But yeah, I did. Even after whining in my last post about how I needed to limit my blogging, I was writing an e-mail to someone and it got me on a rant.

Been using the iPad a lot lately for a variety of things. Most of my web surfing, e-mail, and .pdf viewing has migrated to the iPad/couch rather than my desk, which has been a big benefit at making the desk a place of work, which in turn trains me like a dog into being productive in this space.

I’ve also been reading my first eBook, Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. Reading prose on the iPad is, ironically, the hardest thing for me to get used to. Again like Pavlov’s dog, I am trained to think of electronic text as work. It seems impossible to take pleasure in such a thing. I miss the feel of a book in my hands, the feel of the paper. I expect I will push past it and it will get easier with time, but right now, it is weird.

On the other hand, the iPad is just plain perfect for comics in every way. If all the comics being produced today were available for the iPad with an easy on-easy off subscription service, I would never buy another floppy again and not miss it one bit. I hate fucking bagging those things. It’s why I switched to TPB’s, but with TPB’s, you have to wait at least 6 months between installments.

I’ve generally been growing more accustomed to the iPad’s Mac interface, as well. The organization is a totally different mindset from Windows, and gives you a lot less control. There are no confirmations that this file saved properly or that file reached its destination intact. You kind of have to trust that the computer knows what it’s doing and won’t fuck up. It’s like driving automatic for the first time after spending your whole life driving stick.

For the most part, I’m finding I miss the control less and less. It came with a ton of needless maintenance. The iPad has yet to fuck anything up, and it’s been a couple of weeks. The only serious glitch I’ve had was when I tried to load like 500 MB of .pdf files into Stanza at once and the iPad crashed. I expect this is Stanza’s problem and not Apple’s, but even so, I held down the power and home keys for 5 seconds and the whole thing rebooted in like a minute. The whole episode probably took about 5 minutes out of my life.

But I’ll admit, it was a looooooong five minutes. Five minutes where I was convinced I had broken My Precious, and broke out in a cold panicked junkie sweat.

Because that’s the thing. It seems like Macs work seamlessly and invisibly, but when they break, the whole thing just shuts down. There are no warnings. No troubleshooting options. One minute your iPod’s working fine, and then suddenly you have a little picture of a sad face on your screen, adding insult to injury while you book an appointment at the Apple Genius bar. It’s like trading death by a thousand cuts for the Sword of Damocles.

The Apple approach is more accessible, and the smarter move for capturing market share. I don’t even think I’ll miss fixing my own computer, if all I have to do is carry my light-ass iPad to the store and let someone else fix (or replace) it for me.

But I do think Apple would be wise to bend a little and also include some concessions to analytical folk like me, like a hierarchical filing interface that lets you keep your shit organized and better synching. I’m never going to be able to cut the umbilical to Windows/my desktop computer without that.

First off, while Pages will maintain paragraph formatting already present in a document, it cannot seem to CREATE said formatting it with any flexibility. If I want to indent every line and don’t have that formatting already present in the document, I need to call down the top menu (which I normally hide as it eats up too much of the screen), hit the tab button, and select the tab type I want. That’s three extra touches for something that I can tell MSWord (or even word mobile on my phone) to do at the touch of the enter key. It also leaves sloppy formatting in the meta-document, which can cause problems when exporting it to other formats for print or whatever. If there’s an easier way to do this, it wasn’t in the Pages tutorial.

The virtual keyboard itself continues to pose problems. Knowing I can hold down the comma to create an apostrophe helps a bit, but the 3 seconds needed to hold it are an eternity when trying to type at speed. Of course, this is nothing compared to the nightmare of switching keyboards to access quotation marks. Do you know how often fiction writers need to use quotes? Obviously the folks at iWork do not. (Answer: A lot). Breaking my stride TWICE (opening and closing quotation marks) for every piece of dialogue is maddening.

While the spell check in Pages is nice, there needs to be a function to build a custom dictionary. I have a lot of made-up words/names in my stories, and I like to just be able to tell the damn program that they are correct, rather than having all those red eyesores on the page. Also, Pages uses straight quotes instead of smart quotes. It’s like writing in caveman times.

I think all of this continues to point to the fact that no matter what Apple says, the iPad was not designed with doing actual work (i.e. content creation) in mind. It is a content viewer that allows some limited creation. This will likely change as new software/firmware versions are released, but for now, it is what it is. More fun than functional.

I recently added the Stanza app, which is great, and uploaded a ton of .PDFs to the iPad to read. The Stanza interface is fantastic, great for both comics and prose, but if you try to add too many .PDFs at once, it crashes the iPad, so you have to do them piecemeal. Also, the iPad backs them all up every time you sync, which has made syncing go from 5 minutes to like 40. Not sure it’s worth the trade off, and I will likely be removing a lot of the files I added for this reason.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love my iPad and think we’re going to be very happy together, but the honeymoon seems to be coming to an end.

Update: I spent about 20 minutes experimenting in pages, and figured out how to create a basic indented paragraph style and then apply it to blocks of text, which I do frequently as I convert bullet points to prose. Like every thing else, it involves a bunch of unnecessarily complicated steps. You have to adjust the tab bar on the top ruler, copy the style, select the unstyled text and then paste the style. I don’t see a way to save the style for future use or set it as a default…

I’ve been told by many people, including a few well-known authors, that this is a bad practice. Some call it masturbation and others call it masochism, but whatever you label it, I can’t help myself. When you spend thousands of hours toiling on something, it’s hard to pretend you don’t care what people think. I care. So I go on Amazon and B&N and Goodreads and have google scour the internets and when a new review pops up, I read it.

I am fortunate that mostly they are positive things that give me joy and encouragement to keep up at what I’m doing. Other times they are critical in a fair way, and give me ideas about how to improve my craft in the future. No one likes to have their weaknesses pointed out publicly, but I think it’s worth the price if it makes me a better author.

And sometimes, reviews kick me square in the nuts. People get angry about my choice of POV character, or who slept with who, or whatever, and say some mean and hurtful things. A lot of times these reviewers don’t even know what they’re talking about, having read more into the story that was actually there, ignored sections of the text that counter their arguments, approached it with a chip on their shoulder that I accidentally knocked off, or whatever. But even when I can see this and know that I wouldn’t change the book even if I could, it stings a bit, and sometimes throws me into a funk that can last for hours, especially since I know there’s no point in responding to defend it. It’s like knowing a bully is picking on your kid at school and not being allowed to go beat him up yourself.

You have to take the bad with the good.

I know I took some chances with The Desert Spear. I didn’t want to just repeat the formula of The Warded Man, however successful it might have been. I already wrote that book, and had no interest in writing it again. I wanted to do something different. I knew this would elate some readers and piss others off. Such is the risk an author takes when they roll the dice and send a manuscript out. It’s been interesting to see the progression of reviews from one book to the next.

I used to post every single review here on the blog, but I just don’t have that kind of time anymore, but here are some recent reviews that injected a little joy into my life:

The other night at Balticon while playing arm candy to the lovely and talented NYT Bestselling author Gail Carriger, I gave a copy of The Warded Man to Howard Tayler, the Schlock Mercenary. He has since called it the best convention swag ever.

Bookish Ardour reviews both The Painted Man and The Desert Spear.

Dave Brendon was one of my very first reviewers and conducted my first online interview. He had to wait a bit to get The Desert Spear down in South Africa, but he finished it this week and wrote this great review.

Jessica Strider is a Canadian bookseller and one of the nicest ladies you’ll ever meet. She runs a site called Sci-Fi Fan Letter where she reviewed The Warded Man last year and did an interview with me. Here she reviews The Desert Spear.

Mark the Walker of Worlds wrote a kickass Desert Spear review recently as well.

Okay, enough masochistic masturbation. I have a Daylight War to fight…

Now I never need to take that shitty laptop anywhere ever again.

Using the iPad has been a pure pleasure. It was quick and uneventful to set up, and easy to intuit its use, even for a lifelong PC like me. The few things that confused me were figured out in just a few minutes, the most complicated of them being the mail on my @petervbrett.com account, which wouldn’t send until I spent about 20 minutes fiddling with the settings. If it was a Windows device, that probably would have taken days, and forced me to consult online forums, tech-savvy friends, and eventually wait hours on some corespawned IT call routed from Delhi.

I used the device pretty much nonstop over the weekend, blowing through my allotted 250MB of 3G service ($14.99/mo) in about 36 hours. I switched to the unlimited plan ($30/mo), but I just heard that has been canceled. Feh.

Still, the 3G is impressively fast, and unlike my phone, the iPad really brings the full breadth of the internet to your fingertips, from surfing to blogging to streaming video. Sometimes it seemed faster than my high speed internet at home. I attributed this to being in Maryland where the demands on the 3G service are less than in NYC, but there has been no appreciable slowing since I got back to Brooklyn.

But for all its wonders, the real reason I was willing to spend a small fortune on this device (over $1000, including the wireless keyboard and slim rubberized case) was so that I could write on it. I’ve lately been dissatisfied with my iPaq 910 smartphone (used to write much of The Desert Spear), which requires an increasing number of reboots and maintenance as time goes on. Plus the QWERTY keyboard is just too damn small. Barely 2/3 the size of the keyboard on the iPaq 6515, which is the device I used to write about 60% of The Painted Man. The screen on the 910 is likewise a fucking joke. I would have gotten an iPhone, but after testing other people’s, I decided the tiny virtual keyboard wouldn’t cut it, and the word processing apps were pretty much nonexistent.

I’ve been waiting for a tablet-style device that could hold its own, and after playing with my partner in crime’s iPad for about 10 seconds, I thought it might have finally arrived.

I started the morning by charging the device and importing the necessary word documents into the Pages App. While I waited, I registered to appear at Worldcon in Melbourne, Australia this September. If you’re in Australia, or always wanted to go, you should think about joining me. It will be epic.

Anyway, the early prep showed me the first weakness of the iPad as a writing tool. Unlike the iPaq, which syncs MSOffice files relatively smoothly with my desktop, Pages requires manual import and export of files, which involves conversion of the file and usually results in some fonts/features being lost. This is a pain in the ass. I can just plug in the iPaq and with Windows Mobile it will replace the older file on either the desktop or phone with the most recent one without me having to do anything. With Pages/iTunes, there are like 6 manual steps. I’m sure I will soon be doing them faster than a marine can put together his rifle, but still, this is a BIG negative. Sooner or later, it will result in me going out with the wrong version of the file, or losing some data. I just know it.

Once my prep was done, I went out for a hike in the park to find a quiet place to write. It was a gorgeous sunny day, not too hot at about 80 degrees, and the park was filled with sunbathing eye-candy. I walked about 4 miles before finding a nice shady spot, deliberately away from bikini-clad sun-worshipers who I knew would distract the hell out of me. I sat down and gave my e-mail a quick check, then opened up my active chapter file.

As I am doing this, a lithe and sexy woman in a bikini sets up shop directly in front of me, about 50 feet away, and starts doing yoga. She was so limber as to put Elastigirl to shame, moving easily from pose to pose, doing full splits and handstands. Clearly, God did not want me to get any writing done. She was obviously a professional dancer, because at one point she came out of a handstand and started to do a pumping, hypnotic dance that had my heart rate soaring far past anything my 4 mile walk might have caused. It made me really regret that the iPad 3G does not come equipped with a camera…

What was I talking about?

Oh, right. I have no idea how long I was staring, but eventually the woman left, jogging off into the distance, and the trance was broken. I shook off my daze and got back to work. The virtual keyboard on the iPad did take some getting used to, but not as much as I’d feared, and I was soon typing at a fair clip. I wrote for about an hour, working on a Renna/Arlen scene. I knocked out 573 words in that time. Not too bad.

Things I liked:

1) In landscape mode, the virtual keyboard was quite wide and responsive, and typos were at a surprising minimum.

2) The screen is big and beautiful, allowing a MUCH better writing/editing experience than the phone.

3) Spell check.

4) Speedy touch scrolling with the Navigator feature.

5) Feeling like I was using one of those little pads they have on Star Trek: The Next Generation

6) The jealous envy of everyone around me.

Things I didn’t like:

1) In portrait mode, the virtual keyboard is less easy to use. Too wide to type comfortably with just your thumbs, but not wide enough to type with two full hands. I ended up doing an awkward one-handed type while holding the device in the other hand. I will get faster at this with practice, but it’s going to be an uphill climb.

2) The virtual keyboard doesn’t have arrow keys, so the only way to move the cursor around is by taking your hands off the keyboard and touching the screen. I suppose I will get used to this too, but so far I have found it really annoying.

3) The apostrophe is not on the main alphabet keyboard, so you have to shift to the alternate numbers keyboard to use it. This seems pretty dumb to me. The apostrophe isn’t a shift key on a standard keyboard for a reason: it gets used a LOT. Why make it hard on the typist? Every time I have to toggle keyboards, it breaks my stride. It’s one thing to do it for numbers, but not for basic punctuation.

4) Pages doesn’t have a word count feature, so I didn’t know how much I had written until I came home, exported the file to my desktop, opened it in Word, and ran a count. Then I had to import it back to the device. That’s really annoying.

5) Pages doesn’t have a track changes feature (though to be fair neither does Office Mobile).

Potential trouble:

The ease with which the iPad can shift to web-browsing, e-mail, facebook, video, iBooks, and twitter takes away one of the main advantages of writing on the move: the absence of distractions.

Of course, as dancing yoga Elastigirl so hypnotically illustrated, life is full of distractions to keep one from writing. One must have godlike willpower.

Sadly, I am but a mortal man.

Overall, I found writing on the iPad a positive, hopeful experience, FAR more comfortable than typing on the smartphone. The negatives are considerable, but I expect that at least some of them will be addressed in future versions of Pages or some word processing app still in development.

I’ll update further as I continue my experiments. I plan to write outside as much as possible this summer, and the iPad makes it simple to do almost anything I could do from my full desktop wherever I go.

Freedom!

In the meantime, I wanted to point readers to something interesting that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The Fantasy Book Club on Goodreads has chosen The Warded Man as their book of the month for May, and has opened a series of discussion threads, including one for author questions which I will be visiting and answering regularly throughout the month. Feel free to stop by and interrogate me.

Topics in the thread include the Painted/Warded name change, questions about the magic system and the number of books in the series, how becoming a father has affected my writing, and why I chose to include themes of religious conflict and sexual assault in the story. I think it’s worth reading if you’re interested. You can see the Warded Man discussion here, though you will have to take five minutes to register (free) with Goodreads and join the Fantasy Book Club in order to comment.