So I have a new phone. It’s not the one I had a couple of months ago–that one was just on loan. This phone is brand-new and 100% mine. (And yes, its name is still Jono. Because I ship it. #nerdalert)

Anyway, it’s taken me a while to fully accept the possibilities this fancy new phone has to offer. By this, of course, I mean that I finally downloaded Wordfeud this week, which means that I’m engaged in furious games with my mother, sister, and brother-in-law, in both English and Dutch.

It’s freakin’ addictive.

And now I’ve gone and downloaded Words With Friends as well, because I’ve noticed people on Twitter talking about it, which means I must get in on that.

Between this and the recent arrival of Bioshock 2, my productivity is in no way impaired. Nope. Nuh-uh. What do you think of me, people?

I’ve been semi-obsessed with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic for a while now THANKS TO A CERTAIN SOMEONE, so when I saw this pony creator on Beth Revis’s blog, I didn’t have much choice but to join in.

So, yeah, here’s three of the main characters of my current WIP, BLINK:

I gave her a snowflake as a cutie mark partially because she’s speshul the place her family is from is a pretty darned cold place; the snowflake signifies home. It’s also fragile but hardy, matching Amara to a T. She gets neither a horn nor wings; she’s trapped where she is. The pose is because she’s trying to break free anyway.

Nolan gets wings and a planet as a cutie mark, signifying how he moves between worlds. He’s also troubled and searching for himself, hence the pose. With some fiddling, I managed to alter his hind leg enough to make it look like his foot has been amputated (though it’s the wrong leg and I’m too lazy to flip the picture right now).

Cilla gets a crown, a horn, and fancy bracelets, because she’s the freaking princess. Duh.

Why is she smiling? Because she looks adorable that way, is why.

… Also Amara and Nolan threatened to make this a depressed!pony blog, which is just wrong. Smiling pony! Happy pony! Yay ponies!

(Uh, not that Amara and Nolan don’t have reasons to be depressed. BRB, need to write and pile on the hurt some more.)

So, one of the reasons I never read many ebooks was because — how shall I put this — my ereader sucks like a [insert appropriate simile of your choice here].

Since then, however, I gained an Android phone. An Android phone that can run FBReader. Which is just — aside from the e-ink thing, it’s so much better on every front. And given that we’re having the wettest summer on record right now, I’m not spending a lot of time outside anyway, so I don’t even mind the lack of e-ink. It makes it much easier to read in bed without needing the light on and drawing mosquitos.

So, anyway, my most significant hurdle to adopting ebooks has melted away, so I figured I’d take a look at the digital versions of some of the books on my wishlist.

… and I realize I’m stuck buying paper for the foreseeable future.

Reason number 1: I’m not in the US. Most major publishers can’t sell ebooks here due to territory licensing. I understand the logic behind this. The end result is still that I can’t buy the damn ebook. (This is also a common reason for piracy, and one of the reasons I still have a hard time denouncing the practice.)

Solution? With the internet, territories and rights are becoming extremely fuzzy. I think some sort of solution here should be possible, especially given how often rights end up not selling to certain territories anyway. There’s a potential market there and no one’s tapping it. And what of territories where translation rights sell to, and I wanted an English version instead of a Dutch one?

I also don’t quite get the difference between paper and digital in this case. If someone knows the answer to this, I’d really appreciate it. How come I can import paper books with absolutely zero hassle — shipping is even free in some cases — but ebooks are a problem?

Reason number 2: Pricing. I also understand the logic for major publishers pricing ebooks the way they do — people still need to get paid. I fully support this.  That doesn’t change the fact that when the ebook is pricier than a paperback, I’m not touching it with a ten-foot pole.

I buy most of my books on The Book Depository. Shipping is slow but free, and the prices can’t be beat. Paperback books here are cheaper than their ebook versions most of the time — and in cases where they aren’t, they’re still roughly the same price.

Solution? Yes, editors, artists, marketing, etc. need to be paid for their time — but that’s the same with paper books, so I’m not sure that justifies ebooks being pricier.

Can’t we just say “ebooks are the price of the cheapest paper version minus X percent” or something along those lines? Anywhere between 10% and 30% seems reasonable to me. If those prices drop only when the paper prices drop, they’re unlikely to cut into those sales too much, which is one commonly cited concern.

I know these complaints aren’t new, but they’re real. I may understand the reasoning, but the end result is still that I’m not adopting ebooks when I’m completely open to the notion. I’ve read a lot of posts explaining the reasons behind a certain problem, and there’s often an implicit “so shut up and deal with it” involved instead of hunting for a solution.

I’m sure there’s tons of flaws in my logic, so please, feel free to pick them apart. This is mostly a post borne of frustration, anyway.

Since I’m in Seattle from June 17th to July 31st to attend Clarion West, I’ve written a number of blog posts beforehand to post while I’m gone. I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments, but might take a while to respond.

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In the same vein as last week’s Twitter Tips, I present to you: Blog/Website Tips. Hopefully these will be helpful!

• Text formatting: Try to do all of this through CSS. That is, don’t format the color and size of your text for your individual blog posts. That kind of formatting shows up even in people’s RSS readers. You don’t want that. A lot of people read RSS feeds exactly because they can read the posts formatting-free: Why force a bigger, smaller, yellow, red, Verdana or Times New Roman blog post on them if that isn’t what they want?

  On a couple of occasions, I’ve actually had people looking over my shoulders while I was catching up on Google Reader and asking me, “Why is that text so huge?” What looks good on your website might not look good in a different environment.

• Keep the Flash widgets to a minimum. (By which I mean zero. Pet peeve alert!) There are several reasons for this: They’re often bulky. They take a while to load, slowing down people’s browsers. They often don’t quite match your blog’s layout, which makes them stand out in a bad way. They aren’t visible on every platform — I think the iPhone/iPad still can’t handle Flash. A lot of people have Flash disabled to avoid ads, so if you have important information in there, they’ll miss it completely.

  Also, Flash widgets often move, which is very distracting to the eye. People like me, who struggle balancing input and have a very distractable brain, often need to disable Flash entirely or cover parts of their screen with one hand so they can focus on reading your actual blog. I truly cannot read with moving things in the screen.

  Flash widgets are also beyond useless to people with vision problems. They won’t resize the way regular text does, and screen readers can’t do anything with them.

• On a similar accessibility/disability related note: Images.

  If your images contain important information — say, a book cover that links to a dedicated page about the book, or a button that says ‘NEXT PAGE’ — you’ll want to use ALT text. That way people using screen readers (such as blind people) can still navigate your website.

  In general, avoid images where you can simply use text. Yes, even if that means you won’t be able to use that pretty swirly font for your book’s blurb. You want people to actually be able to read your content, don’t you? Try to keep the text-as-images restricted to maybe a blog header with your name or the blog’s title (and put that same information in the ALT text).

• Vlogs. I have a separate post on this that’ll go up next week, but in short: If you’re going to vlog instead of blog, please transcribe the video to make it more accessible.
• Make sure your name is in either the title or the URL of your blog (preferably the latter, or both). Many recent browsers have the option of searching through your history based on just a few letters. Say your name is Paige Guthrie but I don’t remember your blog title/URL — I’ll just need to type ‘Paige’ into my browser for it to pop up. But if your blog URL is thisisastupidlylongurlnoreally.blogspot.com and your title is ~*COUNTRY MOUSE*~ I won’t find anything.

  In addition, I’ve been linked to blogs on occasion and it took me ten minutes to figure out who was behind the dang thing. Having your name that prominent helps me figure it out.

• Contrast the text with the background. Light grey text on a white background will make people squint. Blue text on a black background… same thing. In general, try to keep brightly colored text to a minimum. Dim the colors if you must. Dark/light/faded colors are much easier to read than brighter ones.
• Similarly: Text on top of images/patterned backgrounds is incredibly hard to read. Keep the text on solid color backgrounds to keep people’s eyes from going wonky.
• Avoid the never-ending sidebar. Having a few links or pictures in there, a blog archive, a bio — all that is fine. Heck, I do it. But if your links exceed, say, thirty? If you have seven different categories of links? If you put in a cover and blurb for every single one of your books? Reviews? A dozen links to where you can buy the books? A list of foreign publishers? Funny images? Blog awards? Giant buttons to your social networking sites?

  Then you might want to consider cutting things down a little and moving some of that info to separate pages. Those who are interested will be able to easily find what they’re looking for; those who aren’t interested won’t be distracted by the onslaught of information while they’re scrolling, not to mention the often-dubious graphics. You want to keep things as clean and overseeable as possible.

• Avoid the giant banner image. A lot of people will check out your blog on their phone, tablet, or netbook — ie. on a small screen. You don’t want to take up all that space and force people to scroll down to see even the header of your most recent post.
• Minimize the number of pages that repeat information. Otherwise, if that information needs updating, you’re likely to miss a page and that leaves your blog/site outdated.
• Try to use tags/labels consistently. I love love love the tags feature, and even I don’t do it right all the time, so I’m sort of a hypocrite for saying this, but… Try your best. Your readers will love you. Having a different tag for every post might be witty, but it’s also next to useless when people actually want to find other blog posts with that awesome writing advice, or WIP Wednesday, or news on foreign sales, etc.

Let me know in the comments if you have any additions. I’d be delighted to hear them!

Since I’m in Seattle from June 17th to July 31st to attend Clarion West, I’ve written a number of blog posts beforehand to post while I’m gone. I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments, but might take a while to respond.

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A lot of posts on Twitter seem fairly 101 — aimed at new users instead of more established ones. Yet, there are a couple of things I see even established users doing that I’d urge them to reconsider. Here’s a not-so-brief run-down.

ReTweeting

• When RTing, go as close to the source as possible. Seeing this:

  “RT @scott RT @jean RT @piotr [insert witty Tweet here] (via @monet)”

  … makes me wonder who actually wrote the original witty Tweet, and why I’m supposed to care who else RTed it. Usually, I suggest only RTing an RT when someone has added actual content.

• I have no strong opinion on the old-skool vs. new-skool RT debate. I usually stick to the “old-skool for when I have something to say, new-skool for when I’m feeling lazy” method.

  HOWEVER.

  When RTing old-skool, please make it abundantly clear which content is yours. I see this kind of thing frighteningly often:

  “RT @roberto Check out these insights on ebooks! http://www.totallyoriginalinsightsonebooks.com WOW really useful!”

  … wherein the last few words were added by the RT-er.

  Don’t do this. Ever. Some people try to clarify things by adding their own comments in brackets or using an arrow <– to point at the original Tweet, but those are only marginally less confusing. Leave the original Tweet alone and add your own comments at the start of the Tweet, like so:

  “WOW really useful! RT @roberto Check out these insights on ebooks! http://www.totallyoriginalinsightsonebooks.com”

• Please stop RTing uninteresting things. I don’t mean that you should stop RTing links to the ebook revolution — I mean that you should stop RTing these sorts of things:

  “Oh YUM!! RT @kitty Having bagels for lunch ”

  “WAY TO GO! RT @jono I just hit 40k on my manuscript!”

  “You can do it! C’mon! RT @warren The words are coming really slowly today…”

  The truth is, if we cared about Kitty’s lunch, Jono’s manuscript, or Warren’s writer’s block, we’d be following them. There’s no need to broadcast your encouragement to the entire world. Keep these comments as replies.

Linking

• When linking, make sure to include http:// before the URL. Otherwise it won’t — er — link, and you’re forcing people to copy & paste it into their address bar. You’re losing out on a lot of potential readers that way. Even if you’re running low on characters, I’d suggest cutting some other words instead of the http://
• When linking to your recent blog post, make sure to use the URL of your actual post, not the main blog page. That is, use this:

  http://www.corinneduyvis.net/2011/06/twitter-tips

  instead of:

  http://www.corinneduyvis.net/blog

  People might click on the link days or weeks later, when you already have a new blog post up. That forces them to scroll down your blog to the one you were talking about. A lot of people will just click away out of frustration. Belated clicking happens more often than you’d think. Someone might be seeing a recent RT of your blog post announcement; someone might be catching up on their feed; someone might be tracing a days-old conversation back to your original Tweet; someone might be checking out your Twitter page and history; someone might love your post so much that they want to add the Tweet to their favorites to check it out again later… Make sure your link stands the test of time.

  Another reason: Sending readers straight to the page allows them to immediately read the comments and add their own. If they’re interested in reading the rest of your blog, trust me, they’ll know where to find it.

• Avoid linking to Facebook. Not everyone is on Facebook. There’s nothing more irritating than clicking a link and seeing a log-in page you can’t do anything with.

Replying

• When replying, use the actual reply button. These are usually easy to find when you use a Twitter client. To find it on the Twitter website itself, hover your cursor over the Tweet:

  

  This will usually be a lot faster than typing the user’s name out yourself. Sometimes, it might be extra effort to hunt down the Tweet you wanted to reply to — but even then I’d recommend doing it.

  For one, it cuts down on misspellings. As someone whose name is misspelled a lot (One R, two Ns, people! Duyvis with a U!), I’ve missed Tweets directed at me because people misspelled my username and it didn’t show up on my @Mentions page as a result.

  For another, it allows people to trace the conversation. When you reply to something using the Reply button, a little speech bubble will appear with your Tweet, indicating there’s a conversation trail to follow. Clicking the Tweet reveals that conversation trail in the pane:

  

  Several Twitter clients allow you to do a similar thing.

  Allowing people to track your conversations stops confusion. If someone’s just had a busy day Tweeting and your response consists of, “ZOMG, awesome!” they won’t know if you responded to their announcement of their fancypants new agent or that kitty-with-monocles photo they posted… unless they can see which Tweet yours was in response to.

• Please avoid doing these sorts of things:

  “GOOD MORNING @hank!”

  Remember — everyone who’s following you will see this Tweet, not just Hank. And no one who’s following you cares. Except for Hank. Maybe. But he’ll see it anyway. Why not just send it directly to him?

Misc

• You know how you can add a link to your website on Twitter? Don’t put a link to your Twitter account there. It’s spectacularly unnecessary.
• Similarly, you have a separate field for ‘Location’, so you don’t have to use up any of the 160 characters in your profile to tell people where you live.
• #hashtags and @usernames can’t contain any special characters. Inserting one will break it up. This is irritating, because it means hashtags #cantpunctuateright, but also handy — it means that when I talk about @dani’s demon bear, I don’t have to put a space between @dani and the apostrophe, like I see a lot of people doing out of fear that Twitter will include the apostrophe as part of the username. Likewise, if you end a sentence on a name or hashtag, you don’t need a space before the full stop.



Any additions? Thoughts?

Well.

That took like, forever.

102274/ 102274 words. 100% done!

Damn straight!

Stats: I started the book on April 6th, setting a semi-arbitrary deadline of May 15th, expecting the book to end up around 75k. I went a couple of days over deadline, but given the extra 25k+, I guess I can forgive myself.

You guys, you have no idea what a pain this book was to write. And you have no idea how utterly, utterly relieved I am to be done with it.

Or how freaking proud I am that I managed to push through, even when it got more difficult than any rough draft so far. This is my first time setting a real deadline for myself and sorta-kinda succeeding.

… I feel like a badass. I need to gloat for a bit.

Anyway! Here’s a snippet! Featuring a ~mystery someone~ and our intrepid hero.

“Can I get up from this chair or will you stab me if I try?”

“Stab you. Definitely.” My hand clenched around the knife.

I’d post something longer, but just like last week, it’s really hard to find something that makes sense with little context and isn’t too spoilery. To make up for it, here’s a Wordle of the entire manuscript.

It tells me I really need to do a search for “like” and “just” when revisions come.

Er, if they come. There’s no point in revising this book until book one sells. (I was probably a little premature in writing it in the first place. Whatever! I’m prepared now! *flexes muscles*)

Anyway, I’m going to enjoy a couple of glorious days off, and then start on my preparations for Clarion West. They include beta reading, sleeping, video games, reading instructor’s works, reading for fun, hopefully a combination of those two, packing, and making a list of approximately five million story ideas.

And did I mention sleeping?

In short: Pixel Qi is a company that produces fancy screens that are just as visible in direct sunlight as they are inside (albeit with less colors). Right now they’re only available on select tablets, or as separate DIY 10.1″ screens to build into your netbook.

Which I did the other week. And I am not regretting it. I was thoroughly sick of spending so much of my summers inside; now that I have a netbook with a battery that’ll last me 6-10 hours easily, and lets me work in the sun without a hitch, I expect to be one tan writer soon.

If you’re curious, or considering getting one for yourself, here’s some picspam/videospam to show off my shiny new toy.

These are “before” pictures of the screen. The actual visibility is somewhere between these two. As you can see, it’s doable outside, but not great.

And this is with the new Pixel Qi screen — a still of a YouTube video and the start of my current WIP.

The contrast? Is awesome. FACT.

I’m actually considering working with sunglasses on because of how brightly the sun reflects off the bezel.

The neat thing about the Pixel Qi screen is that it works in all lighting conditions. Inside, it’s like an LCD screen; outside in the shade, it’s just as bright. As you can see up there, it’s similar to an e-ink screen when in direct sunlight. As an added bonus, you can turn off the screen backlighting when you’re working in the sun, since there’s plenty of light to work with. The difference is absolutely minimal, but it saves on battery power.

With the help of my lovely assistant, I made a video to show what I mean. The netbook starts off in the sunlight with with the backlight deactivated; I turn on the backlight, walk from the sun into the shade and into the house, then turn off the backlight and walk back outside.

The sun’s reflection on the screen is actually minimal; it only showed up on the camera. I didn’t notice it in real life at all.

So I am a bouncy, bouncy person these days. If you’re looking into getting one of these for yourself, feel free to ask questions. Or, you know. Just gawk at the pretty.

Shiny thing number one: It’s my birthday!

Does anyone remember what birthdays are supposed to feel like? No? Me neither.

Shiny thing number two: My Pixel Qi screen finally arrived. Unfortunately I don’t have screwdrivers small enough to take out my current netbook screen, so I’m foiled in my attempts to install it straightaway. Theoretically, The Dad will be coming to the rescue when I meet him tonight. If all goes well, I’ll spam you guys with pictures soon enough. I really think this is a fabulous tool for anyone who spends significant amounts of time at the computer.

Which is, you know, all of us writer types.

Shiny thing number three: I actually received this a while ago, but I haven’t found a good place to stick it yet. Anyway, I commissioned the lovely Darci Robbins to draw a picture of Lillian Hagen, the MC of Always Read the Fae Print, the book currently on submission.

This is the absolutely mind-blowing result:

It is the prettiest, shiniest thing I’ve seen in months.

Receiving this picture made me realize just how few of the drawings I’ve commissioned off artists have ever made their way onto the blog — which promptly gave me the answer to the question that’s been nagging at me for a while: “What do I do with the blog while I’m at Clarion West?”

Starting mid-June, prepare to be showered in pretties, you lovely people.

Getting my shiny shiny Paige delivered to my front door this weekend made me haul out the old laptops from storage to clean them up, wipe them, and get them out the door. Unfortunately, one of those laptops was… well… old. Really old. Held together with a bit of elastic. It’s got Windows 98 and 32MB RAM. (I know. Adorable.) It would only start up in Safe Mode because of a stack overflow problem, but I got it in working condition again after a good hour of fudging with the registry and MS DOS and fruitlessly messing around with config.sys. (Don’t think I knew how to do any of this on my own. I love the Google.)

Once I got it to work, another problem presented itself: How was I supposed to get information off there? It had no CD writer (duh), I can’t hook it up to the Internet, and I was totally convinced it didn’t have a USB port– which made me wonder if I should a) copy everything onto floppies and get a USB floppy drive or b) tear out the hard drive and get an external HD case.

As it turned out, it did have a USB port. Score! Except it didn’t have any drivers and thus refused to read any of my USB drives. Not-so-score.

What it did have was… infrared. So I hunted down the other old laptop, which also had infrared — plus a functional USB port — and tried to set those up. I was marginally successful: after a lot of fussing around, the computers recognized each other’s presence. It didn’t go beyond that.

I sighed and decided to go back to the USB port. Cue me hunting down the never-used disc for my external HD and repeatedly trying to install the drivers. After rebooting approximately three dozen times, I gave up. It turned out I had the first edition of Windows 98, and the HD was only compatible with the second edition of the OS. Typical.

What ended up doing the job? Downloading a Windows 98 Service Park upgrade plus a bunch of generic USB drivers and jamming in an old USB drive. After another half-dozen restarts, it did the job.

It’s probably a little pathetic how accomplished I felt.

On the bright side, I managed to save a bunch of my old writing — and I do mean old. Like… I was eleven or twelve at the time. I’ll post some of it here sometime, ’cause there’s nothing quite like self-mockery and/or seeing how far you’ve come.

… I got my netbook this weekend.

And oh lord is it ever pretty. Imagine me with cartoon hearts jumping from my skull, okay? You know, like this:

I was a little worried I’d have a hard time adjusting to the smaller keyboard and screen, but nope. It’s not nearly as bad as I expected. At all. In fact, regular laptops look positively humungous right now. What do people need those IMAX-sized screens for, anyhow?

So. This netbook. It’s a Samsung N210 Plus. It’s white, shiny, has a battery that lasts for-e-ver, and I’m calling her Paige. Yes, after the X-Men character. Look, she’s super nerdy, occasionally snarky, ambitious, and driven — I figured it might help with my work ethic.

Just look at this sexy thing:

Once I install the Pixel Qi screen and jam in an extra gig of RAM, she’ll be unstoppable.

I managed to download a bunch of useful, lightweight freeware, but I’m on the hunt for more. Specifically, I’d like webcam software — just something simple to snap pictures with on occasion, maybe edit the levels/contrast or crop them, but that’s optional. Right now I have Cyberlink YouCam, which came preinstalled, but I’m kind of rolling my eyes at all the filters and special effects. Do any of you know of anything that’s no-frills, no-freaking-filters, and super lightweight?

Also on the lightweight front, I’m looking for a really simple Twitter client — something I can stick in the system tray that I can set to only pop up when I get a mention. (I don’t want it to pop up for every Tweet in my feed; that’d be too distracting when I’m trying to focus on writing.)

Also nice would be:

• URL shortener (ideally bit.ly)
• multiple accounts
• maybe list support?
• keyboard shortcut to bring up new Tweet screen

But all that is optional. The important things are a) lightweight (I want to keep this baby running at lightning speed) and b) non-obtrusive.

Thanks for any tips you might have!