Computers

iPad In My Hands

Last week, my iPad finally arrived. Yes, I’m a tad late to the party. But that doesn’t really matter. All in all, while I think it’s a game changer in many ways, and I love it, I do have some gripes, but the gripes mostly have to do with the way eBooks and other content is sold.

What I love about going to the bookstore is the way it’s laid out. You can walk in, see your bestsellers up front, then skip them and move into the category of your choosing. Most online bookstores seem to mimic this behavior to a degree. However, where they fall down is in the way you can actually browse a category.

In a regular book store, authors books are organized into two sections (often) – new books, and the rest, and those are alphabetical, generally. The books sit there, face out or spine out, right next to books by the same author, or right next to an author you may never have heard of. It’s EASY to find new authors (as long as their books are on the shelves) that are somewhat like what you’ve read (in the same basic category) but that are different, too.

In online book stores, it’s pretty damned difficult to find stuff from an author you’ve never heard of that isn’t a bestseller. On Amazon, you only get to see 12 titles per page, which means you have to click a lot to see more than a few books, where in a real book store, you can run buy a hundred books by taking a couple steps. In most online book stores, either I’m blind, or there is no easy way to see a list of authors in a particular category. I don’t know about you, but there are some authors I forget about unless I see their name. If they’re mid list authors, and I have to click 20 times to maybe see their latest book, I may never think about books in their back catalog.

The app store on the iPad has the same issue. There’s not an easy way to see apps that aren’t new or a best seller. In games (where I buy lots of stuff), the iPad interface lumps them all together – there’s no category options like strategy or rpg like there is on the iPhone/iPod app store. I’ll buy fewer games because I can’t find the stuff I want.

Basically, I just want ways to browse the back catalog that aren’t tedious, and that jog my memory about authors that I like, but don’t necessarily think about all the time.

Uncategorized

Piece By Piece

There’s a new song in the playlist, Piece By Piece, that I wrote and recorded today, while suffering from a mild headache and a croaky, phlegm filled throat. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sing it when I get better, but I don’t think that really matters.

Computers, Software, StoryBox

StoryBox 0.0.52

I just uploaded StoryBox 0.0.52, after much delay. It’s got some better import features (specifically, importing to wherever you want to in a document), and some other bug fixes.

I apologize for it taking so long, especially after the initial flurry of activity. I don’t have a final release date. I have a list of things I want to get fixed before I call it done.

Now, just in case you don’t know, my livelihood comes from making games, and while StoryBox is important to me and my future plans, it doesn’t quite pay the bills yet, and bills have to be paid, so game development sometimes has to take precedence, which is entirely what has happened. And it will have precedence, unfortunately, in the near future. If you see posts about other things that I’m doing, specifically related to a particular game I’m working on (Infinite Suns), don’t worry that I have forgotten StoryBox. I haven’t. They both have to get finished this year, along with all the other work I have to do (like finding time to work on a novel, somehow).

Writing

Expanding My Horizons

2 Comments

I’ve spent the majority of my reading time, nearly all of my life, reading Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. I love the adventure and the speculation and possibilities that are inherent in those genres.

Reading outside those genres has happened occasionally, but never consistently. I’ve read Stephen King, though most of his works are essentially fantasy. I’ve read books by F&SF authors who dabble outside their original genre (Stephen R. Donaldson, Bradley Denton and a couple others). And then I’ve read the occasional book suggested by some other media outlet. A radio interview with Joe Gores got me to read a couple of his mystery novels. A recent article on James Patterson caused me to look at his books on the shelf of the bookstore recently, which resulted in my purchase of “When The Wind Blows” (Of course, it treads on SF territory) and the consequent finishing of that novel in a day.

I’m going to make a commitment to myself that at least one in every three books I read this year (and for the foreseeable future) will be something from outside my comfort zone of the F&SF genres. I’m going to try to sample all sorts of stories that I haven’t read, in the hopes that it will expand my vision of what’s possible to do with a story.
After all, I just read a book where I doubt any of the chapters was longer than four pages. I flew through the book and it was impossible, almost, to put down. 416 pages and 127 chapters. It’s not something I’ve seen before, but it was certainly effective. What other techniques are out there that I’m not aware of because my reading has been so insular?