Work Surfaces

'You are where you work', said nobody, ever.

Today I had a moment of clarity about the standard of my work. The great problem I have is being in the zone and unless I am in the zone, I find it virtually impossible to write. I need to be in a comfortable space, free of distractions. I need to have a reasonable book for writing in and a good pen. I need to be sitting at the right angle and I need to make sure that people aren't going to distract me. It's a long list of things that can go wrong. Even simple things. For example...

I might not have enough battery on my phone to listen to music.

My pen might have run out/got lost/been stolen.

My wife, (Yes, I got married last summer, I don't think I blogged about it) may want to talk about Grey's Anatomy/Glee/X-Factor.

Any body else might want my attention. 

My book may have run out of pages.

Anything else, like the temperature or a fly or the fact that the rosé I'm drinking on this warm summer's night is too sweet for my palette. (wine is almost as important as writing)

Actually, while we're on the subject, I never drink and write. I write much better when I've been drinking, though slower, I'm frightened of the idea of the alcoholism slippery slope. If I ever feel that I need a drink to create, I'll stop writing forever. George Orwell said that writing must come first and I'm inclined to agree. I would sacrifice a lot of things to follow my dream but a line has to be drawn somewhere. I'm writing the best book I possibly can. If it is not good enough, so be it. In the end, it's only a book, even if it's my life's work.

All that, however, is an aside. 

I wanted to talk about my bag. I put my bag on my lap and use it as a writing desk. I always have. Maybe eighteen months ago, I swapped a beautiful soft leather briefcase for a nylon computer bag. I wanted to work more on computer for the day job and I didn't want to destroy the leather case my wife had bought for me. Today, I use this nylon case as my writing desk and today I understood why I have been writing less. The nylon fabric slips. This may not seem very much but It throws me out of my zone. I am no longer at the right angle, comfortable and undisturbed and I think this may be why I have written so much less. Simply because I am not comfortable writing. I don't know what to do about it. I suppose that I am going to have to change bags. We will have to wait and see. I am trying to reclaim my mojo and this may be one of the steps that needs to be taken.

All that said, I have actually been doing some writing over the last few days. I made a start on the next chapter today and got through about half of it.

Just imagine what I could do with a bag that has a higher friction co-efficient...

DR

Chromebook Updated

Well, how are you? You've changed. Something new? A haircut. No wait, you're wearing a different lipstick. You've had your dodgy knee replaced with a titanium one and now you're gambolling along like a race-pig.

Oh! You've changed OS. That's...   ....interesting.

Well it is actually. It probably shouldn't be but it is. Here I am listening to The Orb and blogging while zootling (*real word*) along (*why doesn't blogger recognise the word 'blogging'? Or 'blogger' for that matter*) at 300kmh on a TGV while all the time existing in a state of 'writing'.

Don't get me wrong. Windows is a better product than many people give it credit for. Like many people, I have been irked for a long time by the lack of alternatives. I believe that competition not only stimulates innovation but that it drives that innovation through a race to the bottom. That innovation becomes the everyday standard which in turn leads to new innovation. It is one of the great problems with patents in a fast moving industry. I guess Apple was always an alternative but somehow I have never got on with Apple. I have been an iPhone user in the past and, surprise!, I really like Apple hardware. I don't like the cost but  think people will find that Apple are getting along just fine with all that profit. No, Apple was never for me because of its closed ecosystem. Everything has to be Apple and I think that somehow,  Apple's ideology got lost in the race to be cool.

This is what happens. The rising competition caused Apple to innovate. The came up with the iPod and their innovation was to be cool. That caused a race to the bottom and suddenly all their competitors became cool too. Next innovation please Apple. Well I think that the next innovation will probably come from a competitor. That competitor may well be Google. They have so many different projects and things going on that one of them is bound to catch on. Nobody expected Android to work but it has. When Google arrived people used lycos or yahoo to search. Google did it better. Now everyone follows Google. Facebook mail and Apple mail and Windows Outlook is being overhauled. Following Gmail. They do things really well which is what I like about them. Even if it seems too late. Too late to release a browser/operating system/email/social network/cloud computing system? Nope. We'll do it anyway and while other people rest on their laurels, we'll do it better and cheaper.

So Apple released a netbook? We'll release Chromebook. There are not too many Chromebooks on the market. I took a bottom of the range one. The Samsung Chromebook. It is small and not very powerful and has no Hard Drive Space. Normally, they cost 299€ but I bought one that had been returned. It was 279€. Samsung are offering 50€ off if you fill in a thing and send it off and I had 50€ in gift vouchers. 179€ for a new laptop and a complete change of OS.

OK, it's a first world problem thing, I know, but 179€ for a trial seemed OK so I have given it a go. It is innovative, I'll give it that. It is very light and very very fast. A lack of offline apps is a pain but I guess that Google is an online company so that is to be expected. I have offline Docs and offline Gmail and I suppose that's all that I need. I had some problems making sure that I am connected to Drive where I store all my documents but I have set up my nexus 4 as a WiFi hotspot. I open blogger and close my connection. When it is ready to publish, I will switch the hotspot back on and bingo.

The Apps are getting better and better and they are all written in HTML5, which means that theoretically they should soon work anywhere. Only having to write one app for all the different OSs that we have out there should reduce overheads and stimulate the next round of innovation. Native apps require a lot more tlc. I'm very tempted to learn how to write HTML5. It seems the way forward. That way, whenever I don't have the app that I require, I can write it myself.

The only app related problems that I have had are with twitter and an image editor.

I don't really like tweetdeck. I used to use it a long time ago but never really got on with it. I understand the point of it, in that it gives heavy social network users a greater amount of control, but I am a 'less is more' kind of guy. I like to keep things simple and would have used a twitter built app if they had one. They don't and so I am going to use tweetdeck. It's not the end of the world.

The biggest problem I have had is with an image editing app. I have a good number of bitmaps that I created in MS Paint. It was the tool that I had to hand when I started making these images and today the majority of my world maps are saved as .bmp files on Google Drive. Great. How do I edit them without MS. Paint? After a lot of trial and error and a considerable amount of advice from the Chromebook Help team in Google Groups I have started using Pixlr and it seems to work like a charm. I am still a novice in Pixlr, for example I haven't tried to copy and paste yet, yet I retain high hopes for it. Set your brush size to one and your brush hardness to one hundred and you can edit on a pixel by pixel basis.

So that's it. No more windows for me. I have moved over to Google completely and I hope that it works out. It has certainly inspired me to blog and tweet more. It has also got my pen elbow moving again. I finished another chapter just before I started writing this blog. If it doesn't work out, I can simply export it all back to windows again.

179€ is a first world experiment to see just how good a Chromebook is.

Google, it's in your hands.

D.

P.S. It's 23:11 local time and I was drinking steadily from midday to nine o'clock this evening. Both chapter and blog may be a little loose and rambling. Sorry.

Trees, or, how to keep track of a plethora of Characters

As you may have noticed, this is another blog post.

I know, I know. They are like London buses. You have nothing for ages and now suddenly two crop up. Well the truth of the matter is, as I mentioned, that I bought a Chromebook. I'm enjoying it and trying to be more organized in my ways of working. It's why I bought the Chromebook in the first place. It seems to be working. I am on an organizing drive. Images, documents, mp3s and anything else that I can lay my hands on. I have done a reasonable amount of internal organization too. I have turned ephemeral ideas into things that are a little more concrete. I have started compiling my notes into something useful. I believe that it is Terry Pratchett, someone whose work I greatly admire, who has a directory on his computer called 'The Pit'. I have ended up with something very similar. A great morass of junk, duplicated documents and irrelevant information. I have been trying to render it less morass-y and more reclaimed-farmland-y. It has been going well.

George RR Martin, another writer I hold in esteem, has huge long lists at the back of his books in order to keep track of all the different characters. I think that I am going to need something similar. I'm not really stealing his idea, I certainly wouldn't want to include them as appendices, more that he has had a good idea that I could perhaps share relative to organizing my characters.

I know he can be spiky about people reusing his ideas so I hope that he is OK with my reproducing a little of his organization. I don't have houses per se in my book so I think that I will need to organise them in a tree structure relative to their geographical location. Different characters have different interactions in different places at different times which means that my geographical structure may not work. But a tree structure is almost certainly the way forward. I think I may colour code them. Principle Characters, Major Actors, Medium Actors, Minor Actors, Foreshadows and Mentioned.

For example, I have a character called 'Tom'. He is a barman and has been repeatedly been mentioned through the chapters as some of the action takes place in his bar in the town of Outpost. Other then pleasantries, I don't think he has much to say. He would be a Minor Actor but his two daughters, also mentioned by name and who have virtually nothing to say in the book would be Mentioned.

Why is this necessary? You do like to ask questions don't you.

The answer is because I am on an organizing drive and getting that organized and keeping it up do date will help me write. I haven't been writing of late and so I have tried to drive that inactivity to place myself into a situation where when I go back to writing, everything is where I need it. Plus, I can never remember names when it comes to mentioning them again and I don't always have the Notebook to hand.

I hope it works. If it doesn't, it will be George RR Martin's fault.*

DR

 *Seriously George, it won't be your fault it will be mine.**

**What will be your fault is not getting the Winds of Winter out soon enough.

Return of the Red

If there are any fans of the Mentalist on here; No, I am not Red John.

I have recently tried to compartmentalise my internet lives and in doing so have invested in a chromebook. I like it. It's much better than having multiple users in Google Chrome. Somehow all the information got mixed up.

Now It isn't and I have moved things to where they ought to be. This means that it is much easier to be me as an author online and I'm hoping that it motivates me to go and find new fans and new interests. This in turn should, theoretically at any rate entice me back into writing.

I'm rusty. I haven't written for a while now simply through a lack of facilities. Sometimes being on the train makes it harder to write and when I am at home I find it impossible to write. I need a dedicated writing space and a dedicated writing headspace. I am working back up to those. I hope to be more active everywhere. If you are reading this, I hope to speak to you again soon.

DR