJW demo, but, please be aware that if you have LifeJournal 2 (“vanilla version”), you won’t be able to see LJW in action because of the way the two programs integrate. LJW has the same essential structure as LJ2; the big differences are that the Prompts, Quotes, Topics List, default Daily Pulse entries and Journal Types are intended for writers.

You might remember that when you downloaded the original LJ demo, you were able to see and test all the features of the program before purchasing it; however, if you already have the vanilla version and you want to download the LJW demo, you will not be able to see the LJW prompts, quotes, and default Topics List until you purchase and enter the LJW key. (We again invite you to visit writers.lifejournal.com—especially the home page and the tour page—to learn more about the program and see screen shots.)

If you want to see and test the LJW version before you purchase the key, you could download the demo on a second computer, one on which the vanilla version is not installed.

And, if you do choose to add the new writer’s “flavor” to your existing “vanilla” version, you will retain your current journal entries and other journal data (Daily Prompts, Timeline, and your added Quotes and Prompts) and gain the new writer’s prompts, quotes, and additional topics in the Topics List.

If you have the vanilla version of LifeJournal 1 or 2, you can purchase LifeJournal for Writers.  If you have LJ2, go to writers.lifejournal.com/ordering and click this link: “LifeJournal for Writers: expand LifeJournal 2.0.” If you have LJ1 go to  writers.lifejournal.com/ordering and click “Upgrade to LifeJournal for Writers from LifeJournal 1.”  The cost of expanding from LJ2 to LJW is $15.95.  The cost of the upgrading from LJ1 to LJW is $24.95. LifeJournal for Writers costs $44.95 for the download; $6.00 shipping and handling costs for US Mail delivery of a CD.

On the left pane of the Journal Explorer is a “Calendar” tab so that you can search and find journal entries by using a calendar. When you click on a date or a set of dates in the calendar, the journal entries written on that date(s) are listed on the right pane.

Today’s date is marked with a blue rectangle; dates where you have written an entry are marked with red rectangles.  Holidays are displayed with the numbers bolded and in burgundy. Click on a date to selecte it; a beige color appears in the background and the number of the date changes from black to white. Click and drag on consecutive days to select those dates. Click the margin to the left of the Sunday to select a week.

You can also select (or de-select) non-consecutive dates by holding down the “Ctrl” key while you click on multiple dates.  That way you can open, for example, all Mondays in a several month period to see if term “Blue Mondays” applies to you.

Move consecutively from month to month by clicking the arrows before and after the month and year label. If you click on the month and year label itself, you can select from the menu showing three previous and three subsequent months.

Sometimes you want the perspective of seeing more than one month at a time. You can display multiple months if you click and drag the top of the Journal Explorer window up to the top of the screen. More months appear as you click and drag the vertical boundary line between the right and left pane to the right, stretching the width of the left pane.

"Words are sounds of the heart."—Chinese Proverb

"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing ... the rest will follow."—Jane Yolan

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain."—Elie Wiesel

"One's own voice, chaotic, unobstructed by artificial mannerisms, comes out pure and clear in a letter, but it has an even purer quality in a journal kept for nobody but the self--at least for the time being."—Ilan Stavans

You can purchase LifeJournal 2 , LJW, or LJE (or upgrade or expand to ) either by:

-Ordering LifeJournal online: www.lifejournal.com/ordering; writers.lifejournal.com/ordering; educators.lifejournal.com/ordering
-Ordering by telephone: toll free 1-877-456-8762 from 9 am to 5 pm Eastern time, Monday to Friday.
-Ordering by postal mail and pay with a check or money order payable to:

Chronicles Software Company
PO Box 220
Sarasota, FL 34230

To learn more about upgrading to LifeJournal, go to our June 2005 newsletter.

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©Chronicles Software Company, 2005. All rights reserved.