Category Archives: Technology

I started using virtual index cards back in 2006 when planning for my first NaNoWriMo, and I still find them a useful way of managing a big project like a novel. I like physical index cards as well, but they’re a pain to carry around with you – which is where an app like Story  Continue Reading »

So, you’ve put yourself out there online, with a website and social media – but that’s only half the story. If your self-promotion is successful, then other people are going to start talking about you online. Sometimes they’ll let you know, but often they won’t. That’s where Google Alerts comes in. What kind of information  Continue Reading »

A few weeks ago I reviewed the IRISnotes Executive 1.0 smartpen, not entirely favourably. To my surprise, two days later I received an email from rival company LiveScribe, asking if they could send me one of their smartpens to review. Of course I said yes; how could I resist a free gadget? I thus arrived back  Continue Reading »

Pinterest in the new kid on the social media block that debuted in 2010. Taking a leaf out of Tumblr’s book, it’s a social media scrapbook, encouraging you to share pictures with your friends. Each image is called a “pin”, and you can organise them into “boards”, or categories. As with other social media, you can  Continue Reading »

Note: this review is for the original (1.0) smartpen, which I bought a couple of years ago. A new (2.0) version is out with more capabilities, including iPad integration, but I haven’t made up my mind about upgrading yet. The IRISnotes Executive is one of several smartpens vying for market share. Unlike most of the  Continue Reading »

Like pretty much every writer nowadays, I do most of my writing via a keyboard, whether that’s on my laptop, on the bluetooth keyboard tethered to my iPad, or (occasionally) using the software keyboard on my iPhone. However anything big enough to comfortably touch-type on is also too big to slip into my everyday shoulder bag,  Continue Reading »

Goodreads is an online reading community that’s grown rapidly in the past couple of years, easily outstripping LibraryThing and other rivals. You can use it to help manage your book collection, post reviews and ratings, and join in online bookclubs. And if you’re a writer, once you have a book out (whether self-published or through  Continue Reading »

One of the trickiest things to keep track of when writing a novel can be the passage of time, especially if you have two or more concurrent plotlines. Tolkien was apparently very good at this; I read somewhere that if you compare his published timeline to the text, you’ll find that not only does it  Continue Reading »

It’s been a while since one of these posts, since spring was such a busy time for me, but with new social networks cropping up I thought I should get the ball rolling again. Facebook is still (in 2012) the biggest and best-known social media site. There are two main kinds of Facebook content stream: individual user  Continue Reading »

It’s been a while since I did a techie post, but this is a topic that came up on Twitter the other day in conversation with my fellow Angry Robot author Matt Forbeck. We’re both using the word-count tracking features of Scrivener but in slightly different ways, so here for Matt’s edification (and anyone else’s!)  Continue Reading »