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First things first. This morning, my 9 month old daughter Cassandra waved to me and said “Hi, Daddy,” her first unmistakable confirmed words in the presence of two witnesses. So far as I’m concerned, that’s way more important than any of the other stuff I’ve been blogging about lately.

That said, there have been some other things going on, starting with a pretty stellar review on Fantasy Literature.

Next up is the interview I did with Laptop Magazine, which was published on their website this morning. Not sure when the print piece will come out.

It was, I think, a really good interview. Quite different from the normal fare, as it focused mainly on the tech side of my writing, and the interviewer asked me a number of interesting questions on e-piracy, the Amazon Kindle, why I don’t use an iPhone, and a few other things. I think it’s well worth reading.

A few other tech sites picked up the Laptop story right away, including boingboing, MobileCrunch, and The Gadgets Weblog. The Daily News story was also picked up on GalleyCat and InformationWeek.

The whole “subway writing” story continues to garner worldwide attention, translating since my last post into German, Dutch (also here and here), French (also here and here), Czech, and Arabic (also here and here), in addition to more articles in Spanish on a site with the best logo ever (also here and here) and Polish (cool pic on this one). That’s ten languages.

Oh, and lest anyone think me unaware that writing books on your phone is old hat in Japan, I point you to this classic Peephole in My Skull post from January 2008.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to see mutations and errors crop up in the story with every degree of separation away from the source material as it filters through the blogosphere. It’s kind of like a game of telephone in some ways, and shows that we still have a little ways to go before blogs can truly replace traditional news as a trusted, verified, and quotable source.

Not that traditional news is perfect in any way…

Posted on April 29, 2009 at 9:24 pm by PeatB
Filed under Cassie, Interviews, Life, Musings, Sales, Tech, Writing
7 Comments »

It’s been quite a week. Seriously. Like a year’s worth of stuff happened in the last 7 days.

I had been planning for last week to be a quiet one where I could get a lot of writing done, but due to an almost slapstick convergence of events, I was forced to put it off again and again.

Sunday: My plans for a peaceful week of writing began to derail when my sister Maritza had her baby over two weeks early (Welcome Freddie! Uncle Peat loves you and is going to inundate you with superhero crap!). Also, Cassie wasn’t sleeping, and was being crazed.

Words written: 0

Monday: Plans to write were further put off by going to the accountant to plan my estimated taxes for the year.

Estimated taxes are an unspoken Hell known only to freelancers, and I wish it on no one. Why? Because it’s a guess. A freelancer has no what they’re actually going to make in a given year to come, but they have to guess anyway, and pay taxes based on that. So you’re left with the winless choice of guessing low and paying less taxes, but risking owing a big chunk of money at year’s end, or overpaying, and feeling broke all year only to find that you didn’t have to and maybe could have afforded that trip to Aruba, after all.

But I digress.

I got home from the accountant to a message on my answering machine from The Daily News. They saw the piece in AM New York two weeks earlier about how I wrote the majority of The Warded Man on my smartphone, and wanted an interview. As I reached for the phone to call them back, it rang, and it was News 12 Brooklyn, asking if they could send over a film correspondent that week. Later that night, something I wrote like two weeks ago on a reviewer’s blog opens a Can of Worms and sparked a big (and kind of fascinating) internet debate.

Words written: 0

Tuesday: The Daily News sent a photographer out to meet me, and we rode the subway taking pictures. The Racy Romance Reviews debate is in full force, and I am joining in. That night, my mother in law and her boyfriend came to visit, stopping for the night on their drive from Boston to North Carolina.

Words written: 0

Wednesday: I was on page three of the Daily News, and on NY1’s “In the Papers” section of the morning news loop. People I hadn’t spoken to in years were suddenly getting in touch, saying they saw me in the paper or on TV. That night, my computer crashed. Sometime after that, Switched.com picks up the story. Traffic on my website spikes. I am oblivious.

Words written: 0

Thursday: Brittany Oat from News 12 shows up at 8:30am to interview me and again film me at the subway stop, writing on my phone, and yes, I am actually writing in those scenes! I’m writing about how friggin’ bizarre it is that I am being interviewed for the news. It’s like I woke up on Bizarro World. Maybe I’ll post exactly what wrote later. I think I also noted that Brittany is pretty.

I get back home and see that a few other blogs like The Gothamist have picked up the story as the News 12 spot airs. (It really was a great piece, but I haven’t been able to find it online to show people. Working on it.) Laptop Magazine asks for an interview.

I then begin the ugly process of backing up urgent files on my computer and preparing for a hard disk wipe/Windows reinstall. Went out for a drink. Came home and pulled the computer off life-support. Began resuscitation.

Words written: 0

Friday: I see that a bunch more sites have picked up the “man writes book on a cellphone during subway commute” story, including Fantasy Book Review, but I don’t have time to explore, because I finally have the chance to meet my nephew. We pack up and head out to my sister’s place, leaving my computer is installing hundreds of updates. Away most of the day. Dinner out with my parents. Cassie is a terror when we get back, and is up until all hours.

Words written: 0

Saturday: Computer more or less fixed, I start exploring the web. My agent has just gotten back from London Book Fair and has posted pix of the awesome Painted Man displays in the UK right now, where the paperback is a bestseller. That is so damn awesome.

I note that the Racy Romance Reviews debate is still going strong (I think I commented a good three times, myself), and the debate has been picked back up off my blog and inspired posts by Tia at FantasyDebut, James at Speculative Horizons, and Ana/Thea at Booksmugglers, which was the site where the whole mess started in the first place. Crazy.

I then see that the smartphone story has been translated into Polish (also here),  Spanish (also here and here), Russian (also here), and Norwegian, in addition to being picked up on windows mobile blogs and other tech blogs like Geek.com, Cellphone Magazine, Flexta, dialaphone, and ixplora. It gets to the point where there are too many links for me to even follow them all to their sources (many of them are pingback comments on my post Page 3 Girl). Suddenly I am “gimmicky cellphone writer guy”, known the world over, and no one is talking about the book itself.

That was weird. I mean, sure, it’s all true. I did write on the subway almost every day during my commute, but it was just a means to an end. The book was what was important. It’s what I was pouring my heart and soul into. The smartphone was just the pitcher. People saw that, right?

I worried people didn’t see that.

I felt like the power of the internet had just bitch-slapped me senseless, or stuck a needle of heroin in my eye. It was heady and addictive and over quickly, leaving me drained and confused.

Near as I can tell, that’s what it feels like to go viral. Even on this flash in the pan scale, it felt like my head had exploded. I can’t even imagine how Susan Boyle feels. By this time it was Saturday afternoon, and I looked up and saw it was sunny out. I  needed a break, so I turned off the computer and went for a walk in the park.

Saturday was a SPECTACULARLY nice day in Brooklyn. Mid 70’s and sunny. The park was gorgeous, and I walked a couple of miles, inhaling deeply, finding my center. Eventually, I plopped down on the grass, feeling the sun’s embrace as it touched parts of my skin that had not known direct sunlight in months. I felt renewed. Relaxed. And I finally had a chance to write.

Good thing I had brought my smartphone.

Words written: 725

Posted on April 27, 2009 at 12:33 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Events, Fans, Interviews, Life, Musings, Reviews, Sales, Tech, World Traveler, Writing
6 Comments »

Local readers, take heed! I will be on News 12 Brooklyn at 1 PM today. In a similar story to the Daily News and Am New York pieces, super-nice reporter Brittany Oat came out and interviewed me in my home office about my writing on my phone during my commute, and then filmed me on the street and in the subway while thumb writing.

News 12 is channel 12 on Cablevision, and 156 on Time Warner (1+5+6=12). I’m not sure if anyone can see it outside of Brooklyn, but the piece will be on their website tonight, and I will link to it then as well.

Some other sites have picked up the story as well. You can join in on the snarky comments on The Gothamist, or see more on Switched.com, Deep In The Heart Of Brooklyn, and the Bridge and Tunnel Club. Good times.

Lastly, if you’re a fan and have written me an e-mail but not gotten a reply, it might take a few more days. My main computer is laid up in bed with a thermometer in its mouth after some hard partying out on the internets. I might have to resort to the dreaded “restore to factory settings”. Everything is backed up, but still, it is a pain in the ass and I will lose some software I don’t have the disks/codes to anymore.

Posted on April 23, 2009 at 11:09 am by PeatB
Filed under Events, Fans, Interviews, Life, Musings, Writing
6 Comments »

So pick up a copy of the NY Daily News today and open the cover. There on page friggin’ THREE, you’ll find a HUGE picture of my ugly mug! The article is about how I wrote The Warded Man on my iPaq smartphone while riding the Subway. You can see the full article here, but the picture in the paper is MUCH bigger and better!

The News called on Monday and interviewed me for an hour, and then sent a photographer out yesterday to ride the subway with me and snap some pictures. I’ll see if I can get permission to put some of the unused shots on the blog at some point. We got a variety of good ones.

Still, I didn’t expect it to make page three of he paper. I have my top on, so it’s not a classic page 3 shot, but it’ll do. It’ll do.

I’m also on the “in the papers” section of this morning’ news loop on NY1!

Posted on April 22, 2009 at 9:09 am by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Events, Interviews, Life, Reviews, Sales, Writing
18 Comments »

So apparently I opened a can of worms the other day with my comment on the (spoiler review alert!) review of The Painted Man by Ana from The Book Smugglers. Not because of what I said or how I said it, but because of the very fact that I, wearing my author hat, said anything at all.

Jessica at Racy Book Reviews wrote an interesting post this morning where she posits that authors posting comments on reviews of their work, even (or perhaps especially) on blogs, has a chilling effect on comments, causing other comments to censor themselves, get starstruck, or simply choose not to comment, killing what might otherwise have continued to be a vibrant discussion thread.

She cites my example as the primary reason why she wrote the post, and there is some circumstantial evidence to support her. Once I left my comment, the conversation effectively ended.

I think she makes a fairly good point. I don’t think it’s good form for authors to respond to reviews too often.  I have read literally hundreds of reviews of The Painted/Warded Man, and I think I’ve left a total of 4 comments. Less than one percent.

Wow, you must be thinking. These must have been VERY bad reviews!

Actually, no. One was spreading misinformation that the content of The Painted Man was significantly different from that of The Warded Man. Because of the problems inherent to having the book have two separate titles in the US and UK markets, I am very vigilant for things like that, and felt I needed to stomp the rumour out as a bud. I don’t want people buying the same book twice thinking there would ne more or less story or whatever.

The other three are due to the reviewers interpreting a certain scene in the book in a way that I think casts a negative aspersion on my character, even though the reviews in question were not necessarily negative overall. In all those situations, I did my best to keep it short, polite, informative, and to stick to the one topic that I wanted to give my thoughts on, rather than addressing the review as a whole.

Did I need to comment? No, of course not. But no one needs to comment on things. That’s the whole point of enabled comments on blogs. Everyone has the option to say something if they have something to say. It is the power of the internet in it’s purest form, laid bare in all its ugly beauty. Everyone gets to be heard, and no one does.

The comments on the post have been nonstop all day, I think there have been about 40, with authors and readers alike chiming in (myself included). It’s an interesting thread; well worth reading. I don’t think it’s going to change anything, though, or even that it necessarily should. Authors are still going to read any reviews of their work posted in public forum, and some of them, including me, are going to comment when they have something to say. It’s one of those things, like friends posting unflattering pictures of us on facebook and illegal file-sharing, that we’re all just going to have to get used to.

P.S.

If you’re a New Yorker, pick up a copy of the New York Daily News tomorrow (Wednesday, April 22), and look for the article about yours truly!

Posted on April 21, 2009 at 7:27 pm by PeatB
Filed under Musings, Reviews, Writing
6 Comments »