The Airship. A silver gas bag carrying its passengers in splendour across the sky. There was an unhurried serenity to how the airship appeared in flight, although to the men who crewed them it was a different story.
While the flight of the Hindenburg may have famously been smooth enough for a pencil to be balanced on a table, this was made possible by a sophisticated trim and ballast system, with most airships carrying more technical crew than passengers. As with all lighter-than-air craft, airships were especially vulnerable to weather, requiring constant effort and adjustment to maintain straight, level flight.
It was in 1670 that Francesco Lana de Terzi first proposed a gondola craft, capable of carrying two men, suspended below four floating copper spheres. With the technology of lighter than air gas in its infancy, Terzi proposed to keep his craft aloft by containing a vacuum within the spheres. However, to prevent the spheres from collapsing a significant thickness of copper was required, making the craft too heavy to take to the air.
During the nineteenth century, numerous attempts were made to fit reliable propulsion to balloons. Generally, these craft were small in size and propelled by human power, although several exceptions represented genuine advancement.
The first motorised flight in an airship was undertaken in 1852, when Henri Giffard flew 17 miles in an airship equipped with a specially designed steam engine. Following the proof that such a vehicle was possible, others hurried to copy and refine the basic design.
The next major advancement came in 1872, when Paul Haenlein flew an airship over Vienna, using an internal combustion engine running on coal gas, the first time such an engine had been used on an aircraft.
It was not until the early years of the twentieth century that craft we would today recognise as airships began to appear, with the so called ‘golden age’ of the airship lasting from 1900 until 1940, by which time fixed wing aircraft technology was proving superior.
Airships generally fall into three distinct types: unframed, semi rigid and rigid. Unframed airships are the simplest, with the shape of the gas bag supported entirely by internal pressure, much like a balloon. Semi rigid airships incorporate a limited structure, often a keel, but with the basic structure still maintained by gas pressure.
Rigid airships comprise a metal frame containing numerous, small gas cells to provide lift. As all structural rigidity is provided by the frame, the lift gas can be contained at near atmospheric pressure, making the craft less vulnerable to gas leaks. This final category includes the craft most synonymous with airships – the Zeppelin.
The launch of the Luftschiff Zeppelins LZ1 in 1900 and LZ2 in 1906 has been credited with starting the major interest in airships as mass passenger transport. More advanced than competing airships from France and America, Zeppelins used multi-plane tail fins for extra
manoeuvrability, a
s well as designated passenger compartments (passengers on other airships simply travelled in crew areas). Zeppelins quickly began running a reliable, if costly, transport service within Europe.
At this point a stimulus was needed to propel airship design and technology, and it received the best possible – a war. The potential military applications of the airship had long been foreseen (H G Wells in his 1908 War of the Air describes cities and naval fleets decimated by airship attack), and in 1914 German Zeppelins undertook their first aerial bombing raid on England.
Initially more useful as a psychological weapon than for inflicting significant damage, the sight of the silver ships cruising over London panicked the civilian population. To early air defences, the airship was an unstoppable weapon. Kept aloft by inert helium gas, the Zeppelin appeared immune to gunfire.
The nature of rigid airship construction, with gas cells pressurised only to near atmospheric levels allowed the craft to sustain multiple bullet hits with only minor leakage, easily maintaining buoyancy for the return trip. The airship provided its crew with a firing platform that was level and stable, while its lift capacity allowed the carriage of heavy calibre guns that easily downed the primitive fighter planes of the time.
However, if airships appeared invulnerable to weapons, they were still influenced by the weather. In particular, the airship’s vulnerability to cross winds made it an inaccurate weapon, with the crew forced to fly low in order to hit targets reliably. To even the mighty Zeppelin, flying low presented dangers where the airship’s low speed, manoeuvrability and sheer size were a liability (it would take a very short sighted gunner to miss a five hundred foot long target travelling at forty miles per hour). The development of incendiary ammunition capable of igniting helium made low flight especially dangerous, with several Zeppelins shot down in flames.
Advancements in airship technology, particularly the development of more reliable diesel engines, allowed them to fly higher than other aircraft and safely out of range of air
defences, although this reduced their accuracy and consequent use as a weapon even further. By the end of World War One, fixed wing aircraft had generally replaced the airship as bombers, and the majority of the remaining zeppelins were scuttled by their crews.
After 1918, as the world struggled to recover from the war, airship development was stepped down,
with only Britain, the United States and Germany maintaining limited airship programmes.
This was changed by the British Airship R34 – a virtual copy of a Zeppelin which crashed almost intact in 1916 – which completed the first double crossing of the Atlantic by an aircraft, taking 108 hours to reach America. Given the far flung nature of Britain’s empire, work began on a fleet of airships to link the colonies, culminating in the R100 and the R101.
The airship’s ability to completely halt mid-air provided an advantage over conventional aircraft, which required large runway facilities. Mooring and boarding facilities could instead be provided within city centres, at railway stations or other passenger hubs – with one such city centre hub being the empire state building, whose pinnacle provided an ideal mooring mast.
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While the R100 successfully completed a return trip to Canada, the badly designed R101 crashed on its maiden voyage, killing 48 people. The event resulted in the scrapping of Britain’s remaining airships, and the termination of the country’s airship programme.
While the British and Americans abandoned airship developments following such high profile incidents, the German Zeppelin Works continued to produce large airships for passenger transport. In the late nineteen twenties, they completed the Graf Zeppelin LZ127, the largest airship they had yet produced. Credited with rescuing the Zeppelin concept, the craft was a great success, flying a total of almost one million miles (including the first round the world flight) during its life without any recorded passenger injuries.
As the number of Zeppelin passenger services expanded, so the craft became larger and more elaborate, until the company launched its most ambitious airship – the Hindenburg.
Over eight hundred feet long and powered by four diesel engines, each producing 1,200 shaft horsepower, the Hindenburg remains the largest, most powerful airship ever built. Intended to use inert helium as a lift gas, issues surrounding supply instead forced the use of hydrogen. Although the use of hydrogen presented hazards, the Zeppelin company’s long record of operating hydrogen ships safely (including the Graff) led to the belief that they had sufficiently designed out the risk.
While still vulnerable to wind conditions, crossings from Europe to America generally took around sixty hours, half the time taken by an ocean liner. Passengers on the transatlantic service included statesmen, industry captains and sports personalities. For the first time in history a new section of society was emerging that would pay a premium for speed. The jet setter had arrived.
The craft completed a very successful 1936 season, but on the 6th of May 1937, the hydrogen filled gas bag caught fire as the craft approached the mooring mast in New Jersey. While the cause of the fire remains a subject of controversy, the enquiry concluded that leaking hydrogen from a ruptured gas cell was likely ignited by static electricity. The exterior covering of the Zeppelin frame was notorious for accumulating a static charge as a result of air friction during flight, with blue flashes often seen along the hull when its mooring ropes first touched the ground, earthing the charge.
A total of 97 people were killed in the Hindenburg disaster. Following the event, Zeppelins were only permitted for use as passenger transport if using helium. As the United States refused to supply the gas, the remaining Zeppelins were grounded and the era of intercontinental passenger airships was over.
During the latter decades of the twentieth century, the military use of the airship for small scale reconnaissance and anti submarine warfare was replaced by the helicopter. Similarly, for long distance passenger transport, fixed wing airliners quickly took over, and airships became little more than curiosities.
Recent spikes and instability in the price of oil have sparked a renewed interest in the airship for freight operations. With a potentially far greater lift capacity than a fixed wing aircraft (up to twenty times that of a Boeing 747), and higher speed than a container ship, the airship offers a useful ‘halfway house’ between the two transport methods. The airship’s flexibility over routes and landing spaces would also offer an advantage, as would its far greater fuel efficiency.
The slow speed of airships (even with modern engines, the drag of their large gas bag limits top speed to around one hundred miles per hour) would be less of an issue when transporting freight, although concerns still surround the craft’s vulnerability to wind conditions.
To overcome this, a number of ‘hybrid’ airships are currently under development, combining the characteristics of airships and fixed wing aircraft. While slightly heavier than air, and therefore being more stable in flight, the craft would still utilise elements of the airship gas bag, requiring only very short runways and being vastly more fuel efficient in flight than a conventional aircraft.
Recent developments in battery and solar cell technology have also resulted in design proposals for ‘zero emission’ airships. With the airship’s lift capacity negating the weight problems associated with battery power, an airship could be fitted with a photovoltaic ‘skin’ covering the upper side of its gas bag, with drive provided by electric motors. Cruising above the cloud level, such a craft would likely travel at full speed at night using battery power, then at reduced speed during the day, with the photovoltaics providing power to the motors as well as recharging the batteries.
A zero emission airship would theoretically be capable of travelling an infinite distance, only touching down to discharge passengers or cargo, or when consumables required replacing.
While the basic laws of physics would still limit the speed of the zero emission airship, as oil becomes increasingly scarce and costly, the advantages of such a vehicle may become impossible to ignore. Possibly as the latter half of the twenty first century approaches, silver airships will return to being a common sight in the sky.
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There’s a bloody great load of information out there these days and it’s easier to access than ever. If you want to know something, rather than traipsing down to your nearest library and poring over a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica, you can just open a browser window. The best thing is that the information comes with context. Research is accompanied by personal accounts, subjective commentary and more discussion than you could ever possibly process. The thing is, those providing all this information inspire others to do the same. Everyone wants to be part of the process and feel like they’re contributing to the hive mind. With browsers, RSS aggregators, smartphones and even some eBook readers, all this information can be delivered to your door.
Some would say that it’s okay to miss things, but what if that one tweet/post/comic/whatever contained the nugget of inspiration you needed to start the project of a lifetime? Feel free to disregard this as the rantings of a paranoid madman, but the risk is there.
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I’m going to risk a bit of ire here, but stick with me. I’m not going to say that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a great movie. I’m not going to say it’s bad, either. I’m definitely not going to say that it’s mediocre, because that’s simply not the case.
With Scott Pilgrim vs…, it’s a case of variable mileage. As a starting point, it requires a general level of investment from the viewer in terms of geek culture savvy. To really get the most out of it, it requires a very specific investment: basically, you need to get a lot of references. Read more…
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It’s a lot of fun to bash Blizzard these days, especially seeing as their litigious arm is rather lax with regards to clipping people round the earhole for describing them as Satanic money-grubbers. Granted, they do seem to be draining the collective soul and bank account of the geek world with their all-consuming hegemony, but on the upside they make excellent games. That, and the outcry against their kitten-stomping evil side is so ubiquitous there isn’t a profit margin big enough to pay the army of lawyers they’d need to action against it.
Still, you have to give them their due. They do know how to get digital distribution and licensing right, or as close to right as makes no difference. You have your Blizzard account linked to an email address, and logging in to that account yields access to a menu of all the Blizzard games you own. If you’ve uninstalled them off your PC, or you’ve simply changed machine, you can download the client from the site and play right away – even if it’s an older game like Diablo, or Starcraft.
As long as you have linked your licence code, the one that came in the box when you purchased it, then it doesn’t matter where or how you play it – you will always have access to the content you’ve paid for.
Sadly, not every publisher is like Blizzard, and because of that I’m momentarily stuck.
The problem is with downloadable content. More specifically, downloadable content for music games.
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Back in 1967, Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow made a landmark piece of avant-garde cinema in his 45-minute movie, Wavelength. Eschewing conventional cinematography, the movie is structured around – and dominated by – a single zoom that begins with a fairly wide-angle shot of an apartment and finishes tightly focussed on a picture of waves on the ocean.
As movies go, it’s a difficult watch. Not only is there the mind-searing tedium of a forty-odd minute zoom to contend with, but the soundtrack is a nightmarish minimalist piece that blends oddly-paired tones of different wavelengths that generally increase in pitch towards the tinnitus-inducing conclusion.
Watching it is, in short, a chore and I suspect you have to have some serious enthusiasm for the school of the avante-garde to actually enjoy the experience.
M Night Shyalaman’s The Last Airbender is – at least with respect to the first point – very, very much like Wavelength.
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Prompted by a fascinating discussion on the latest Wordpunks (Podcast), I have decided to write a little blog post on Book Trailers and give my take on them.
In order to differentiate between books and movies Simon created an analogy involving source code and machine code. Sounds complicated but coming from the viewpoint of a screenwriter I found it pretty spot on. I’m not going to go into that though, you can take yourselves over there and have a listen.
The charm of the written word has always been the readers ability to transcribe their own interpretations of what they are reading. A writer may describe a character (a good writer won’t), but there will always be enough room for each individual reader to create that character as a unique entity, different from everyone else’s, in their own minds. With a film on the other hand the visual aspect has already been done for you. It’s one of the common reasons why people often dislike the film of a book they’ve enjoyed, it simply differs too much from the version they created in their head.
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This is the first article in a series we are running here at WordPunk. We thought about asking the question”where do you get your ideas from?” but that is a stupid question! So we decided to be serious for a moment (a first at WordPunk).
Here at WordPunk we know about Tech and we know about Genre (that is Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror to the uninitiated) so the obvious question is what tech do genre writers and editors use in their day to day writing/editing lives.
This is an organic article that will grow as more responses come in. It is open to all, either contact us with your response or leave a comment and we will incorporate your response into the article.
Jump to (order of receipt):
Lee Harris, Gareth L Powell, Mark Charan Newton, Paul Graham Raven, Nick Harkaway, Mark Chadbourn, Danie Ware, Ian Whates, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, David Devereux
Editor, Angry Robot
I’m a bit of a gadget freak. I don’t always have the latest gadgets, but I do try to find a way to obtain the shiniest. Though after a short amount of time, of course, the shine wears off, leaving perfectly serviceable – if unexciting – hardware in its place.
When I’m writing, it really doesn’t matter to me where I write, or on what platform, so I can happily type out a few thousand words on the laptops, netbook, desktop or iPad. As long as I have my files with me, that’s all that matters. This is where Dropbox comes into its own. When I save a document to Dropbox, it is automatically replicated across all my PCs and my iPad, so I always know where I am in the document, and can edit, or continue working, with a clear memory of what’s been completed. Dropbox is the single most important piece of software that I use.
Whatever machine I have with me is the machine I use. If I’m at home I will generally choose to use the 19” touchscreen, as that lives in my home office, and is a lovely machine to use.
I have written over 1,000 words on my phone in a single session, though it’s not an experience I would recommend.
As an editor, Word and Foxit PDF reader are the ones I use most, though I will sometimes convert first draft manuscripts to ePub format to read on my iPad (using Calibre).
My team of freelance copyeditors make changes and recommendations in Word, with the Track Changes function turned on, so I can approve or reject their recommendations, once the files are emailed back to me.
Once I have finished this stage of the editing process I prepare the file in Word and send it to our typesetter, who sends me back the book in QuarkXpress format, and a copy as a PDF. The Quark version is sent to the printers for Advance Reader Copies to be made (once we have added a few additional bits and pieces in-house) and the PDFs are sent to our proofreaders, who largely use Foxit PDF reader, as you can annotate changes in this.
When I receive the annotated PDFs back from two proofreaders, I have them both open onscreen (this is where the additional monitor comes in handy) and I note down the amendments I want to be made to the manuscript in a simple Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is then sent to the typesetter for him to make the last few amendments before the final QuarkXPress file is delivered. This is the file that is sent to the printers – along with the cover spread – for the retail copies of the books to be printed.
Interestingly, at no stage during the above process, is a book printed out on paper, though I have a small inkjet printer at work, as well as a good (wireless) colour laser printer, and I use a colour laser printer at home, though the only time I tend to print out my writing is if I’m taking it to my writing group for other people to tear to shreds critique.
Without going into too much detail, in terms of hardware, I use the following:
17” widescreen Dell laptop – dual core Pentium, 3Gb RAM, 320Gb hdd. 19” widescreen Dell touchscreen all-in-one desktop, dual core Pentium, 4Gb RAM, 320Gb hdd. 21” widescreen TFT monitor (which I use mainly in conjunction with the Dell touchscreen, to give me plenty of desktop real estate). 7” Acer Aspire One netbook (bought the Windows version, but installed Ubuntu on it, instead). Apple iPad (32Gb, wifi) with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. T-Mobile G1 PDA (Android OS). 1/2 Terabyte network hard drive for initial backups, accessible from any internet-connected PC. 3 mobile wifi unit (for connecting any of the above kit to the internet, wherever I am). 14” Dell Latitude laptop with accompanying 15” monitor for double screen real estate (fairly low-entry spec for this one).
Software:
Microsoft Word (2003 and 2010) across the laptops and desktop. Microsoft Excel (2003 and 2010). Foxit PDF Reader. Open Office on the netbook. Pages and Corkulous on the iPad. Dropbox (the free version) Calibre PDF995 (a shareware PDF printer). iBooks An ePub reader on my phone
Lee on Twitter: @LeeAHarris
Author
At university, I used a secondhand manual typewriter. This was the early nineties. I used to balance the machine on the end of my bed, by the window overlooking the river, and sit cross-legged, battering out essays and stories. It was a beast. It weighed a tonne and the clatter of its keys could be heard throughout the house.
These days, I use MS Word 2007. I use it in page view, so it feels like I’m typing on pieces of A4. I can’t write in Outline or Draft view. They just feel wrong. It’s almost as if I need that primal connection between keys and paper, even if it is only an illusion on a screen.
I also tend to write stories straight through, from beginning to end, rather than jump around within the narrative. This could be a hangover from writing on a manual typewriter, where there was no choice but to write stories in sequence.
The advantage Word has over a manual typewriter is the ability to edit on-the-fly. But this can be something of a mixed blessing, as it can lead me to spend all my time tinkering with one sentence instead of pressing ahead with the rest of the story.
I have looked at other programs, but Word seems to suit me. I am comfortable with it. I write everything in either Times New Roman or Courier New, and so there aren’t too many distracting settings with which to play.
Gareth on Twitter: @garethlpowell
Author
I use a MacBook Pro as the main bit of hardware, mainly because it’s hugely reliable – it never crashes, never clogs up my writing time with popups or virus scanning (and believe me, time is precious!) I also prefer to use a laptop over a desktop, so I can write anywhere in my house or on the go. It’s quick, portable and reliable. As for the actual programs, I’ve started using Scrivener to help plan and structure my novels, and it’s a great bit of kit. It took me a while to get the hang of it – because it’s not a word processor, more of an aid to writing – but I’ve not stopped using it during the creation stage. The final drafts, of course, are tarted up on Word, since the files are universally accepted. I use the internet as I write, for research – so Safari is my program of choice for that – mainly because of the way it handles fonts and images.
With the Mac, I can have easy synchronicity with things like iTunes (which I have in the background) and my iPhone. The phone is actually pretty useful for all the other stuff you have to do these days – catching up with emails, viewing things online, Tweeting – all tasks for the modern writer, and I’d prefer to have something that connected easily with my laptop
Mark on Twitter: @markcn
Editor Futurismic, Web guru to the genre stars
Where to start? Well, I’m typing this in OpenOffice, the open source office suite software from Sun Microsystems; I use Linux on all my hardware these days (after one too many corrupted hard drive FAT tables, courtesy of good ol’ Billy Gates and friends), so free software is pretty much the only option for me. But it’s not a second-class option: don’t let anyone tell you open source stuff doesn’t cut the mustard compared to paid software. Oh sure, OpenOffice crashes occasionally, but that’s what the time-defined autosave function is for, and anyone who claims that paid software never crashes is either lying or works in PR for Apple (or possibly both). At this price point, I’m more than willing to take the rough with the smooth… and frankly I’ve had far less hassle with Linux than I ever had with Windows. Your mileage may vary, of course, and I’m sure some keen Apple evangelist will want to tell me that MacOS is just Unix with all the kinks smoothed over, and boy howdy does it look pretty! Well, sure; but I bought my desktop machine as parts for ￡350 and haven’t paid a penny for software; if I had a driving licence, I’d run an old Cortina, keep a well-stocked toolbox and read the Haynes Manual for it every night before bedtime. Different strokes, different folks. Only difference is, I don’t routinely email people who are struggling with software glitches or hardware flakiness with the cheery admonition to “get a Mac!” I guess it’s only when you’ve been on the receiving end of that particular rejoinder that you know just how bloody supercilious and smug it sounds…
… but I digress. So, yes: OpenOffice is for long-form non-fiction and fiction writing, but only after the initial thinking-it-out, taking-notes and kicking-ideas-around phases have been accomplished, which happens either in my beloved Moleskine notebooks (using a rather nice Cross pen, thank you very much) or on scraps of paper from the misprinted pile on the end of my desk, depending on where I am and what sort of thing I’m working on. But the basic dividing line is pretty clear: non-linear and/or creative thinking is pen-and-paper, though more formal planning for complex projects can migrate to online mind-mapping services like Bubbl.us if it looks like a single sheet of A4 won’t hold everything; actual long-form cranking-the-words-out (and the inevitable slashings of excess wordcount and juggling of structure) tends to happen right here in OpenOffice. Editing and proofing of anything longer than 500 words tends to be done on a print-out, though; it’s funny how many errors you can miss on screen that you catch first time in print. Go figure.
The odd man out here is poetry, which I simply can’t write on a keyboard until the work is nearly finalised, at which point it enters into an endless cycle of minor revisions: poems are never finished, but instead end inhabiting a state of perpetual late-stage Beta testing. I think this has its roots in me writing poems and songs as a teenager: it was something I tended to do in class when I was supposed to be doing something else, so it ended up being done on whatever paper was to hand. The legacy of this is my utter inability to construct any sort of viable filing system for creative work on paper… an odd contrast to the Byzantine OCD-esque directory tree that manages my digital documents.
Short blog posts are written in the edit windows of the blog in question (they’re so much more stable than they used to be back in 2005), but longer pieces (and web copy for clients) is written in Kate (the default text editor for KDE flavours of Linux) so that I can put in the HTML tags manually. The purists tell me I should learn to use Vi or Emacs (the two main Unix text editors of repute, whose fans are so viciously partisan as to make Apple fanboys look like weekender hobbyists), but I have a terrible memory for custom keystroke combos, and if I had the spare month it’d take to practice them to proficiency, I’d probably be better off spending it on learning to touch-type – it’d probably have a much greater effect on my productivity. Or maybe I’m kidding myself… but given that I don’t have that mythical spare month, the point is moot.
As far as the work that surrounds writing is concerned, my biggest boon is also my biggest bugbear: the internet itself. Information on every subject you can imagine (and plenty more besides) lies but a few clicks and keystrokes away… but there’s a good side, too. Oh, I jest, but it’s true – the web is one devil of a time-sink, and acquiring the discipline required to divvy up research time and writing time (be it for business, fiction, non-fiction or whatever the hell else you’re working on) and prevent them from bleeding into each other is the most important thing a web-based creator can do…
… and if anyone out there has even the foggiest idea how to go about it, they should drop me a line and share the secret. 
Paul on Twitter: @PaulGrahamRaven
Author
I use a bunch of technology, in more and less sophisticated ways. I have a big desktop, with a screen large enough that I can display three pages of text side by side (six if I squint really hard). That’s my base of operations, and all roads ultimately lead there. (I use a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard, by the way, or I’d lose the use of my arms.)
A few months ago I also used a moderately outdated mac laptop – but not any more. The laptop is mostly redundant now because of the iPad – the smallest laptop I’ve ever owned, the lightest, and the one with the best battery life. I don’t have a problem with the touchscreen keyboard. More, the fact that it only does one thing at a time (well, it does check my mail) is a boon. I don’t get distracted constantly.
More prosaically but NOT less importantly, I use a selection of scraps of paper and pencils, pens, borrowed eyeliners, and even lipstick, if I need to write something down and there’s no alternative. I write by hand only very occasionally, but I do do it and I’d wager a fairly decent sum that there’s a difference in the brain state when writing by hand and typing. It’s similar, but not the same. There’s a granular quality to hand work. Anyway… be that (or not) as it may, I make notes and draw diagrams and scribble plans and so on on paper. I haven’t yet found an electronic method which does as well.
In between, there’s a bunch of ad hoc solutions which are there because either the technology isn’t as smooth as it could be or I’m a bit rubbish about it. I make notes on my ipad or phone and email them to myself; I leave myself voicemail messages and type them up later.
For software, I use Scrivener, and on the iPad because it’s there and it’s simple (although not great) I use Pages. I used to use Word, but it’s cantankerous and argues with me and it can piss off. It also crashes too often and/or gets a bee in its bonnet about formats sometimes when I don’t want it to.
I’ve also got a decent amount of experience with Final Draft scripting software. It’s very good. I’ve always wanted a plotting tool which would display plot strands in 3-D so I could work with them, rotate them and see where I’m screwing up. As far as I know, there ain’t none-such.
I tend to print things out every so often so I can hold the book in my hand and know that it’s real. At that point I also work on the text with a pen and transcribe the changes to the computer.
I haven’t yet experimented with Dragon Dictate and so on, but I will, I’m sure.
But to be totally perverse, I want to write a crime pulp with an old typewriter – although I did wonder whether it would be enough to hook one up to my computer and use it as a keyboard – there’s a very cool artificer somewhere who makes them up for that purpose.
For me, it’s about a couple of things: how it feels, and whether it works. I use pen when I feel it flows better that way, when I want to express ideas in short form onto paper, almost as if I’m painting the story. I use the computer because I type faster than I write and I can edit more readily. But it’s about the experience, the lock-in of writing, and what best fosters that.
I have a bunch of thoughts about technology in general and its place in our lives, but that’s a pub conversation or an article I should probably write… I will say that I think tech may be on its way to getting more seamless, less intrusive, as we manage our relationship with it better and demand that it not require us to learn things, but rather than it learn how we want to interact.
Nick on Twitter: @harkaway
Author
I write everything on a nine-month old MacBook Pro. I like the mobility it offers, the ability to write in the garden, at the pub or cafe, and that helps to keep my productivity up because writing in one spot all the time is a creativity-killer. For many years I used Windows-based laptops until the last one melted down and I decided I’d had enough. Apples have a degree of aesthetics which helps with writing. Non-creatives can’t understand how the style of something contributes to the work, but summoning up creativity from the depths of the unconscious requires a degree of magic, of ritual. It’s the difference between the feel of an expensive Mont Blanc or scratching something out with a blotting Bic. To write, you have to detach yourself from the process, and Apples are best for that, for me. PCs feel like something you use for doing a list of cogs and washers in an engineering factory.
The biggest change for me in recent times is using Scrivener for writing. It’s a fantastic software package and makes the whole process easier because you can move chapters around easily and keep all your research material in the same place. I use vast amounts of historical research for the current books and it really helps to have it all there with the manuscript. Scrivener also collates and exports directly into Word, which is the industry-standard for publishing, and into Final Draft, which I use for screenplays. I’ve now written one novel and a screenplay on Scrivener, and I’m into the second novel, and I can’t see me going back.
Wireless broadband is the big work killer for me. The process of writing, as opposed to the imagining, is boring and it’s easy to get distracted. As an information junkie, I can spend hours searching out new stuff, and it’s easy to get distracted by my WordPress-based blog or Twitter (I use Echofon) so I have to be very disciplined or switch the wireless off completely. That’s hard, though, because I’ve got all the ancillary business stuff coming in from various agents, editors, script editors, producers and the like in the background all the time, and most of it needs a quick response.
I use an iPhone, mainly for net-based stuff and email – phone calls eat up too much time – but that too has allowed me to be more productive. When I’m out researching, which I do a lot, it’s great for taking pix and emailing them off, or recording ambient sounds or notes. I may pick up an iPad for writing on trains and planes rather than carting the Mac around if I can find a good foldaway keyboard. I’ll stick with the wireless one, though, because 3G is shit. With the vast amount of proofing now done on screen, an iPad would be a boon as I can sit and read in a comfortable place – on my back on the sofa – rather than sitting up at the Mac.
I’ve started experimenting with Evernote for mapping ideas and I have Dropbox, but it doesn’t work well with Scrivener so I haven’t really used it that much. Audioboo and Posterous both make the blogging easier.
I now write probably three times as much as I did five years ago, and that’s all down to technology buying me the time.
Mark on Twitter: @Chadbourn
Front(on)line PR for Forbidden Planet London and a Crusader for the New Breed of Geek
In the winter of 1990/91, I sat down to write with a pad of A4 and an ink-pen, proper cartridges and everything. A year or so later, my housemate acquired an old Amstrad – and lo, did those first green flickerings of authorial technology invade our little Norfolk lives. I can’t express our wonder at how simple it made things like… editing…
Twenty years later?
Open MacBook, boot MS Word; write by chapter, slot it all together. Spellcheckers drive me nuts; art-toy USB sticks have replaced the 3 1/2 “ floppies. This stuff is superficial – for day-to-day wordcount, not much has changed from the Amstrad days.
The thing that’s different (and how much easier would this have made those Uni days?) is research.
Where would we be without – Google.
Want to know anything from a time and date and place to correct wind direction? It’s on your desk. Visual inspiration is but an image search away – my desktop background is usually something relevant to the chapter I’m writing. Names, translations, everything from fascinating psychological disorders to quirky and interesting weaponry… if you know how to ask the question, the answer is waiting for you.
The glories of – the Smartphone.
All Hail the Mighty Evernote. From sitting on the train, to Muse-strikes of genius when out walking, from being able to take snapshots when on location-scout to the delightfully anal meticulousness of tagging it all so it fits together… haphazardly scribbled notes (usually lost and/or indecipherable after a week) are a thing of the past. It’s a perfect portable memory. Thank the Gods.
How we’re using – Social Media.
A Search Engine will give you facts. Social Media will give you inspiration. Ask Twitter a question and you’ll get thirty answers from thirty different points of view; search Flickr for a tag, and you’ll get intense and individual portraits of people’s views and experiences. If you’ve nothing better to do, play with StumbleUpon to find fascinating fodder to fire your synapses for days. I guess ‘research’ one thing – and ‘feedback’ is quite another. Google doesn’t have a sense of humour.
There’s lots more stuff – the ease of communication and the world-wide webworks of friends, the writers’ circles and supports forums (which thus far I’ve steered clear of), and the establishing of reputation and credibility we all (should!) know inside out…
For me personally, though, my writing is hit-and-run; it’s something I cram into an hour when I have one, an evening when I’m tired. I have no real schedule and dare not commit to a group I won’t have the time or freedom to support – hence my inspiration, planning and research are haphazard. They have to be, or they don’t get done at all.
A far cry from those lazy post-Uni days when I could spend an afternoon crossing things out and re-writing them in ink pen…
It’s all about immediacy.
Danie on Twitter: @danacea
Author, Editor NewCon Press
Writing.
I set the document up as I wish — font, font size, double space, first line indented etc, and then away I go. I have spellcheck on, which is by no means infallible and should never be depended on, but it highlights silly typos such as “coudl”. Other than that, I use the internet for research where applicable, but that’s about it.
Editing
When editing submitted stories I use ‘Review’ to highlight errors or suggested amendments in (red) coloured bubbled in the margin. When organising an anthology, I will use the ‘search’ and ‘replace’ functions to rationalise such things as single or double inverted commas for speech, form of ellipses, use of long dashes, whether single or double space between sentences etc etc, but will never use ‘replace all’, instead going through each discovered item individually to avoid such things as ‘can”t’.
In initial layout I’ll then use ‘page set up’ to arrange page size, margins etc.
Author
At one point my accountant called me to ask if I really owned eleven laptops and I had to say I’d broken half of them and most of the rest were in a cupboard with their keypads beaten to hell.
These days I’ve slimmed it down to a steam-driven pre-windows Toshiba, a 1st gen Sony Vaio, and a couple of more recent vaios, including a new SSD version light enough to carry everywhere. It also gives me a full day’s writing if I stay off the web and use the lowest power settings. Since I write in cafes and pubs, on trains and sometimes planes because I distract myself at home, this is essential! It’s been several years since I owned a desktop computer,
I write using Word 2002, because (afaik) it’s the last version to allow white text out of blue as a general option. Something Microsoft originally included to compete with Wordperfect.
My iPhone, filthy, scratched and already failing, is now my memory. Instead of trying to remember plot points, character traits and slick one liners I simply email them to myself and pick them up later. In emergencies I’ve typed whole scenes on the iPhone.
I’m also a junkie for writing software, and own dramatica pro, character pro, quickstory 5, storybase, stylewriter, treepad plus & mindola’s notecard. Most are bollocks. But the temptation to keep looking is irresistible.
I use quickstory 5 for ease of breaking a synopsis into scenes and acts, but ignore the plot generator function. Character pro I looked at and discarded. Same with dramatica. Stylewriter is good for analysis. (do I really want 83 cliches and 981 uses of ‘very’ in this book?)
Treepad I gave up on. But notecard is fantastic for shuffling scenes and adding and losing chapters. It’s the development software I use most. I also do one hardcopy edit using a pen and paper since I’m pretty sure it uses a different part of the brain.
No software will, should or could write the book for you but I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t obsessively collect the stuff!
Jon on Twitter: @JonCG_novelist
Author
My technological set-up is one that I ruthlessly keep as simple as I can. I believe that technology exists to minimise the distance and effort between idea and finished product, and if I notice a system, if I
have to change the way I think or work to accommodate a piece of hardware or software, it’s in my way and has to be replaced with something better and less obtrusive.
I use a laptop (specifically a 13” MacBook Pro) with Pages as my WP package of choice – it handles text with enough formatting control for my needs, keeps a wordcount in the infobar and can handle the “track
changes” thingy used for editing and copy-editing notes. The only other software tools I use on the laptop are VoodooPad, which I find enormously handy for character notes and bios, Evernote, which keeps my
notes in order, and Numbers, which I use to keep an eye on productivity figures and workflow.
Add to this an iPhone and you’ve got my entire current working hardware load. The iPhone runs Evernote as well, VP Reader so I can refer to VoodooPad files (I’d like to be able to edit them from the iPhone as
well, though), Dropbox and Instapaper for referring to other stuff on the hoof and Vlingo, which I find outrageously helpful. Combining Vlingo with a Bluetooth headset wraps into a package that lets me dictate notes while doing something else (like riding my bike, which I find a great way to relax and process ideas) and have them waiting for me when I sit at my desk to pick up work again. I bought Writepad to give me the
option of handling longer blocks of text, but I have to be honest and say I’ve used it no more than a handful of times since picking it up last year – the simplicity of the interface is great, but trying to type
significant amounts on the iPhone really doesn’t work for me. Maybe that will change when I finally join the iPad collective, but the implementation of Pages there makes it pretty unlikely.
Brainstorming and basic plotting still happen on paper for me, with a fountain pen, but that’s the only part of the process I still prefer to do on paper. Once I find a way to digitise that – and I strongly suspect
an iPad will give me the means to do so – my electronic objective will be accomplished, and the first piece of paper I handle that directly relates to a print project will be the bound proof ready to go out for
review.
I have a dream that reviewers will have the good sense to go over to e-ARCs soon, too. The waste of paper in publishing is dropping, but we can still do more to reduce our use of resources that would be
better-placed elsewhere. That leads to my real hope: that the first physical incarnation of an idea that progresses from my head to a printed page will be the finished product sitting on a shelf waiting for
the reader to buy.
David on Twitter: @davedevereux
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