Political Metal

One of the things about living in a different country is you get to observe all the things that are probably completely normal to the locals, but which have that unmistakable quality of otherness for the expat or economic migrant, such as myself. 

Despite being a country that retains an unwavering and perhaps inexplicable love for Air Supply and Europe, one of the bigger bands round these parts are Chthonic, a metal band. They've been around a couple of decades. They're also pretty political, on the leftist/progressive side of things, which around these parts often also means anti-China. China insists Taiwan is Chinese, and the majority of Taiwanese say we are, and always have been, Taiwanese. They have their own flag and their own elected government. It's a little more complicated than that, but at heart that's the essence of it.

Anyway, the singer is running for a government post. There's an election coming up next year. All this came together in the form of a free concert at Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei. Here's what the Guardian said about it in an article:

"Wearing combat boots, lead singer Freddy Lim held the stage with the brand of music that has seen the Taiwanese “black metal” band dubbed the Black Sabbath of Asia.
But this was not just any gig: it was also a political rally ahead of a crucial year for Taiwan. Described as a “concert to calm the soul and defend the nation”, the event was intended to energise Taiwanese youth and gain political support for Lim’s new role – as a parliamentary candidate for the New Power party (NPP).
The party, which was formed earlier this year, emerged out of Taiwan’s 2004 Sunflower student movement and represents, said Lim, a means “to channel the energy and frustration of young activists and frustrated Taiwanese” ahead of the parliamentary elections on 16 January."

Naturally, we went along. It was pretty good. I haven't been at a full-out metal gig since I saw Opeth sometime in the mid-2000s. I'd have to think about it to be sure. But there's something decidedly surreal at being at a gig like this and seeing various besuited politicians trotting up onto stage between songs to rouse the crowd. Now try and picture Hilary Clinton turning up at a Rage Against the Machine gig, and you're pretty much there.

Here's a short clip from the gig to give you a wee taste of what the experience was like. There were a LOT of people there. We were stuck somewhere way, way, way at the back.

Force Awakens review

I actually posted the following on my Facebook account a couple of days ago, and there's already been a spate of post-release reviews all saying pretty much the same thing. But, for what it's worth, here's my take on the new Star Wars movie. TL:DR; it could have been a lot worse, but it could have been a deal better, too.

On the new Star Wars movie - needless to say there may be spoilers, but I'll try hard to avoid them. And the tone of what I say may come across as a lot more negative than I actually felt watching the movie, but which needs to be said nonetheless:

I think it's safe to say, judging by what I've seen via Google (try googling "Force Awakens plot holes"), that I'm not the only one left a touch bemused - if not downright perplexed - by the new Star Wars movie. Once the credits rolled, Emma asked what I thought of it, and I said 'I'd give it 7/10. It was...okay.'

That surprised me a little, because I'd actually gone in with high hopes. I was genuinely looking forward to it. I've always been willing to cut Star Wars some slack because in the original trilogy at least, it told a pretty effective story with some genuine surprises. Even when I was a kid, seeing Star Wars for the first time, I already knew spaceships couldn't make noise in space, and that a parsec was a measure of distance, not time. But if you can get the story right, the audience, including me, will forgive a lot.

What _also_ helped were the endlessly positive reviews of The Force Awakens, particularly from reviewers like Mark Kermode, whom I don't always agree with, but whose reviews I always respect (if you don't know him, he's a BBC film reviewer with the haircut of a middle-aged rockabilly, and a highly-regarded podcast). He gave it an enormous thumbs-up, despite himself never having been that much of a fan of the previous movies.

I often find I don't really figure out what I think of a film until I've had a little time to absorb it and think about it. Now, a day later, I feel less like I've seen a Hollywood film than I have a dramatised spreadsheet in which points of drama are strung between points of fan-service.

I found it curiously lacking in excitement, for all the running around and explosions. In fact, for a major Hollywood movie, it's surprisingly lacking in any real dramatic tension. I had a hard time caring, to be honest, because the movie was aimed, judging by reports I've read of audience reactions in packed cinemas, at people who wanted to see familiar faces and familiar objects and places from the original films. These faces, objects and places (I'm trying to avoid spoilers) overwhelmed what otherwise might have been a decent story.

If you'd kept all the old faces out and concentrated on the new - on Finn, Rey and so forth - it might actually have been a better and more involving movie, because there would have been time for the story, such as it is, to develop. It would also have allowed for - and one can only hope for the Star Wars movies still to come - a more _original_ story.

That way, we might have had time to get to know and thereby empathise with those newer characters, instead of them being subsumed in the tide of referentiality that otherwise constitutes the plot. In fact, what you get is less a movie than a _cover version_ of a movie. Not quite a reboot, but more like what might have been a genuinely original story that's been strangled at birth and fed into the gaping, Jabba-like maw of a commercial franchise.

I could say more regarding the huge, massive plot holes that litter the whole thing, but instead of that I'll just point you to at a review that goes into far greater detail, but which I agree with.

It's far from the best movie of 2015; it's far from even being the best science fiction movie of the year. If it's akin to anything, it's a reunion gig by some 60s or 70s rock dinosaur where the audience sits and waits passively while they rumble through the new, not so good songs, before cheering hysterically the moment the band plays the opening chords to a familiar hit.

Again: I really wanted to like it more than I did. I went in with high, rather than low expectations. If I was 12, I'd probably have enjoyed the heck out of it. But when I was 12, I also thought Irwin Allen's The Lost World was the greatest thing ever, and just a couple of years before that I'd probably have thought cardboard boxes were a barrel of fun too.

But as an adult, I felt like I'd gone to a restaurant everyone raves about that turns out to serve a meal that's merely acceptable, if even that. In other words, I felt disappointed, and just a little bit let-down. I can only imagine what that other, better movie featuring the new actors and none of the old would have been like. 'Better than the prequels' just isn't enough.

New book, new cover

It's been through a bunch of name changes, but here at long last is the cover and publication date for Survival Game, the sequel to Extinction Game. It's coming out at the beginning of August 2016.

Algorithms and Amazon.

...so now Extinction Game is back up to £4.19 on Kindle, Final Days and Thousand Emperors are still cheap, and Empire of Light is now way down in price. So if you missed that Extinction Game deal, you missed it. I'm guessing an algorithm, rather than an actual human being, is responsible for all these prices bouncing around. 

Price Drops (UK) for Thousand Emperors, Final Days, and Extinction Game

I have no idea if this is something specific to Cyber-Monday, or Black Friday, or Slightly Mauve Wednesday, or whatever the hell it is this week, but you might be interested to know the ebook editions of several of my books have just drastically dropped in price on Amazon UK.

Being naught but a lowly author, I have no idea for how long these deals will pertain, but the prices are low enough to edge the books in question into impulse-buy territory; The Thousand Emperors and Extinction Game (my most recent book) are £2.45, and Final Days is £2.10.

So my advice, if you've been thinking about getting these particular titles, is to get them now.

This works well both ways - you get the book cheap, but I still get my full royalties from the sale, regardless of what price it's sold at. So the more it sells, the more I can eat and pay for a roof over my head, and the more writing I can do without having to throw a pesky day-job into the mix.

You can get Extinction Game here, Final Days here,  and The Thousand Emperors here.

The prices have been gradually dropping over the last couple of days, so it's not outside the bounds of possibility Amazon UK might decide to drop some of those prices further. 

Buy Interzone (and read me)

The November-December issue of Interzone, the UK's longest-running sf magazine, is just out. It contains, amongst others, my six-thousand word story Scienceville. 

I'd recommend buying Interzone at the best of times anyway, but if you've never previously read the magazine and feel inclined to check it out, I'd be super happy if you made this particular issue your entry point. And if you like the story, let me know.

For some reason, I've had a sudden spurt of creativity in the past couple of months, in that I've been writing short fiction for the first time in a long, long while - although strictly speaking, Scienceville was written in late 2014. I've since written a couple more stories which are currently doing the rounds, and have ideas and notes for a few more.

(And in case you haven't heard of it, a big shout-out here to the excellent website Submissions Grinder, which isn't nearly as filthy as the name just might suggest. It's both a market listing site and a user-end database that lets you catalogue who you've submitted stories to, and how long it takes to get a response. What's really nice about it is that it also aggregates the most recent turnarounds (both rejections and acceptances) reported by site users, so you get to see if they're responding quickly or not. I've been using it since I wrote Scienceville.)

Back to that new issue of Interzone: you can subscribe to the magazine direct or buy individual copies in either physical or e-format here. It's also available in Kindle format on Amazon pretty much everywhere. I personally subscribe to the magazine through Weightless Books, since that gives you access to the magazine in three different formats at once: epub, mobi and PDF. I happen to like the PDF version because Interzone is a highly visual magazine with very high-quality illustrations, and by far the best-looking genre magazine out there, and it looks pretty fantastic on my iPad Air. 

(Also regarding Weightless Books: they offer numerous subscriptions to other, highly-regarded sf and fantasy short story magazines, all of which are worth checking out.)

Questions Writers Sometimes Ask Me

A few weeks ago I got paid, as I sometimes do, to read an unpublished novel and tell the author what I thought they needed to do to make it publishable. As is usually the case, there were a lot of errors that pretty much guaranteed the book as it stood would never get out of the slush pile. I told the author what I thought they needed to do to make it better, and also emphasised - as I nearly always do - that writing often requires an enormous amount of dedicated work with absolutely no guarantees of success. Success in this case being: getting a book deal.

And, as is not infrequently the case, after I'd written up my assessment and sent it to the client, I got a reply. In most cases they're pretty happy with my comments, although there tends to be a certain shellshocked quality to their words that makes it obvious most of the things I picked out as needing fixing were things they had never been aware of. 

One, recently, asked me whether it was worth it to keep going. I don't get asked that often, but I'm guessing it's a question pretty much all, if not most, writers ask themselves. I wrote a long reply, then thought maybe it applied to a lot of writers, and that maybe I could put it up here. I've edited it a bit, but what follows is, essentially, the same advice I'd give to pretty much anyone asking that same question.


Dear [Writer],


You asked me whether it was worth continuing to write. 


I can't really answer that, I'm afraid, but what I will say is that if it gives you pleasure, then you should keep going. That you say you love to write is very important, but ask yourself this question: would you still love writing if it took you ten years to get a book deal? Or even fifteen years? How do you feel about writing ten books, none of which sell, in the hope that maybe - just maybe - the eleventh might net you a deal? 


I sold a two thousand word short story to a magazine in 1990 for £40. Over the next decade, I made a grand total of £260 from selling a total of three stories. 


Most people who aren't interested in becoming writers would laugh and shake their heads at these numbers, but I had realised one important thing: if you can write a short story and get paid actual money for it, then in theory at least you can also write a book and get paid for that too. 

About 1997, I wrote a novel that never sold. I wrote a second, and that did sell, in 2004.

That's nearly fifteen years it took me to get to the point I could at least in theory support myself by writing, and I'd say that's a not untypical span of time for a lot of writers. I kept my day job, of course, at least until 2007 when back problems forced me to quit. Fortunately by then, I was on a more even financial keel and could support myself by writing - mostly because I moved to a cheaper country for a couple of years. 

Like you, I hammered my first novel out without stopping and without any real idea what I was doing. However, after I had extensively revised it - a process that included dumping the last third of the novel and writing a completely different ending - it got me an agent. 


That first book never sold, for reasons that are now startlingly clear to me: it showed promise, but was not a saleable work. How can I know that? Because as I kept writing, I slowly became a better writer, and got to the point where I could better judge my earlier work. 


Five years after getting an agent, a publisher showed enough interest to ask if I was working on anything else. I'd just started writing something new, fortunately, and they took a look. 

One year later, I had a book deal.

Let's assume you'll do anything it takes to succeed, because you love writing. Do you read a lot? You'd better, or you might as well give up now. I read up to fifty books a year, maybe half of which are non-fiction. Should you keep going? Absolutely - as long as you accept the possibility it might never happen. I wrote to get published, but all the while aware it might be for nothing. On the other hand, if I'd never tried, I'd never have sold ten books to a major publisher. 

If you REALLY love writing, dedicate yourself to it completely. Don't let anything get in the way of it. Make your life fit around your writing, not the other way around. Are you constantly critical of your own writing? Do you always strive to improve, and learn from others? Are you prepared to miss out on the TV shows everyone is talking about, skip social nights, at times become a near-hermit to focus on your work?

You're concerned that your lack of science education - or education in general - might hamper your desire to write.

Fred Pohl was one of the most famous sf writers in the world: I recently read somewhere online that his Gateway books might be made into a TV series. He wrote The Space Merchants, a hugely influential book in its time. He was also a major sf editor for some years.


Pohl's writing was a huge influence on me, and yet he didn't get his US high school diploma until he was an old man. Learn from his example. When I started writing, the internet had barely been born. Now all the writing advice you could imagine is out there, to be found, and often for free. Don't know about something? Look it up online. I'm amazed how few writers do. Is there a library near you? Use it. 

What else can you do? Find a writing group near where you live and join it: it makes for a great support network and you get to meet new people with the same shared interests and drives. If there isn't one near where you live, there are groups online - Critters has a good reputation. There are probably others.

Also, don't just write novels. Write short stories too. Short stories, especially online, are having something of a golden moment. These are paying markets: check out Clarkesworld, Interzone, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Apex, just for a start. Then go to http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com and check out the short story markets listed there. Write a couple of dozen short stories, and maybe one of them will sell for a few pennies. Write another couple dozen, and maybe four or five of those will sell. Write more, and if you sell more, people will start noticing your name appearing in the magazines.


Getting just one story sale for money makes for a HUGE confidence boost, I can tell you, and it's nowhere near as much work as a novel. 

It all comes down to how badly you want something - and whether you're willing to put in the time and sacrifice to try and get it. Someone once said you need to write a million words of shitty, terrible prose before the gold starts emerging. And even then there's still always the possibility it might not be enough.

But the only way you can ever get good enough is by writing and studying and improving and working and being obsessive to the point of near-lunacy and all without any guarantees of success.

Are you that person? Maybe you are, but I'm not the person to tell you. That, you'll have to figure out for yourself.

- Gary Gibson

Writer's Block, and Why I Don't Get It

I came across an article on Lifehacker called You Don't Have a Creative Block. It references another article, which in turn quotes the author Jodi Picoult, talking about writer's block.

In it, she says:

"I don’t believe in writer’s block. Think about it—when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn’t it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer’s block is having too much time on your hands. If you have a limited amount of time to write, you just sit down and do it. You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page."

I couldn't agree more.  I just finished up two outlines for two new novels, one 7,000 words in length, the other close to 12,000 words. Completing them took two months. An outline is creative invention in its most purest form: imagining a complete narrative, with a beginning, middle and end, incorporating characters, motives, action and theme. Each outline contains a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the story. This is something I've done since early in my writing career, and most often the resulting novel is pretty close to what you'd find in those outlines.

Behind each outline is a great deal of writing you don't get to see - notes totalling 55,000 words for both projects together. Add in the outline themselves, and that's 75,000 words I've written in the past eight weeks or so: equivalent in length to a short novel.

So why so many words? Because that's how I avoid writer's block. I just start writing. If I get stuck, I summarise what I have so far.

But you can't force it too much: there will be days when nothing comes. But the act of writing out what I've come up with so far, I find, forces unexpected connections to appear. And even if they don't immediately appear, they'll pop into your head at unexpected moments.

What I do most recently is have a 'work diary'. I put in the date, scan the previous entry, then try and think my way further into the story based on what I've already come up with. I scribble down anything, on the off-chance it might mean something. I explore connections. Even if no idea is immediately forthcoming, I keep making notes, waiting for something to come.

And I do it every day.

For instance, in one of the aforementioned outlines, I wanted character A to find out something about Character C. Except Character C is CEO of a major technology company, surrounded by private security, and therefore untouchable. There was no way for A to find out anything. I was stuck.

So I tried looking at it from a different angle. I thought: what about B, who used to have a close personal relationship with C? Is there any reason they couldn't find out the terrible truth about C? And what if they rushed to a phone to tell A the news, then the call got suddenly cut-off...as if someone had got to them before they could fully warn A? And then what if...

And suddenly you're coming up with ideas.

So, really, there is no such thing as Writer's Block. Procrastination, sure, we all get that. But block? Doesn't exist. 

Final Words on Ulysses (the writing software)

Pretty much, it's great.

I'll have to admit, I really, really wasn't hot on it at first. It takes time to work out its kinks and its features. I discovered many of these in the process of using it. On first contact, it seems confusing and limited. I felt as if I were restricted by unmovable, unnameable notes panels. Markdown threw me. If I wanted to edit styles, I had to dig into HTML-like text-files I felt sure would send most people unused to such things running (I'm used to such things, but that doesn't mean I want to have to deal with things like that).

Then, as I explored further, I slowly discovered that I could undock my notes, and a great deal more, and I got things set up more or less the same way I have them in Scrivener. It helps a lot that, like Scrivener, the people behind Ulysses are very quick to respond to questions (in my case, usually via Twitter). I discovered I could have non-printing in-line notes (like Scrivener) and add annotations to individual words, sentences or paragraphs (similar to something you used to get in an earlier version of Scrivener that got pushed out).

I've been using it exclusively now for about a month and if you're thinking of trying it, you definitely should: there's a demo version available for the desktop or laptop with a ten-hour limit which should be time enough to at least explore it a little.

That's not to say I haven't found niggles. I've found several, but I could say much the same about Scrivener. Don't get me wrong - I highly recommend Scrivener as well: but where a few months back I would have said Scrivener was comfortably ahead of the pack, I'd now say Ulysses is more or less neck-and-neck with Scrivener.

There are conditions to that statement, however. Ulysses is Mac only; Scrivener is available on Mac, PC and Linux. Scrivener does not have an iPad app yet, and even though there's been a lot of talk about one forthcoming - I still hold out hope for November for a possible release date - there's no sign of it yet. Ulysses has an iPad app that integrates perfectly with iCloud and syncs smoothly and automatically (I've read elsewhere that hasn't been the case for some people, but so far I've had no problems).

If you have a PC or a computer running some flavour of Linux, Scrivener is by far and away your best possible choice.

If you have a Mac, it's down to personal preference between Scrivener and Ulysses: Scrivener has a huge range of features which mean it can be used for tasks far beyond simple novel writing. Ulysses is much more bare-bones on the surface, but with a great deal of hidden muscle. Some people find Scrivener too complicated (although I must admit I don't understand why); they might have a better time with Ulysses.

If you have a Mac and an iPad, and want to write on the iPad and sync it with the desktop or Macbook, Ulysses is an absolute must-have.

Scrivener is powerful, but utilitarian: Ulysses is more limited, but beautiful to look at and work with.

In the past month and a half, I've written two lengthy outlines for two novels, each document about ten thousand words in length, and all in Ulysses. The real test, of course, is what happens when I write a novel.

And the only way to find out how Ulysses handles that is to do it. 

Ulysses (yes, again)

Okay, so maybe the last couple of times I got talking about Ulysses I was being a bit grumpy. I got some editing work in since then and thought screw it, and bought the desktop version of the app as well. And you know what? I quite like it. It seems a bit minimalist compared to Scrivener, but it looks nice and - like I think I mentioned last time - it's got an attractive layout that somehow prompts me to write. Is it better than Scrivener? Hell, no. But it's close, and if Scrivener hadn't been invented I'd have probably thought Ulysses was pretty great. But someone did invent Scrivener.

The thing that puts people off Scrivener - and draws them towards Ulysses - is the latter's simplicity. God knows I've known enough writers who seem to get severe techno-fear when it comes to computers that the appeal of something like Ulysses is clear.

Now that I have the desktop as well as the iPad version, Ulysses turns out to sync really nicely between the two machines. In fact, the iPad version only really comes into its own when used together with the desktop version. On its own, Ulysses for iPad is perfectly acceptable, but with a certain small degree of hassle that means it doesn't entirely get out of your way as you write. But these are minor concerns, and it's otherwise a genuine pleasure to use.

And that's what for many people gives Ulysses the greatest advantage over Scrivener at the moment: you can use it on the iPad.

Like many, I'm sure, I've discovered that an iPad paired with a bluetooth keyboard makes for a much better laptop than most actual laptops. It turns out that you can use an iPad for work, if the tools are good enough: and Ulysses is more than good enough. If you wanted to write on the iPad, you really, really couldn't do better than Ulysses.

However, I do still have a strong sense of loyalty towards Scrivener, having used it to write almost all of my books apart from the first two (and how the hell did I manage that?), and I really want them to get out an iPad version of their software and blow everyone else out of the water. And when it comes, I'm sure they will.

In the meantime, I'm gradually getting used to Ulysses odd-to-me quirks like the insistence on markdown text. I like that I can drag documents into Ulysses for OS X and boom, it's transformed into markdown; I'm using it at the moment both for working on outlines for future potential books and the aforementioned editing work. I was a bit annoyed at first by a fairly constricted notes panel (I write a lot of notes) until I realised they could be undocked. Even so, I'd like to be at least able to name the bloody notes, so when I look to the right of the screen I can find what I'm looking for immediately instead of having to scroll up and down for ages until I finally find the specific note or detail I'm looking for.

It's little things like that which keep Scrivener just ahead in the race. For some, its flexibility is a bug. It seems too complex. For me, that's what works about it. I don't use that many of Scrivener's features, but I don't notice them at the same time. If I one day need them, I can find them fairly easily.  Scrivener is flexible enough you can figure out what you want to do, and how you want to do it, and do it that way - as I demonstrated in the previous post. It's a serious working tool for novelists, for people working on theses, or on all kinds of documents. Ulysses is...more like Scrivener Lite, let's say.

Here's the best metaphor I can find for Scrivener's utility: it lets you see past the trees to the whole wood.

When you're writing, and you're deep in the guts of a book, you feel like you can't see the forest for the trees, right? You're there in the middle, and you can see the immediate detail, but getting a mental grasp on the whole picture can be difficult. But with Scrivener, with its multitude of ways of displaying information, you can in fact get very close to seeing everything at once. You can surround your primary text with all kinds of ancillary windows containing synopses, paragraph-specific detail, other chapters, notes, and so forth. You can move everything around until it's displayed in a way that suits you. Can you do that with Ulysses? A little, but not nearly so much as I'd prefer.

But it does look terribly pretty. And I wanted to be able to work on the iPad as well: my laptop, with its buggered-up keyboard, now sits on a Roost stand and I type on a bluetooth external. That makes my iPad my true laptop, for now. I still don't know if I'd be able to write a whole book in Ulysses, because I still have a sneaking suspicion once a project got complex enough I'd have to go back to Scrivener to finish it. But we'll see. 

Ulysses on the iPad versus Scrivener on the Macbook

I read a rumour somewhere online that the much hoped for Scrivener iPad application might still be a while away, and possibly not this year, as many were hoping. Well, shit happens, even to the best of us, assuming this is true: even so, Scrivener remains by far and away the best of the writing tools out there for people like me, by a very long mile.

But increasingly people want to write on tablets like the iPad, and in that respect Scrivener are playing catch-up with everyone else at the moment. I suspect there's a huge market out there for an iPad app of Scrivener, and a lot of people aren't going to think about the cost whatsoever once it does finally appear. 

I wrote recently about other apps like Ulysses and Storify, and found them wanting, for various reasons. I'd been holding off buying anything else until Scrivener arrived on the iPad, but I finally gave in and decided to get the iPad version of Ulysses, which I've previously tried on a limited trial basis on my Macbook.

To my surprise, the markdown aspect didn't bother me nearly as much has it had the first time around, and in fact I'm getting used to it. The app works beautifully - in most respects. It's all very swishy and pretty, and it makes me want to write, which is a definite plus.

Previously I'd been syncing Scrivener on my Macbook with another app called Textilus on my iPad, which has the advantage of being very cheap. But it, alas, has serious problems. Every time I plug in an external keyboard while using Textilus, half the text disappears precisely as if it's hidden behind the onscreen keyboard...except the onscreen keyboard isn't visible either. A recent attempt to use Textilus to work on some Scrivener documents was painful and distracting enough for me to think fuck it, and pay the money for Ulysses for iPad. 

I can see why people like it. I can see the advantages of the app, in that the files it works on are purely text files. There's not a hint of a proprietary format, which means your text files aren't going to be inaccessible twenty years down the line. 

But here's the problem(s).

The biggie is iCloud syncing. I cannot begin to express how completely the app's ability to sync with iCloud sucks. It's ridiculously bad. They've just introduced a new backup feature, but that only functions locally: if you lose or break your iPad, you're pretty much screwed when it comes to accessing those backups. I've just wasted the better part of forty-eight hours trying to get the damn app to sync with anything, and it just. Won't. Work. 

There is a way to save your information, however, but it means accessing various submenus. It's hardly the seamless, always-on background Dropbox syncing I'm used to with Scrivener. Because Ulysses...doesn't work with Dropbox. 

Go figure. 

But, when you're a writer like me, you like to try new things, because it varies up the workflow. And I do really like writing on the iPad, I find, even when my Macbook is right next to me. As I said in the blog recently, the more I muck about with my iPad air, the more I'm impressed by it as a piece of hardware, even if certain functions such as iCloud are ridiculously bad. I can't entirely blame Ulysses: the true blame, I suspect, is with Apple's bungled cloud software. But even so, for the kind of money Ulysses costs, you really expect better. 

If one thing puts Scrivener far, far ahead of its rivals, it's in multitasking.

This is what Scrivener looks like when I'm working on a book, most usually, as above, in fullscreen mode. On the left is the current draft of whichever book I'm working on. On the right and on top of everything else is a "quick look" window: this is a movable, resizable text window containing documents from elsewhere in a Scrivener "project". It can be anything: another chapter, other notes, whatever. I can also open up additional information such as comments, footnotes, synopsis and so forth in a little window at the bottom. 

Behind that, is an illustration of a bridge (some of the action in Extinction Game took place near a bridge, and I used this for reference). And behind that is the scratch pad. 

The scratch pad is pretty much what it sounds like - an in-app notepad in which I can create multiple documents saved separately from a book draft. This is where I just blast down anything that comes into my head as I work out the mechanics of a scene, or - more often - just cram down ideas where I can see them. From this same window, I can also launch a synopsis for a particular chapter or book, or keywords, or external web references, and more. One thing I really like about Scratch Pad is it always remains on top. Even if I switch to a Chrome or Safari, it's still there, which means I can take quick notes without having to switch back to the full application. Which is amazing.

In the main text window, some text is surrounded by a soft-edged bubble. This is an annotation - an in-line note that won't appear when I compile or print the document. Similarly, a sharp-edged box lower down shows where a comment has been placed, and displayed on the right. 

Everything you see in the above example can be moved around or resized. I can change the background colour. I can change the text colour. I can move windows around. I can move the current draft to the middle, or the right, make it narrower or wider. 

If I opt out of fullscreen view, even more ways of displaying information become available. There is, in other words, a wealth of strategies to place the information I need, right now, where I can see it all at once. It's as close as you can get as a writer to seeing both the wood and the trees, all at the same time.

Not to mention that the whole thing backs up seamlessly. automatically and constantly to Dropbox without having to think about it (I also have a paid CrashPlan account for the whole hard drive - never rely on just one method of saving an important document). 

This is an awesome level of functionality. I get why people might be daunted by it. Pro tip: you don't need to use all this. You can just use it on a very simple level. Nobody's bending your arm and saying you must use any of this. God knows, I didn't at first: but over time, I tried things out, or got bored enough to play around with settings, and gradually discovered there were many, many things I could do to improve my ability to both write and to clearly understand the context of what I was writing within the larger work. 

Now, I don't know what I'd do without it. 

So: Ulysses. It looks great. The markdown threw me at first, but now I actually kind of like it. But when people talk about keeping an app simple, so you can "just focus on the writing", that makes the mistake of assuming that writing is a process that travels directly to the screen, from the brain, via the fingers. 

Wrong. It's an accumulation of data, both invented and actual, merged together into a narrative. That data can come from reference works, from web pages, from Wikipedia, and sometimes, as above, you need to be able to see it all in front of you so you can work out the connection...and quickly write notes without having to switch to some other app and risk forgetting that carefully linked-together daisy chain of plot logic hanging on in your brain by its fingertips. If you're not used to writing the way I do, the above might look messy. It's not. It's perfectly aligned to my particular way of writing, and if your way is different, you can change it to suit. 

I've played around with Ulysses on the iPad for long enough now to actually find it quietly impressive, despite my reservations. But for really serious, hard-grinding novel-writing, Scrivener is by far still the best of the pack. I could see myself writing at least part of a book in Ulysses, but eventually I'd get to the point where I'd think hey, where is that web link? and wouldn't it be easier to see what happened in chapters two and three that explain why chapter four is happening, all at once on the screen? and why do I have to keep changing apps to check out that visual reference?

But for now, Ulysses at least makes a nice change. I can at least put together outlines in it on the iPad, and it feels nice to type in. Even if it can't sync for shit. But for doing serious writing, to a contract with a deadline? Not so sure about that. 

In praise of my Ipad

I'm back. I need your ironic glasses, your skinny jeans and your...fixie.

*Checks time machine chronometer, realises twenty-five years too late to terminate Sarah Connor, gets back in time machine, disappears*

Sorry.

I'm back! I mean, I finished a major redraft of the sequel to Extinction Game, which will be out some time next year. I've basically been welded to an office chair for the past couple of months and haven't really seen much of the outside world, and...

Oh yeah. My iPad. I can't remember when I bought it exactly. Just over a year ago? Something like that.

I think there's a kind of growing-in process with an iPad. You're not sure if you actually need one, but you like the idea of getting one. Because, you know, Star Trek. In Star Trek, everyone had some wizzy little tablet-looking prop (that looks unbearably clunky in retrospect) and whenever you tried one you thought hey, this is pretty cool, then checked the price tab and thought...maybe next year.

But things tend to be a little cheaper in Taiwan, so it made sense to get one while I had the cash. So I did. And I've talked about it before. But it's gone from being kind of cool, but do I really need it? to downright indispensable.

In the morning, it's my newspaper. I check Facebook, not just to see what friends and other writers are up to, but to check various newsfeeds plugged into the service. I read the Guardian, a couple of online magazines. I could use my laptop, but I don't want to get milk and coffee all over it. I could use a phone, but who the hell wants to eat one-handed?

In the afternoon, it sits next to the Macbook. I use it a lot for checking online resources because, frankly, it's faster than the Macbook. It has a flash memory, an attribute it shares, so far as I understand, with the current iteration of the Macbook Air, which Emma has. And that's a whizzy little beast itself. That flash memory means what I want to get just pops up. Often, I don't need to even type anything: I just tell it to open Google, then use the voice-activated search which works really terrifyingly well.

It's also my TV a lot of the time. I've been using Netflix and BBC using a VPN service, and it's terrific. I watch when I'm having my lunch, or stick it on top of the fridge to catch the UK news when I'm doing the dishes.

It's a games machine and a comic reader. Granted, I don't play that many games any more, and I don't read that many comics primarily because of the cost and because I won't pay serious money for anything with DRM on it, but still. I have become a touch immersed in Minecraft: Pocket Edition, and I'm still working through a bunch of graphic novels I got from HumbleBundle.com.  They look great on my iPad.

And it's fast. Fast. It's wonderful using a machine that responds more or less instantly while my Macbook grinds its way noisily through a process, and I am forced to watch that little spinning blue ball until it finally does what I damn well want it to.

I even use it to work on, most usually with a bluetooth keyboard. I could use my laptop, sure, but I killed one of the keys through sheer overtyping the last couple of years, and the Macbook now lives, more or less permanently, on top of a Rooster stand, and I now type using the same Mac bluetooth keyboard I use with the iPad. Now, if I want to move about, or even go outside, I have the iPad to work on.

And that, interestingly enough, is where the iPad - or indeed many tablet computers, by their very nature - are possibly superior to the laptop as we currently know it. The things that go the most wrong with laptops in my experience are either the keyboard, the trackpad, or both. Those, after all, are a person's primary points of contact with a computer of any type, and hence are the ones most likely to be affected by wear and tear...at least, they are if you're a busy working writer.

And because the average laptop, whether Mac or any other flavour, is a fully integrated device, you can't easily swap one part for another the way you can with a desktop. With a desktop, all you need to do with regards to a faulty keyboard, mouse or screen is buy a new one.

To me, ultimately, tablet/laptop hybrids are the way to go in the future, for economic reasons as much as anything else. By separating the tablet from the trackpad and/or keyboard, you create the possibility of replacing parts that are relatively cheap to replace. I can't do that with my Macbook. I can with my iPad. Having a separate or detachable keyboard creates an extra layer of versatility that a fully integrated device lacks.

Most recently, because of the inherent vulnerability of the keyboard and trackpad on integrated machines, I've been considering that in the nearish future instead of using a Macbook to work on, as I have for a few years now, I might switch back to a Mac Mini with separate monitor, keyboard and trackpad, but also have an iPad with a good quality keyboard and/or cover for when I want to be on the move.

In fact, the primary reason I haven't already done that is because you can't get Scrivener on the iPad. Yet. But it will be released sometime this year: the iPad version is currently undergoing testing and the minute - the second - it becomes available on the iPad, I'm buying it. And when it does become available, the iPad, as much as a good laptop, stands a very good chance of becoming indispensable as well for a good many writers.