I don’t plan to let it die, but I like to take a break from it from time to time. I’ve been spending more time on the social networks lately. One big reason for that is my job entails knowing the Facebooks, Twitters, and Google+ mechanisms. So it leaves little time for personal blogging.

As a means of a meager update, for anyone who may still be poking around here occasionally, please feel free to follow me on twitter or Google+. I’d be happy to follow you back and keep in touch. Relevant buttons below. Hope to hear from you.

-gordon

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Writing on the iPad was one of the main excuses I came up with for getting this elegant piece of technology. After purchasing it, I soon realized that it wasn’t as useful as I thought it would be for writing. The main problem was the on-screen keyboard, but there was also a serious lack of writing-focused apps.

Six months after the iPad’s debut, the app situation, at least, has changed for the better. While I have discovered that when I need to do some heavy writing — for Nanowrimo, for instance — the iPad’s screen can’t compete with pounding out my words on my laptop. Still, for writing out short notes or a contemplative journal entry, I now use the iPad quite a bit for writing. Here’s what I have found works best for me.

The apps

After trying out many different apps with many different approaches, I have narrowed my tools down to two: Writer.ia and PlainText. Both are well-designed, simple tools that do what they do without a lot of fluff and features I don’t need in order to just sit down and write. I tend to draft in one and revise in the other.

PlainText is probably the app I use the most for writing on the iPad. As its name suggests, it’s just plain text, no fancy formatting options, no bullet lists, alignment options — you can’t even change the font. It’s extremely useful for writing lists, quick notes, outlines and other things I just need to dash out quickly. I’ve used a few other tools by the developer of PlainText, including the awesome Writeroom, and he really promotes the idea of simplicity in software, for which I am thankful. PlainText is free, but I’d have no problem paying for it.

PlainText Screenshot

Writer.ia is well suited for working on longer projects. It has its own custom keys to move between words and give you quick access to punctuation marks and other keys that are clumsy to get to if you’re using the on-screen keyboard. Combined with the Focus mode that keeps your view focused on the three center lines of text (see screenshot below), I think the app is particularly useful for editing and revising longer pieces of writing. Writer.ia is not free and, while its $4.99 price tag may seem exorbitantly expensive in the app world (I’m being mostly sarcastic — there’s a lot of irrationality when it comes to judging the price of apps), I found it was worth the five bucks.

Writer.ia Screenshot

If you’re so inclinded, you can read more about how these two apps differ in this side-by-side review on GigaOm.

Keeping it all organized

The tool that keeps all of this remote, mobile writing painless is a service called Dropbox. Up to a certain amount of storage, Dropbox is free and it pretty seamlessly keeps my documents synced between my computers and mobile devices. It’s a great way to keep everything I’m writing accessible and organized. I’ve been using it for a few years for various reasons and since I got the iPad, I use it daily.

For writing in the cloud, I could use Google Docs but I actually find that service a little bit frustrating and the fact that I couldn’t edit documents on mobile devices always kept the big G at a distance for me.

I put this system through its paces while trying to write my novel for Nanowrimo this year. It didn’t help me actually finish it, but I’ll keep this workflow going as I keep plugging away on it.

If you have any apps or services that help you get your writing down, wherever and whenever, let me know. I’m a huge nerd about this kind of stuff…

Here are some other articles taking a look at various  iPad writing apps:

• John Chander’s iPad Writing Apps Showdown (byjohnchandler.com)
• iPadGirl’s Review of My Writing Nook (ipadgirl.posterous.com)
• iPadGirl’s iPad Apps for Writers (inkygirl.com)
• 5 of the Best iPad Apps for Poets and Writers (Cloudy Day Art Podcast Network)

Found this while browsing through the popular writing-related links on social bookmarking site Delicious. I can’t help but get a little annoyed at the $2-blog-writing schemes, SEO “content” farms, and a general deterioration of originality, voice, and real content that passes for so-called writing online.

Now I have an image to conjure whenever this black mood strikes me. To the person that wrotte [sic] it, thanks.

Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.

I’ve been working on the web since 1997, and I’m still surprised at how little organized the array of people in the industry actually are. Sure, there are conferences galore, but I mean really organize. I used to joke with a few colleagues at Yahoo! back in the day about starting a union for web editors. It was tongue-in-cheek back then, but it today it could be a great way to get rid of these freelance jobs that pay $10 for a blog post that I see on craigslist all too frequently.

If you work on the web, think about taking A List Apart’s survey.

On this topic, Author Steven Poole’s got a lively post on his blog about giving up on Microsoft Word. Something I did well over two years ago. While I compiled my short story collection for my MFA thesis on Word, creating the table of contents and page numbers on it, I haven’t actually written anything using Word in years. For the stories in my collection I used a program called CopyWrite. Since then I’ve switched to doing most of my writing in raw text editors or a program called Scrivener, which Poole also mentions in his article.

Like most things involving technology it doesn’t really matter what you construct your work with, but it’s still fun and sometimes productive to reconsider your methods and ditch things — like Word — that just don’t work very well.

Read it all here: Steven Poole – Goodbye, cruel Word

Duotrope is primarily a database of journals and magazines for fiction and poetry. Only about 1,600 different publications. Along with the expected literary fiction, it also includes outlets for the relatively maligned (in MFA circles) genre fiction, like science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. And there are intelligent ways to find markets that fit your interests, goals, and patience.

I feel saved by Duotrope’s online submission tracker — something I’ve been wishing for since I started trying to use Excel to track my many rejections, and hating the process.

But maybe best of all is Duotrope’s repository of statistics, showing how quickly and how often publications review and respond to submissions. To my mind this is powerful. But it’s also dependent on you and me to give them the data. If you write and submit, you should visit Duotrope and let them know about your rejections and successes.

Much love to the folks who put Duotrope to together. On the one hand BookFox calls for a boycott of the #1 slow-responder (which I fully support). But Duotrope also makes it easier to find, support, and frequently submit to the publications that swiftly go where many editors fear to fly.

All this has gotten me very fired up. Time to go through the trash bin of rejections and get recycling.

(Many thanks to Elaine in BookFox’s comments for linking to Duotrope. She made my day.)

But, I’ve confessed before, I’m a bit of a gear-luster, and over the past few months, I’ve noticed some interesting trends in the small but vibrant world of “writing technology,??? including:

• Anti-word processing — Just text.
• Full-screen writing — No distractions.
• All-in-one tools — Keep your ideas, notes, drafts, all together.
• Paper — Lovely paper.

The dominate theme that I’ve noticed feels like it’s about writing without distractions. No funny fonts, no Yahoo! Messenger bouncing in the background. No trying layout your story in progress so you can pretend it’s in print in the “The New Yorker.”

Writing zen.

I like this trend. I spent most of my failed efforts in this latest round of National Novel Writing Month writing my project in a notebook. I will be compelled to type up what I wrote, but in the frantic draft stage, the connection between my hand, pen, and paper was refreshing after spending eight-plus hours on a computer for work.

Likewise, all the software centered efforts to minimize distractions when you’re on the computer are coming from the right place. A focused workplace has always been conducive to producing, whether you’re sitting across the room from Bartelby or aggravating your RSI on a PC.

I typically use a Mac, and some of the interesting software applications aimed at writers that I’ve seen include CopyWrite, which I’ve used for a couple years. This application offers project management for your writing: keep your notes, various drafts of stories and chapters of novels all together so you don’t have a dozen different verions of Word files floating around. And it offers an optional full-screen mode, so you see nothing but your words.

In a more minimalistic direction, I recently tried a free program called Writer, which can block your Internet access and fade out all the other programs you may have running. A bit foreceful, but strikes me as an effective method to reach focus.

If there’s any moral to this story, it may be that whatever format you spend your writing time on — computer, typewriter, quill and inkpot — you must focus, you must use all your tools to hone in on your words. Stop comparing how your name looks in Courier versus Times New Roman. Stop checking MySpace. Stop clipping your toenails.

Writing zen.

But, eventually, there came a moment — I think it was around the time my first daughter was born — when I looked around at all the equipment that I had been lucky enough to acquire. Look at all that hardware, all those blinking lights, all that technology. But where was my music?

The eminent danger of technology is acquisition syndrome. I’ve been through it with photography and with music. I’ve had friends go through it with all of the above, with video and filmmaking, even had one friend who had the automotive strain of this disease.

But writing — writing is the one creative pursuit that allows one to stay clear of aquisition syndrome, technology, gear lust, and window shopping of any kind… Right?

All you need to write a story, a poem, or a novel, is something to write with and something to write on. Simplicity in its most noble, artistic form. So why have I spent hours searching for software for writers? Why have I splurged on sublime notebooks and fountain pens?

Maybe I’m incurable. But, still, I can look around and see that I’ve got more to show for my efforts in writing than I did with music and other media. I’m thankful for that. Every time I finish a sentence, turn the page, or click the Save button, I just need to keep reminding myself that writing zen doesn’t come from a notebook, or a piece of software, or a pen.

So far, so good.