Tech review: Story Skeleton
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 Skeleton comes in. Story Skeleton is an iPhone app that allows you create and export outlines in a variety of formats, including as a Scrivener .scriv project. It’s this that first interested me, and I used it for an initial outline of The Prince of Lies. Overall it’s quite a nice little app. The design is a bit fussy in some respects – on a small screen, I prefer the controls to adhere more closely to Apple conventions – but not difficult to get the hang...
Read MoreWeb presence 101.9 – Google Alerts
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 will Alerts find for you? Basically, anything that you could find out by manually searching on, say, your author name and/or title. That includes: <ul> <li>your website</li> <li>your social media profile pages</li> <li>interviews and guest blog posts</li> <li>book reviews</li> <li>online bookshop listings</li> <li>piracy...
Read MoreTech review: LiveScribe Echo smartpen
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 from FantasyCon to find a LiveScribe Echo waiting for me… Unlike the IRISnotes pen, the LiveScribe can record audio as well as handwritten notes, and comes in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB versions. Since I said I was mostly interested in the transcription and handwriting recognition side of things, they sent me the basic 2GB model plus a couple of extra notebooks. Current retail price of this model is £69.99, which is less than half the price of the new IRISnotes...
Read MoreWeb presence 101.8 – Pinterest
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 follow other people and they can follow you; images pinned by you and your followees appear on your homepage. You can then pin them to your own boards, so that your followers get to see them, or just comment or like them, as on Facebook. At first, Pinterest was invitation-only—I picked up an invitation earlier this year through fellow author Jody Hedlund, whose blog I follow (somewhat erratically)—but it’s now...
Read MoreTech review: IRISnotes Executive smartpen
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 others, however, it does not use special (read, expensive) gridded paper, nor does it store the transcribed text in a heavy, high-tech pen. Instead it uses a normal-sized ballpoint pen with a infrared transmitter around its nib, and a receiver unit that you clip to whatever notepad or loose-leaf paper you desire. Since a) I have small hands and b) I don’t want to have to buy a load of expensive notebooks on top of the pen, this makes the...
Read MoreHuman computer interface: digitising your handwritten prose
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, so I’ve been looking for alternative solutions. There’s also the issue that whilst I’ve long since become accustomed to writing the stories themselves on a keyboard, I still prefer to do background note-taking (world-building, plot brainstorming, etc) in longhand; it just feels more natural and organic. Unfortunately this means I end up with a lot of paper notebooks, which are difficult to search through! There seem...
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