Tablet Blogging Again - Acer Iconia A500

So the main theme today is going to be on gadgets rather than on my ongoing struggle with LMS (lazy man syndrome). So fair warning to those of you who tuned in merely for my customary self-flagellation--this week's blog is bound to disappoint.

Unless you were tuning in for spelling hijinks. Apparently Blogger's spelling auto-checker thingamawhosit doesn't work in Dolphin browser lite on my tablet. And I can't remember if disappoint is spelled with one S or two. I also may have the number of Ps wrong. How dissapointing.

Anyways...

I got a new tablet this week, the Acer Iconia A500 mentioned in the title above. So far, I'm loving it. Much better build quality than the crappy Coby I had previously, and the new version of Android is an improvement as well.

Side note--due to their ridiculously horrible customer support, I will never purchase another Coby product of any kind. Also, I will never shop at Toys-R-Us again, for the same reason. Just saying.

I've mostly used the A500 for games so far (of course). Their are tons of free and cheap games on Android Market, plus the Amazon Market free-app-of-the-day is often good. So I am definitely happy on that score.

You didn't know I was just gone for about an hour, but I was. Turns out that editing a blogger blog is really difficult (once you get a few paragraphs in), using the installed soft-keyboard. I've got a wireless keyboard and mouse hooked up now, but it's still tricky going compared to just doing the durn blog on my computer. Which is a shame because I had hoped to be able to do the Sunday-morning-blog-in-bed-thing.

Okay, I am now typing this blog in an external note-taking application. The fact that you are reading it indicates I was successfully able to copy-pasta it back to Blogger. But what a pain. I wonder if this is a fault of the Blogger interface or of the Android OS? Either way, I may look into starting a WordPress blog instead, assuming that platform is easier to work with via Android.

Okay, I'm tired of the shenanigans, so I'm going to wrap this entry up. Although the Iconia A500 isn't great for blogging, it's awesome for games, comic books, and movies. I suspect I will find more uses for it as well, hopefully some that are at least marginally productive.

I Have No Time, and I Must Blog

The title is a riff on Harlan Ellison's classic story, of course. The story actually has nothing to do with this blog, but the title sure is spiffy. Bait and switch folks, bait and switch.

Down to business--I have been wracking my brains for a way to continue blogging without having to carve any time out of my increasingly overgrown wild-ass jungle of a schedule. But I think I have at last found a solution. But first, I want to illustrate more fully the problem.

I have learned a few things in the last six months of on-again, off-again blogging. Daily blogging is a lot of work and a big time sink when added up. Especially when, for the most part, people don't give a hoot anyway. People do seem to love technology and gadget reviews, which are my most popular (only popular) posts. The writing exploration stuff, not so much.

The blogs that I enjoy, and that are popular, tend to feature regular doses of useful information, some news, some analysis. So maybe emulating them, to the best of my limited resources, is the way to go. Makes sense, no?

The solution--I am going to try blogging once a week (with the option to do more when so moved) on Sunday mornings when I have a chunk of time I am currently using for web-surfing and general baby-tending. Content will stay the same, but subject to change if I find things that people show more interest in. Okay? Okay.

In a very small attempt to provide some sliver of content that is not completely about myself, I will note that I have been reading George R R Martin's A Dance With Dragons. I am greatly enjoying it (about 10% in), but am struck by how large a role food plays. Every other paragraph is a meal description of some sort. I really wish someone (else) would do a statistical analysis of how much of the book is actually food and food related words, and how much shorter it would be if those words were removed. would it be only nine hundred pages? Eight hundred? I wish I knew.

See you next week.

A Quarterly Check-Up - Statistics

I began writing seriously tomorrow, four months ago. I know this because I have a journal that I started on that date, as well as a text file of an idea I was trying to develop.

The journal got 5 more entries, I started blogging somewhere in that time frame as well. The folder labeled "story ideas" with that first text file, labeled "story ideas", eventually became my idea bank, and it now has 188 entries. This number doesn't include the ideas I have already written stories from, or the actual usable ideas in the "good ideas folder".

I blogged off and on until a little more than a month ago, when I began the Daily Blogging Challenge. I haven't missed a day since.

I have completed 13 short stories, one drabble, and one flash fiction piece since then. I have six more stories in various stages of completion, as well as two novels in progress, and one more novel that is at the planning stage.

I have a spreadsheet to keep track of my stories and the markets they are submitted to. I have submitted to various markets 29 times, and received 18 rejections. Two of those, from minor markets, have been personalized. I have not made any sales, yet.

I have more fiction available for sale at this point than markets to send my work too. Also, some of my earlier stories have been rejected by nearly every professional market they are suited towards. I launched my first ebook, a fantasy novelette name Tes-Nin's Elbows. It has been downloaded a whopping thirty times in the last week. Baby steps. Baby steps.

Touch Typing

One of my bugaboos is my typing speed and technique. Although I know how to  touch type, I am incredible slow at it. Especially compared to my favored technique, the look-at-my-hands-and-use-two-of-my-left-hand-fingers-and-three-of-my-right approach.

The really sad part is that I am actually much faster now than I was a few months ago. But, I really need to be able to touch type at all times.

It would help if I wasn't using a netbook keyboard half the time, but that's a whole other ball of wax.

So, in the interests of pushing myself over the edge (maybe not the best choice of words), I am issuing a new challenge to myself - the touch typing blog posting challenge. Basically, all of my blog posts, which I do every day, I am requiring myself to touch type. Every single one, all the way through.

This will guarantee that it takes me twenty or perhaps twenty five minutes to type each blog entry instead of my usual fifteen or so. But hopefully I will get past that pretty quick, and start picking up speed. Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.

I am going to push harder on my idea bank transcriptions as well, that they be done by touch. Not require, not yet, but likely soon. Then the final blow will be transitioning to only touch typing all my fiction.

In the long run I hope to save a fair amount of time. This is whole 'nother blog post, but lately I've been working on writing via voice recorder. Actual finished text not just ideas or whatever. So far I am spending more time than I'm saving, but touch typing fluently is one of the things that could turn that around.